Radio Script #796

Little Talks on Common Things

February 23, 1969

Hanging in the President’s office at Colby College is a very old painting of the three earliest buildings on the old campus. It was painted in 1836 by the daughter of Rev. Nathaniel Butler. Later prints were made and sold by a Boston engraver. One of those prints is now owned by Mr. Francis Bartlett of the Boothby and Bartlett Company. What is not so generally known is that Miss Butler painted another picture, showing the then small village of Waterville from the top of Sand Hill in Winslow. Fortunately a detailed description of that picture has been preserved. Quite by accident I came across it in an issue of the Waterville Mail of 1883.

It has been sometimes said that Miss Butler was a daughter of one of Colby’s presidents. This could not be true. because the Nathaniel Butler, who was President of Colby, was not born until 1853. nineteen years after Miss Butler painted these pictures. She could not even have been a daughter of President Butler’s father, who graduated from Colby in 1842, for he would have been only ten years old when Miss Butler did these paintings.

It turns out that there were actually three successive Nathaniel Butlers. The first was a Baptist minister, whose grandson was a Colby president from 1896 to 1901. Miss Elenthra Butler, the painter, was therefore a sister of the second Nathaniel Butler and an aunt of the Colby president. The first Nathaniel’s family was living in Waterville in 1834, from which place of residence Butler was traveling about the state as a missionary to the rural areas. It was a time when the pastor of the Waterville Baptist Church was Samuel Francis Smith, author of the hymn America.

As I have said, the description of Miss Butler’s painting. published in the Mail nearly 50 years after she produced it, tells us something of what Waterville looked like in 1834. TheMail said: “The picture was made from the Winslow side and includes only the upper portion of our village as it then was, extending from a little way above the college buildings to Temple Street.”

The first buildings shown on the right. or northern end. were the three college “bricks”. North College, Champlin Hall and South College. with slightly northwest of them a smaller wooden building that housed the college commons and the workshop, where students earned part of their expenses by turning out carpentry products. It was in that old shop that General Ben Butler worked when he was a Colby freshman. South of the three bricks was the President’s house on the later site of Memorial Hall. That frame house had been the first bUilding erected on the campus, built in 1819, three years before South College was erected. In 1868, when Memorial Hall was about to go up, the old President’s house was removed, and part of it became the ell of the large house that older residents of Waterville knew as the Boutelle house, which until a few years ago stood just north of the brick house where recently the offices of Or. Howard Hill and several other physicians were located.

Next appears, on the corner of Chaplin Street and College Avenue a small cottage house, the home of John M. Foster, father of Colby’s professor of Greek and first in a line of five generations of Fosters to attend Colby. Next, on the west side of the avenue toward the business district was what the Mail called “the Deacon Williams house, after great changes becoming the home of Reuben W. Dunn”. You will note that the Lannigan house. later the Ferris Arms Motel, had not been built when the picture was painted. Just south of the Dunn house the future site of Foss Hall was then occupied by the home of Professor Briggs, one of the four members of the college faculty in 1834.

On the east side of the avenue was the old Clarke homestead, later the Phi Delta Theta fraternity house, and south of it the small, brick schoolhouse that stood near the present site of a discount store; and just below that was one of the oldest homes on the avenue, built about 1790 by Henry Doe. When the Mail printed this article in 1883 it had been substantially remodeled into the residence of the Mail editor, Daniel Wing. It was on the site of the present American Legion Home. A large farmhouse appears on the site of the Elmwood Hotel and a two-story house is shown at the corner of Union Street, and two houses south on the avenue on the present site of the fire station.

To get a glimpse of what the north end of Elm Street looked like in 1834, let us now turn to the exact words of the article in the Mail: “On Elm Street are shown the Hasty house, where Mrs. Plaisted now lives, and a small cottage below it; then the Captain Getchell house; the Bodge and Scammon house; the Jewett house, since removed; the John Burleigh house, now Dr. Hanson’s. Then came the Baptist Church, the cemetery, the old academy, the Sanger house, and the Major Dow house.”

Going back to what is now Post Office Square, the buildings shown on Main Street, according to the Mail account, were the Asa Redington house; the Purmot Hill house with a one-story cottage beside it; the Appleton house; the Bodge and Scammon shop; a brick house; the Cook and Boutelle houses; and the old printing shop. The left end of the picture did not quite reach Temple Street.

The story in the Mail says that the painting was given to Colby College in 1883 by Jonathan Farman of Georgetown, Kentucky, the man who had married the girl who made the picture half a century before. He said it was his wife’s first painting, and she claimed it was true to nature, showing accurately every house, tree and rock.

