Radio Script #752

Little Talks on Common Things

January 21, 1968

Several times, during the years of this program, I have talked about the origin of land titles on the Kennebec, especially in Waterville and Winslow. I have recently been asked if I would explain some of the confusions that seem to be involved in the ancient titles, and I am glad to do that, as best I can, today.

As I am sure my listeners well know, all Waterville titles revert to those originally granted in the town of Winslow, because until 1802 what is now Waterville was a part of the town of Winslow, incorporated in 1771 by the Massachusetts legislature as a town in the District of Maine, a part of the royal Province of Massachusetts. That was five years before the Declaration of Independence and twelve years before a formal treaty ending the American Revolution would recognize the separate sovereignty of the United States.

Twenty-two years before the incorporation of the town of Winslow, that is in 1749, a group of businessmen in Boston, under the leadership of Dr. Sylvester Gardiner, formed a company to take over what was known as the Kennebec Purchase, the huge tract of land from Merrymeeting Bay to Norridgewock, fifteen miles on each side of the river. That land, originally granted by the English crown to the Plymouth Colony, had been sold in 1661 to four men: ~tipas Boies, Edward Tyng, Thomas Brattle and John Winslow.

Because 88 years had elapsed between that purchase and the formation of the new company in 1749, Gardiner and his associates had a hard time even to locate the lawful heirs of the four proprietors of 1661, to say nothing of the further trouble of arranging settlements with each heir. But the task was finally accomplished in 1752.

Although the legal name of the company was the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase, they were popularly called the New Plymouth Company. To encourage settlement they offered generous grants. Sometimes a man receiving a grant would himself settle on the land, make the required clearing, build the required house, and plant and reap the required crop, to give him a free title. Even more frequently a man would receive a grant of as much as a whole township and proceed to make good his title by inducing other people to settle on the lots.

One of several surveyors employed by the company to layout their holdings in the form of settler’s lots was John McKechnie, who surveyed and lotted all the Plymouth lands on the west side of the Kennebec from the Augusta line to the Fairfield line where began the so-called Nye-Dirnm0ck grant. The lots on the east side of the river from the Vassalboro line to Ticonic Falls had already been surveyed, and the lots near Fort Halifax had been shaped almost as triangles, so as to allow many of them to have a short river frontage on either the Sebasticook or the Kennebec. The lots across from the Fort, on what became the Waterville side of the river, were on the other hand laid out in regular rectangles, forty rods wide on the river bank, and extending westward a full mile.

In 1766 the company made to six men their first grants in Winslow. Those six men were Gamaliel Bradford, James Otis, John Winslow, Daniel Howard, James Warren and William Taylor. Several of those men were already proprietors of the company and had no intention of settling on their grants. They were speculators rather than settlers.

We have no evidence that any of those men ever came to Winslow, in spite of the fact that the name of John Winslow was included among them. This John Winslow was a resident of Marshfield, Massachusetts, and an entirely different man from the John Winslow who commanded Fort Halifax in 1755. In fact the family name Winslow does not occur in the tax list of 1791. The man for whom the town of Winslow was named certainly didn’t stay in the town, indeed if he ever stepped foot in it.

In the 1791 tax list there does appear the name of George Warren, who may have been related to the James Warren who was one of the six grantees of 1766. The same is true of the 1791 taxpayer William Bradford, who may have been a relative of the grantee Gamaliel Bradford of Duxborough. Neither Otis nor Taylor appear as names on that tax list.

What evidently happened was common all along the Kennebec. Men in Massacusetts bought up large grants of land and then, as sort of sub-proprietors, sold to others the surveyed lots. For instance one of the proprietors of the New Plymouth Company was James Pitts of Boston. There is no evidence that he ever saw his land. From it before 1800 Pitts had sold to Isaac Temple the McKechnie-surveyed lot no. 105. In 1810 Timothy Boutelle purchased from the Temple heirs what was left of that lot, for parts of it had already been sold by Temple. But when Boutelle bought it, the lot still retained most of its original river frontage, and still extended west to the First Rangeway. It is the lot that contained much of what is now the business section of Waterville’s Main Street. Before Boutelle bought it, the town had already secured from Isaac Temple the land for a cemetery, which was the area where Monument Park is now located. Boutelle gave to the Baptist Society the land for their meeting house, which still stands on its original site. He gave to Waterville College the land for its academy (now Coburn), and gradually to others he sold pieces of the huge lot, until at Boutelle’s death in 1855, it was well broken up.

