Radio Script #780

Little Talks on Common Things

November 3, 1968

Although this program has carried many items about Winslow and especially about Fort Halifax, it may be well to set straight just what happened in that area in its earliest days of English penetration.

As everyone knows, Ticonic Falls had been a meeting place of the Abnaki Indians for hundreds of years before the White Man came. Because that region was the actual junction for travelers between the Penobscot and the Kennebec, the Indians gathered there in each of their frequent travels between the two rivers. That is why so many Indian relics have been found in the vicinity of Fort Halifax, and along the west bank of the Kennebec below the falls.

As I have often pointed out, there was much dispute about the ownership of Kennebec lands. The disputes arose because Crown Grants to various persons or groups frequently overlapped, and because other claimants relied on deeds they had negotiated with the Indians.

In 1630 the so-called Plymouth Patent was granted by the crown to William Bradford and others of the Colony of New Plymouth in America. That grant included lands all along the Kennebec as far as the falls at Norridgewock. Despite the Plymouth claim, Christopher Lawson. in 1649, bought from the Abnaki chiefs the Kennebec lands up as far as Ticonic Falls. Several historians say that the trading post soon afterward set up at the junction of the Kennebec and the Sebasticook was established by Clark and Lake, prominent land speculators and traders at Pemaquid; but Kingsbury. in his 1892 History of Kennebec County states: “On the plan of a survey ordered by the Pejepscot proprietors (that refers to the owners of the grant of which Brunswick became the center) and made by Joseph Heath in 1719, a building is drawn on the south side of the Sebasticook. where it enters the Kennebec, and is marked ‘a trading house built by Lawson, September 10, 1653, as recorded at Plymouth by the court’~ Since Kingsbury learned of that authentic record at Plymouth, it must have been Lawson who built the trading post. Likewise he must have transferred the title soon to Clark and Lake. because other authentic records reveal that those partners were operating the trading post in 1656.

Certainly the traders of Lawson, or of Clark and Lake, were not the first white men to see Ticonic Falls. Although there is no record of a visit by the French until the coming of the Jesuit missionary, Father Druillettes in 1646, it is very probable that the widely ranging French couriers de bois had come down the river long before that date, because in the first half of the 17th century there were no English forces to stop them and those couriers de bois, going far into the wilderness for Indian furs, certainly knew the Abnaki trails between the Chaudiere and the Kennebec, and they weren’t hampered by having an army or the cumbersome bateaux that gave Arnold so much trouble when he went in the opposite direction in 1775.

What we actually know, however, is that Christopher Lawson, with a few English helpers, was trading in Indian furs at the junction of the Kennebec and the Sebasticook almost a hundred years before the building of Fort Halifax.

If there were Englishmen, however few, in what is now Winslow in 1653, why didn’t settlers follow? They did come in good numbers to Kittery, York and Wells, to Cape Elizabeth and the Falmouth peninsula that later became Portland. And they settled in very respectable numbers at Pemaquid and at the mouth of the Kennebec. There were several reasons why people didn’t seek homes farther up the river.

In the first place, the land owners, whether the officials at Plymouth or individual claimants like Lawson and his successors Clark and Lake, did not encourage settlement. They were interested in trade with the Indians, not in development of land. Secondly, we should remember that Plymouth had been settled for only 33 years and Boston for only 23 when Lawson built his trading post. Actually there were not very many white people in all New England, and it was natural that those few should settle either along the seacoast from Cape Cod to Kittery, or only a short distance up small rivers like the Charles and the Merrimac. It is significant that the early settlers at Cape Elizabeth and at Pemaquid were much more interested in trade than in farming. For instance, my own ancestor who came to Cape Elizabeth in 1690, was the first of three generations of ship owners and sea captains from that ship building and trading town.

Even the lethargy of land owners and the scarcity of population would surely have been overcome much earlier had it not been for the major barrier to settlement — fear of the Indians. That fear, during the middle of the 17th century, was aggravated because in the perennial contest between France and England for control of America, the Maine Indians sided with the French. The explanation is succinstly given by Kingsbury, who wrote: “The French never had war with their Indian subjects, but kept their loyalty with flattery, charity, and religious ceremonials. Puritanism was a failure with the Indians; it neither converted nor attracted them. It was too abstract and too filled with the fear of Hell. The Indians preferred their symbols of worship and their medicine men. Catholicism with its own symbols and visible objects was quickly understood by the Indian mind. The priest replaced the medicine man, the Crucifix replaced the totem, and the enthusiastic, humane understanding Jesuits won Indian loyalty as well as Indian souls. Those Jesuits were loyal Frenchmen. Why shouldn’t their Indians take sides with the French when trouble came with the English? That Indian allegiance was quite natural.”

