Radio Script #974

Little Talks on Common Things
May 20, 1973

Many times this program has had something to say about Winslow. Today I want to tell you a bit about the beginning of that town which, as you all know included what is now Waterville on the west side of Kennebec as well as the present Winslow on the east side.

It was the building of Fort Halifax in 1754, and the assured protection that it gave against French and Indian raids, that made settlement possible, and in the 1760′, so many settlers came in that it was possible for them to petition the Massachusetts legislature for incorporation as a town in 1771. Their petition was granted, and on May 8, 1771, James Howard, in his capacity of Justice of the Peace, issued the call for Winslow’s first town meeting. His warrant said: “By virtue of the power given to me by the law of this Province for incorporating a certain tract in the County of Lincoln into a town by the name of Winslow, the freeholders and other inhabitants of said town are commanded to meet at Fort Halifax on May 23, 1771 at 8 A.M., to choose selectmen, a town clerk, constables and such other officers as shall be necessary to manage the affairs of the town.”

The description of the town in the act of incorporation seems strange to us 200 years later, but it is the way most Maine towns were laid out at that time. Note how boundaries are marked by non-permanent objects, such as trees. The act said: “The town of Winslow is butted and bounded as follows: Beginning on the east side of the Kennebec River at a hemlock tree standing on the bank one rod west northwest of a large rock, and 2-1/2 miles on a northeast course from Fort Halifax; then from said tree to run east southeast five miles to a beech tree, marked; thence to run south southwest five miles and 178 poles; thence west northwest to the northeast corner of the town of Vassalboro; thence on the northerly line of said town west northwest five miles to the Kennebec River; thence to run across said river, the same course, to the end of five miles on the west side of said river, butting thus far on the same northerly line of the said town of Vassalboro; thence northerly on such a course, so far as to meet the west end of a line running from the hemlock tree above mentioned, west northwest five miles from the Kennebec River; thence to run east southeast on the last mentioned line five miles to said Kennebec River; thence across said river to the hemlock tree aforesaid.”

You will note, hard as such a description is to follow as I give it orally on the air, that not only Winslow, but also Vassalboro, originally extended across the river. Just as Waterville was at first a part of Winslow, so was Sidney at first a part of Vassalboro.

One of Winslow’s early settlers, an important land owner and operator of mills, was Ezekiel Pattee, for whose family Pattee Pond is named. At the first town meeting in 1771 he was elected to three offices: town clerk, town treasurer, and first selectman. His fellow selectmen were Timothy Heald and John Tozier. One man of the early officers lived on the west side. That man, John Cool, who owned two of the big lots surveyed by John McKechnie, was elected warden. Two of the early Crosbys got into the picture, Joel as surveyor of highways and Jonah as fence viewer. Among the early town officers was a hog reeve, because swine were then allowed to go at large.

When Winslow was made a town, it was the custom in all American colonies to place minor offenders of the law on public exhibition. Like every other New England town, Winslow at once set up the town stocks where even women were sometimes placed for onlookers to jeer at and even pelt with soft fruit and rotten eggs.

Winslow was only four years old when at Concord and Lexington were fired the shots heard around the world. The town at once set up a Committee of Safety, consisting of Timothy Heald, John Tozier and Zimri Haywood. On July 8, 1776, only four days after the Declaration of Independence had been signed in Philadelphia, a Winslow town meeting voted to have these men go up the river on a scout, to see if British forces planned an attack from Canada. That seemed especially necessary, since Benedict Arnold’s march up the river to attack British Quebec had so dismally failed. At the same town meeting, Winslow voted to purchase a stock of ammunition and to petition the Massachusetts legislature to provide troops to guard the river settlements.

Evidently the hog reeve had been busy, for in 1780 the town voted the “hogs are no longer to be allowed to go at large”.

One item in the old Winslow town records shows concern for destitute, friendly Indians and how precarious was the paper currency of the time. In January, 1781, the town voted to pay for a thousand pounds of beef furnished to the Indians by Ezekiel Pattee, and that he be allowed $5 per pound in Massachusetts currency for it, and also to pay him for five days’ labor of a man for procuring the beef. The currency, or paper money, was so deflated in 1781 that it took $5 of it to buy a pound of beef.

When another town meeting was held late in the fall of 1781, Cornwallis had already surrendered at Yorktown, but skirmishes of the war lingered on, and two years would elapse before a treaty of peace was signed with Great Britain. Meanwhile the Continental Congress requisitioned army supplies on each of the thirteen colonies and they in turn placed demands upon their towns. Winslow balked. They voted to take no action on the order of the Massachusetts General Court that the town supply shirts, stockings, shoes and blankets for the army.

