Radio Script #824
Little Talks on Common Things
December 14, 1969
My recent story about turkeys driven over the road to the Boston market has brought to light another story about turkeys in this area. According to an item in the Waterville Mail on January 31, 1890, Gilbert Burleigh of Vassalboro received from the west a shipment of live turkeys, which he drove over the road from the Vassalboro railroad station to his home farm. In November of the same year the Waterville Mail had another item on the same subject, reporting “Mr. G.S. Burleigh of Vassalboro received 2,000 turkeys from the west last Saturday, which he sold for 20ยข a pound for the Thanksgiving trade. Many of them went to Bangor and Augusta.”
Then just before Christmas Mr. Burleigh repeated the operation for the Christmas dinners of Maine families, the Mail again reporting: “A carload of 1,300 turkeys were received by Mr. Burleigh of Vassalboro for the Christmas trade from Montreal. They were readily sold in Maine’s larger cities.”
Now for some additional information about the proposed dam across the Kennebec at Vassalboro that I mentioned a few weeks ago. This new information, like its predecessor, comes from Raymond Manson.
In 1826 the U.S. Engineers surveyed the Kennebec from Bath to Skowhegan. Among their many recommendations was one that, at what was known as Negumkeag Falls in Vassalboro, rocks be removed from the channel and a low dam be constructed. Locally the place was better known as Six Mile Falls, because it was six miles above the place where Seven Mile Brook entered the river. It was not a large fall, but its drop of slightly less than 2t feet was enough to impede river traffic. The whole extent of the descent was considerable, five-eighths of a mile.
As soon as the report of the Engineers was made public, a group of Vassalboro men formed a corporation under the title of the Negumkeag Mill Dam Co. The group included such well known persons as Jacob Southwick, George Getchell. Ebenezer Frye, Nathaniel Doe, Moses Purington and William Redington. The company was incorporated on February 1, 1834 with a capitalization of $100,000. The charter authorized them to erect and maintain a dam at the Falls to extend from the east bank of the Kennebec westerly into the river a distance not exceeding 150 rods, thence upstream 100 rods to a place known as Guide Rock, and on the east side of this dam to erect and maintain mills, factories and machinery.
It is thus clear that the proposed dam was to take the form of the letter L. The water would then be guided into a narrow channel on the Sidney side of the river, thus facilitating boat traffic to Waterville, especially at times of low water. It seems that when the river was low, the old longboats sometimes could not get above those Six.Mile Falls, even on the less obstructed Sidney side, but had to tie up at Getchells Corner and have passengers and freight carried by stage and wagon on to Winslow and Waterville. The main purpose of the dam thus appears to have been to assure uninterrupted river traffic during all the days of open water, and the provision for mills was secondary.
No one today knows exactly why the project never came to fruition, for no dam was ever built at Six Mile Falls. Perhaps the promoters decided that there was insufficient water to operate profitable mills and could not see the building of a dam just to accomodate boats. What is even more probable is that they simply could not sell stock in the project to raise an amount anywhere near to the needed $100,000. It is recalled that, after the first serious proposal for a bridge between Waterville and Winslow at Ticonic Falls, announced in 1805, it took 20 years to raise the capital to build that bridge. Venture capital was not impossible to find in the early part of the 19th century, as shown by Nehemiah Getchell and Asa Redington’s successful building of the Ticonic Dam eight years before the dawn of that century, but investors wanted to be reasonably sure that stock in such a venture would pay dividends. No such assurance could be given about the proposed dam at Six Mile Falls.
Forty years later, in 1873, the idea was revived when a new corporation was formed by several men from both Vassalboro and Waterville, among whom were Edward and Nathaniel Meader, Willard B. Arnold, Isaac Bangs, John Caffrey and Timothy Wentworth. They were authorized to clear the channel and, if necessary, to build locks, but they must not obstruct river navigation in the process. They were expressly forbidden to clog the river with gondolas, rafts or lumber. Those promoters had the idea that a dam permitting freight and passengers to be carried at all water levels all the way up to Waterville could compete successfully against the railroad by charging noticeably lower rates. Whether it was the persistent logic of faster and more popular railroad transportation or some other reason that made prospective stockholders wary, that dam, like the earlier proposal, was never built.