So throughout the hundred years between the building of Lawson’s post in 1653 and the erection of Fort Halifax in 1754, Indian raids stimulated by the French at Quebec repeatedly harassed the few settlers who ventured to build cabins on the Kennebec.

All that was made worse by the great uprising of the Indians themselves under the chief whom the English called King Philip. What our history knows as King Philip’s War broke out in 1675 with a raid on Swansea. Mass. All of Western Massachusetts and much of Rhode Island was soon menaced. No outlying settlement was safe. Deerfield was destroyed, Springfield deserted, and raids came as near Boston as Hingham and Concord.

In a few weeks traders and the few settlers on the lower Kennebec were alarmed. A Committee of Safety met at Phippsburg and decided to disarm the Indians. A meeting was arranged at a point up the river with five Androscoggin and seven Kennebec chiefs, and the Indians were persuaded to surrender knives and guns in return for tangible favors and promise of protection.

But the peace was short-lived. In less than three months new Indian raids occurred. They continued intermittently until, in 1724, the authorities at Boston felt the time had come to make the Kennebec area safe for settlement. If that were to be done, those authorities felt they must wipe out the Indian village at Norridgewock and dispose of their French missionary, Father Rasle. And that is exactly what an English military expedition did, although they afterwards stoutly contended they had no intention of killing the priest. But kill him they did, as well as burn the village and kill all the Indians except the few who managed to escape to Canada.

So controversial is the recorded evidence of that event that, even to this day, it depends on which version you read — the British, preserved in the records at Boston; or the French, now in archives at Paris — whether you think Father Rasle was wantonly murdered or deserved his fate as an enemy of the English who stirred his Indian subjects against the Anglo-Saxons.

Maine’s foremost early historian, Williamson, tells us that in 1660 there were about a hundred families settled in cabins between what is now Bath and the falls at Skowhegan; and that in 1690 there was not a single family left. All had either been massacred or had been scared away. The removal of the Norridgewock Indians to Canada did not extinguish the danger. Raids out of Canada, especially now that the French could make good use of their Indians in what we have come to call the French and Indian War, still made English settlement extremely precarious. At last the Massachusetts government under Governor Shirley was persuaded to erect two forts, one at the old trading post of Cushnoc (now the City of Augusta), the other at the junction of the Kennebec and the Sebasticook in what is now Winslow. The Augusta fort was named Fort Western and the Winslow fort was called Fort Halifax, after the Earl of Halifax, a patron of Gov. Shirley. Why one of the forts was not named for Gov. Shirley himself was because there was already a Fort Shirley farther down the river. On September 3, 1754 Captain William Lithgow took command at Fort Halifax. What he commanded was described by Kingsbury in his 1892 history as follows: “The old block house still standing was at the southwest corner of the Lithgow plan. From this extended each way a palisade of posts enclosing an area 117 feet square. At the northeast corner was another block hosue, 20 feet square. Inside the enclosure was a row of barracks on the east side, 80 feet long and 20 feet wide and one story high; on the north side were the officers’ quarters, fort house and armory, all covering a space 40 by 80 feet.”

The fort was built under the supervision of General John Winslow, who gave his name to the town when it was incorporated in 1771. So far as Indian menace was concerned, Fort Halifax proved unnecessary, for the Treaty of Paris in 1763 soon ended all danger from French and Indians from Canada. France lost Canada forever, or at least until the present day. One cannot safely predict what result the present agitation for a separate French Canada may bring. But at any rate, Winslow has been safe from invasion for 215 years.

The psychological effect of the building of Fort Halifax should not, however, be underestimated. It certainly made prospective settlers feel safe, and they came in such numbers that four years before the outbreak of the Revolution Winslow had enough people to become an incorporated town. In fact, on the same day in 1771, four Kennebec towns were granted charters of incorporation by the Massachusetts General Court. Those towns were Winthrop, Hallowell, Vassalboro and Winslow.

By the way, with all the rivalry between Waterville and Augusta, neither can boast of being an original Kennebec town. Just as Waterville was once a part of Winslow, so Augusta was once a part of Hallowell. And believe me, the disputes between Waterville and Winslow were never half so bitter nor so prolonged as those between Augusta and Hallowell. But that story must wait for some future broadcast. Right now we have to say goodbye until next Sunday.

Year: 1968