Even a year later, in the summer of 1782, when the war was presumably well over, there seems to have been demand not only for supplies but for troops, because Winslow then voted that Zimri Haywood, Timothy Heald and Jonah Crosby be a committee to hire two men to serve in the Continental Army.

By 1786, people were complaining that public notices were not posted in enough places to attract attention. It wasn’t right, they said, to hold town meetings without giving all the people a chance to know about them. So it was voted that thereafter such notices should be posted, not only at Fort Halifax, but also at Jonah Crosby’s gristmill on Outlet Stream, and at McKechnie’s gristmill on the west side of the river. That McKechnie mill was the first to be built in what is now Waterville, erected by the man who had surveyed the Waterville lots for the Plymouth Company. He built the mill on the Messalonskee near the present Western Avenue bridge, where now stands the pumping station of the Water District.

Although a comparatively poor pioneer town, Winslow was determined to have some sort of school in operation every year they could possibly scrape up the money. Although it is true that the town skipped a few early years without schooling, they usually got in at least a few weeks of it. One way they managed is revealed in a town meeting act in 1786: “Voted to allow Zimri Haywood four pounds, eight shillings, six pence for paying and boarding the schoolmaster one month.”

Sometimes a Winslow town officer was responsible for expenses the town decided not to pay. In May, 1787, it was voted not to allow Zimri Haywood for 32 days going to the convention at Portland and Falmouth and for three shillings paid to the printer.

On the other hand, at a town meeting in the following December, it was voted to send Jonah Crosby as Winslow’s representative to a state convention in Boston to decide whether the Commonwealth of Massachusetts should accept the new Constitution of the United States, adopted three months earlier in Philadelphia.

In 1788 the town voted to lay out a road from 12 mile pond to the Kennebec River. Twelve Mile Pond was what we now know as China Lake, and the road referred to was Winslow’s responsibility from the Vassalboro line in North Vassalboro to Fort Halifax.

In the early days fishing was very important in the water just below Ticonic Falls. In May, when the fish, especially salmon, herring and shad, pushed up the river and leaped the falls to reach spawning beds, hundred of barrels of fish were salted for later use. So, as early as 1790, twelve years before Waterville became a separate town, Winslow set up a fish committee, composed of two men who lived on the east side of the Kennebec, Ezekiel Pattee and Joseph Cragin, and one west-side, James Stackpole. It was their duty to see that no outsiders poached on those waters below the falls, and that the offal of cleaned fish was not left on the river bank.

When in 1791, it was proposed to build a meetinghouse for religious worship and for town meetings, the people turned it down. However, the need persisted, and in 1794 there was finally passed a vote, by 27 to 1, to build a meetinghouse on the east side of the river on land given by Arthur Lithgow, between his house and Nathaniel Dingley’s. The building was to be financed by a special tax on property, and the amount thus raised was to be one hundred pounds. In other words, they expected to put up the whole building for about $500. The committee elected to draw up a suitable plan was composed of Jonah Crosby, Timothy Heald, Jonah Hayden, David and Ezekiel Pattee, Jonathan Soule, and Nathaniel Low.

On September 5, 1794, the town voted to call Rev. Joshua Cushman as the town minister, and he was the first to hold services in that meetinghouse, the original foundation and hand-wrought beams of which still stand as part of the Winslow
Congregational Church, the oldest church building now standing on the Kennebec above Gardiner.

Elaborate plans were made for Mr. Cushman’s ordination in 1795, and that year’s record of the March town meeting sets them forth in considerable detail. “Voted that Mr. Cushman’s ordination be on the second Wednesday of June, 1795, and that ten churches be invited to participate, namely, the Churches of Christ at Canaan, Pownalborough, Woolwich, Brunswick, Topsham, Wells, Kittery, Pembroke, and two other churches at the option of Mr. Cushman. Voted that the Christian Society in Winslow choose a committee of five to write to the above named churches and request their assistance at Mr. Cushman’s ordination. Voted to choose a committee of twenty to wait upon the council of ordination and escort them to the place of the event.”

The list of those twenty names of escort reveals who was who in the little villages across from each other at Ticonic Falls 178 years ago. On the east side the list included the venerable Ezekiel Pattee, Zimri Haywood, Timothy Heald and Arthur Lithgow. Equally prominent men from the west side were Asa Redington, Elnathan Sherwin, James Stackpole, and David Pattee. By that time David, the son of Ezekiel Pattee had married the widow of the surveyor John McKechnie, and was living in the McKechnie home and operating the McKechnie mills on the Messalonskee.

Year: 1973