It is difficult to locate the exact spot on the Winslow side where Miss Butler set up her easel. The Mail commented: “In the foreground appears the point of the intervale or island, while cows and sheep are shown on the slope and boats on the river — the water appearing unnaturally smooth, and showing sailboats such as were never seen outside of this picture.” The Mail accused the artist of other distortions, saying: “She has put a spire on the old academy, a feature that it never possessed.”

The fact remains, despite any artistic distortions, that, half a century after Miss Butler painted the picture, the editor of the Waterville Mail could recognize building after building from the college campus to Temple Street.

Not long after finding that clipping of 1883, it was my good fortune to find another from the Waterville Mail, printed three years earlier in 1880. It is a long article of two newspaper columns, headed “Waterville Seventy Years Ago”. Here we have a description of the village when it was even more primitive than when Miss Butler painted her picture in 1834. Let us now see what Waterville was like in 1810.

That “Seventy Years Ago” story in the Mail was based on the recollections of an aged resident, Sumner Wheeler, who remembered when there were only 34 buildings in all of Ticonic Village, as the settled part of Waterville was then called. Now let us see what the story in the Waterville Mail had to say: “Beginning at the upper end of College Street (College Street was not called College Avenue until about 1900) was a little house on a height of land, owned and occupied by Ebenezer Bacon, the elder, who after bUilding the Gilman house on Silver Street had been compelled to retire to a farm, where he lived until his death.

“The next building was the little Johnny Emery house, owned by Nathaniel Gilman. In later years it was removed to make room for the elegant residence of Prof. Samuel K. Smith.” (That reference spots exactly where was the north line of buildings that Wheeler was talking about. It was at this corner of what is now College Avenue and High Streets.)

Wheeler explained that John Emery, who in 1810 lived in the little house on the site of the later Smith residence, was a man-of-all-work for Nathaniel Gilman and ate a large part of his meals at the Gilman home. Wheeler told an amusing yarn that one day in the Gilman and Mathews store, Mr. Gilman said to Emery, “Take that ham home”, meaning the Gilman home. Johnny took the ham to his own little house up on the hill.

The account in the Mail continues: “The next house to the south (that is, south from the present High Street) had been built by Captain George Clarke,a shipmaster and builder, and became afterwards known as the Prof. Briggs house. It was the house in which, many years later during the Civil War, the noted Boston divine, Dr. Balduc died during a Colby commencement.”

Next was the home of Richard Clifford, where his descendants were still living 50 years later. In it, at one time, lived Prof. Barnes, an early member of the college faculty.

Now note carefully the next words of the story: “Skipping the Woods house for the moment, we come to the twin Jackins houses, the one on the east side being occupied as an inn by its builder, Fred Jackins and its mate on the west side, then owned by James Hasty, and occupied by him and Timothy Boutelle, Esq., a rising young lawyer, recently married. The old tavern is now owned by the Misses Hanscom, its mate was torn down to make room for the Plaisted house.”

Now that paragraph is filled with important information. For several years I have been trying to find out where Timothy Boutelle lived before he built his house on Main Street. a little way north of Temple Street. This old clipping makes it clear that, in 1810, only a year or two after Boutelle had come to Waterville, he lived in a rented apartment in the home of the merchant James Hasty, and that the Hasty house stood at the corner of Center and Main Streets, where later the Plaisted mansion was built. The section of the town that is described in that paragraph in the Mail was what we now call Post Office Square as it looked a full century before the post office was built there. One of the twin Jackins houses occupied by the Hanscom sisters long after it ceased to be a tavern. stood on the present site of the central fire station. The Wood house that the writer of the article said he would for the moment skip, stood on the later site of the Elmwood Hotel. It was in the Wood house that Jeremiah Chaplin lived and held the first classes of Colby College. and in that house was organized the First Baptist Church of Waterville.

The house standing at the junction of Main and College Streets, or as they were then called, the Road to Fairfield Meeting House and the Road to Kendalls Mills, had been built about 1795 by Abial Wood. who had bought from John Tozier the larger portion of the old Lot 106 of the McKechnie survey. As late as 1820 it was considered well outside the settled area of Waterville and was called the Wood farm. It is interesting to note that. ten years after the time Wheeler was describing (that is, 1820 instead of Wheeler’s 1810) what had not already been sold off from those big McKechnie mile-long lots that adjoined each other from a little south of Temple Street to Getchell Street belonged inorder to Nathaniel Gilman, Timothy Boutelle and the heirs of Abial Wood.

Next week I will tell you about other parts of Waterville in 1810, as remembered by the aged Sumner Wheeler in 1880.

Year: 1969