Just as James Pitts’ Lot 105 was broken up into many parcels by the middle of of the 19th century, so were most of the other original lots surveyed by John McKechnie, but if any piece of land in Waterville or Winslow is traced back to its first English-speaking owner, he would be not a single person, but the group of men who made up the Colony of Plymouth, when the King of England first gave them the lands along the Kennebec early in the 17th century. In 1967 such a piece of land comes to its present owner from the King of England, down through the four purchasers of 1661, through the Plymouth Company of 1749, to someone who obtained that land from the company and who passed it on to others, generation after generation to the present day.

Quarrels and jealousies have played their part in human destiny since the Garden of Eden. Those of us who maintain an interest in local Kennebec history like to remember that it was jealousy that gave Waterville a railroad before the iron horse ever reached Augusta.

In 1843 the Maine legislature granted a charter for a railroad from Portland to the Kennebec. An enterprising group of business men in Waterville wanted to make that town the Kennebec terminus of the railroad, but Augusta interests were equally determined that the line should stop there. Augusta folk were unwilling to put up money to construct a railroad that would only pass through their town to a rival community twenty miles farther up the river.

The Waterville promoters then turned to Maine’s greatest railroad builder, John Poor, whose Atlantic and St. Lawrence was already connecting Montreal with Portland. In 1845 they secured from the legislature a charter “to construct a railroad from some point on the Atlantic and St. Lawrence, easterly through the town of Lewiston to or near the Kennebec River, at some point between the north line of Waterville and the south line of Hallowell.” That presented a wide range within which to place the eastern terminus of the new road. There was a chance that it might be built from Winthrop, through Manchester to Hallowell or Augusta.

Interests in the capital city however, were unconcerned. They took the position that the A&K promoters could not raise the money to build their proposed road at all; so the Augusta people concentrated in bringing up from Brunswick another line, chartered as the Portland and Kennebec.

In the summer of 1846 the so-called “back route” was surveyed from Danville Junction to Waterville, and designated as the towns through which it would pass were Lewiston, Greene, Leeds, Monmouth, Winthrop, Readfield, Belgrade, with the end of the line at Waterville. The stock required by the charter was $400,000, which was issued in the form of 4,000 one hundred dollar shares. Ground was broken on July 17, 1847 for the part west of Winthrop, and in October for the part east of that village. Traffic was opened from Danville Junction to Lewiston on December 4, 1848, and was at first operated directly by the management of the Atlantic and St. Lawrence. Gradually the line extended eastward, with trains running to Winthrop on July 9, 1849; to Readfield on October 15 and finally to Waterville on December 3. December 3 was actually the date for starting a regular schedule from Danville Junction to Waterville. The date always celebrated here for the coming of the railroad was November 29, 1849, the day when the first train, a special for the occasion, came through.

When the whole extent of the A&K was finally in operation, the stockholders numbered 1,854 persons residing in 87 Maine towns. Only four stockholders lived outside the state, all four of them in Massachusetts. When the A&K was built, there was no connection between the Atlantic and St. Lawrence depot in Portland and the station of the Portsmouth and Portland R.R. at the foot of Portland’s State Street, where one took the train for Boston. Assurances had earlier been given the A&K representatives that such a connection would at once be built. As time passed and nothing happened, a committee of the directors of the Atlantic and St. Lawrence came to Waterville to confer with the A&K President Timothy Boutelle. After examining the voluminous correspondence Boutelle concluded that good faith demanded immediate construction of the connection across Portland.

The connection was delayed, however, by trouble that broke out between the A & K and the A & St. L. At first the older road charged local rates on all freight coming from or going to the A&K. During the next ten years various contracts were worked out. between the two roads. Once freight revenue was divided for rate according to mileage; at another time on a 2/3 to 1/3 basis and again it was on a complicated formula that considered kinds of freight as well as mileage. For some time the A & K handed over to the A & St. L fifty cents for every passenger carried between Danville Junction and Portland, who was also a passenger on the A&K. Not until just before the A&K merged into the Maine Central was that much needed connection built along Portland’s Commercial Street.

Year: 1968