Because the matter of land titles in Maine is a complicated subject, on which new discoveries are constantly shedding additional light, you may expect that the subject of land ownership in our state will occasionally reappear on this program, as it has appeared several times during the past 22 years.
Today I want to talk about a form of ownership about which I have previously said very little — a form known as the Town Proprietors. We know that the huge grants in colonial times were made by royal charters and by colonial grants from the provincial governments directly to individuals or groups. By the time of the American Revolution one of the commonest methods in Maine had come to be the proprietary grants that resulted soon in the incorporation of a town. In response to a petition the Massachusetts Legislature often granted a township of land to a group of persons afterward known as the Town Proprietors. The proprietors then proceeded by careful survey to layout lots on their land, divide those lots among themselves, provide for the bUilding of mills, the settlement of blacksmiths, millers and other artisans, the assignment of lots for church and minister, and provisions for schooling.
In Buxton, Maine in 1736 the proprietors of what was then called Narragansett No. 1 offered 20 pounds each to the first ten settlers who would build a house and clear four acres of land within two years. In most towns proprietorship division of the land was in three classes: cleared up land that would include the town common, meadow and marsh land for hay and pasture, and woodland. Cemetery, church and minister’s lot usually adjoined the town common. The division among the proprietors was based on the number of shares held by each accompanied by a lottery drawing.
Many conflicts arose between these chartered proprietors and squatters already on their lands. This was especially disturbing when the proprietors were absentee owners who did not themselves settle on the township. The proprietors were also harassed by timber thieves, who sometimes cut and hauled away thousands of feet of the big pines before the proprietors far away in Boston knew what was going on.
Some of the Town Proprietorships were frankly speculative ventures by men who cared nothing about settlement other than its probable increase to the value of the land. In the second decade of the 18th century England experienced a period of speculative craze that came to a climax in the scandal of the South Seas Bubble in 1720. Especially inducing to the speculators were the unappropriated lands in America, both those under English and under French control. A London speculator named Thomas Coram launched a project for settling Sagadahoc Province in Maine for the raising of flax and hemp. But that bubble too soon burst.
As early as 1725 the so-called Narragansett Townships had been granted in Maine to veterans of King Philip’s War’-of 1675. There were in Maine two such townships, Buxton and Gorham. Another township was Sudbury Canada, now the town of Bethel, granted to men who went on the expedition that captured Louisburg in 1650. Then there were the so-called frontier townships of 1762. These included six between the Penobscot and the St. Croix that later became the towns of Sullivan, Sorrento, Gouldsboro, Harrington, Addison and Milbridge. Each of those was six miles square and each had 60 proprietors.
Sudbury Canada was not the only proprietorial township that had Canada as a part of its name. There were in fact three others: Rowley Canada, now Bridgton; Beverly Canada, now Raymond; and Sylvester Canada, now Turner. It was not those town proprietors, but rather what were known as the Great Proprietors — owners of extensive tracts of hundreds or even thousands of square miles, who encouraged immigration from overseas. In 1718 the Pejepscot Proprietors, with their first settlement at Brunswick, brought Scotch-Irish families from Ulster in Northern Ireland. Seventeen years later in 1735 Samuel Waldo brought 27 Scotch-Irish families to Broad Bay, now the town of Waldoboro, and soon followed them with 40 families from Germany. In 1749 the newly formed Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase, in which Ticonic Falls was at the center, brought Germans to Pownalborough, now the town of Dresden. Indeed the place was at first designated not Pownalborough, but Frankfort, a good German name. The proprietors gave 100 acres to each settling family.
Florentius Vassall was not so fortunate with his Kennebec lands that are now the town of Vassalboro. He personally went to England and Holland to seek immigrants, but his mission failed. As a consequence, most of the Vassalboro pioneers came from Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
In summary we may say that in all Maine there was no land system apart from some body of proprietors, large or small. From the beginning it was the proprietors, not the politically constituted town or township, that controlled the land. It was the proprietors who were responsible for the general plan of the town, its division into lots, its highways, its common fields, pasture and woodland. They were the builders of the towns. Their control ended with the final division of settled lands. Only the vast wild lands remained, and after the Revolution those wild lands became public property of the state, first of Massachusetts, and after 1820, of the State of Maine.
Year: 1969