Radio Script #975

Little Talks on Common Things
May 27, 1973

Here’s a bit more about early Winslow.

When the town finally got around to building the long discussed meetinghouse in the middle of the last decade of the 18th century, it is of some interest to note just how they finally decided to do it. They voted to have the frame put up, the roof boarded and shingled, and the lower tier of windows glazed, by November 1, 1796. Then pews were to be sold by auction bid, but none of them built until a sufficient number had been subscribed. The pews could be paid for in cash, corn, grain, or any building materials or merchandisable lumber, and could be made in four payments: April 20 and September 15, 1796,and May 1 and September 1, 1797.

Winslow was early in the movement to make Maine a separate state. Although that was not accomplished until 1820, nearly a quarter of a century earlier in 1797, Winslow voters cast an overwhelming majority of 137 to 2 in favor of separation.

It is well known that, before meetinghouses were built in any town, religious services were often held in individual homes. What is not so well known is that, after a town got a settled minister but did not yet have a meetinghouse, home owners were sometimes paid for opening their homes for Sunday service. That explains the town vote of April 2, 1797: “Allowed Richard Thomas $10 for use of his house for preaching and Major Sherman $30 for the same reason.” That does not mean that the town then had no meetinghouse, but rather that it had none on the west side of the river, and people over there found it difficult, without a bridge, to get to services in the meetinghouse on Lithgow Street. By May, 1798, the second town meetinghouse had been erected on the west side, where now stands the Waterville City Hall, and the voters decreed, “Mr. Cushman shall preach alternately in the meetinghouse on the east and west sides of the river.”

When, in 1799, Winslow voted $1,000 for highways, they at the same time established ways for work on those roads. A man was to get one dollar a day. Allowance for a yoke of oxen for a day was 66 cents, for a plough 33 cents, and for a cart 17 cents. Why those seemingly odd figures? While the new American money system was then legally established, at the turn into the 19th century and for many years afterward, English money, in terms of New England currency, still held sway. So we find for commodities, as well as for services, the price was often in shillings. So, the 17 cents for a cart was the nearest full number of cents to the 16-2/3 cents of the New England shilling. The plough’s 33 cents was two shillings and the oxen’s 66 cents was four shillings. Some time ago I told you, on this program, that about lEOO the price charged by Dr. Ambrose Howard of Sidney for pulling a tooth was one shilling, 17 cents.

By 1799 the people living in the far west end of the town at the foot of the Messalonskee Lake were seeking recognition, and the town voted that Mr. Cushman should preach every fourth Sunday at some place near the West Pond, now Messalonskee Lake.

When the subscribed pews were put into either of the town’s two meetinghouses, they were not built in a group at town expense, but individually by the subscribers themselves. On September 25, 1799, the voters decided that the owners of pews in each meetinghouse could build their pews when they pleased, and that they would be recompensed for that expense out of the first money received from sale of the gallery pews.

The earliest birth listed in the Winslow records was that of Betsy Parker, daughter of Thomas and Olive Parker, on March 16, 1759. Although there may have been earlier deaths, the first to be recorded was that of Sarah Pattee, daughter of Ezekiel Pattee, on November 5, 1772.

Even after the town voted not to let hogs go any longer at large, Winslow was certainly having trouble with those animals. On September 17, 1796, Enoch Fuller sent the following letter to the Winslow town clerk: “This is to give you notice that on September 10, I took up a large, stray feed hog, all white except two black spots on his head, has lost his right ear, was neither yoked nor ringed. The owner thereof is unknown to me.”

At late in 1801, the people on both sides of the river agreed to let the west side become a separate town. On December 28 in that year, a town meeting voted to petition the Massachusetts legislature to set off as a separate town that part of Winslow which lay on the west side of the Kennebec, and named as a committee to present the petition Reuben Kidder, Thomas Rice, Josiah Hayden, Nehemiah Parlin and Asa Soule.

Just before the division of the town, the last selectmen of the larger Winslow were Jonah Hayden, Elnathan Sherman, and Asa Soule. The town treasurer was Asa Redington.

After the legislature granted the petition and the town of Waterville was duly established in 1802, then was appointed a Committee of five to settle all matters between the two towns, but it took ten years before disputes as to certain property and certain debts were satisfactorily adjudicated.

Now let us come ahead half a century and turn to a few items from the Waterville Mail in the years just before the Civil War, more than a century ago. Early in 1847 there appeared an ad by Dr. Burbank, dentist. The ad contained an endorsement by Justin Loomis, the professor of natural philosophy and chemistry at Waterville College. Prof. Loomis stated: “Dr. Burbank administered to me the anodyne vapor, from which I suffered no injury and experienced no pain from the operation of removing a molar tooth, performed while I was under the vapor.” The dictionary defines anodyne as medicine that relieves pain. The anodyne vapor to which Loomis referred was the newly discovered anesthetic called ether.

Another 1847 ad announced a new stage line from Waterville to Belfast, through Sebasticook (now Benton Falls), Albion, Freedom, Knox and Waldo.

On September 30, 1847, occurred Waterville’s first murder, that of Edward Mathews by Dr. Valorus Coolidge, a notorious event I told about in the early days of this program, and to which I devoted a chapter in my book, KENNEBEC YESTERDAYS. Of course that murder and its spectacular trial were fully recorded in the pages of the Waterville Mail. A year and a half later, in May 1849, the Mail carried the following item: “On Friday morning, May 18, Dr. Coolidge was found barely alive in a solitary cell in the State Prison at Thomaston. He had been placed in solitary only the day before, when a plot to secure his release was discovered. A prisoner whose term had nearly expired was to kill Thomas Flint, chief witness against Coolidge, and place in Flint’s pocket an alleged confession, representing Coolidge as innocent and Flint himself as the real criminal. Within a few days Coolidge had died, thus presumably ending the case. But just as later happened with Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and with several other such murderers, rumors that Coolidge still lived persisted. He had been recognized in California, in Caribbean, in Mexico. As late as 1865, Prof. Loomis, the college teacher to whom we referred a few minutes ago, talked with a Colby graduate in a western Pennsylvania town where Coolidge was reported to have appeared after his supposed death in Thomaston. The Colby man told Loomis the rumor did still persist in the town, but he himself took no stock in it.”

Actually there is almost no doubt that Coolidge did die in Thomaston, and was buried in the family cemetery at Canton, Maine.

On November 27, 1849, the Mail announced the coming of the railroad to Waterville. It said: “The Androscoggin and Kennebec Railroad is at last open for travel to Waterville. There was a grand stockholders’ excursion from Portland. An elaborate dinner was served in the freight depot, a huge structure 250 x 30 feet. A train of four cars went from Waterville to Readfield, to meet there a train from Portland. A large crowd had assembled beside the station house and on the hill behind it, long before the train returned from Readfield. As the first train ever to arrive here puffed in steadily and smoothly, cannon rang out in thunderous tones, while the crowd gave loud cheers. The guests filled the freight depot to overflowing. The table was set in the middle with a row of cushioned seats around it. The program included an address of welcome by Timothy Boutelle, President of the A. & K., Joseph Preble of Portland, Wyman S.B. Moor of Bangor, Joseph Little, President of the Atlantic and St. Lawrence, the Hon. Lot Morrill of Augusta, and John Poor, founder of the Atlantic and St. Lawrence. In the evening the depot was again filled by a grand picnic and dance, the whole making a festival and jubilee long to be remembered.

In 1850 the Mail printed Waterville’s first daguerreotype ad by Sam who boasted, “one is at a loss which to commend most highly, the fidelity of the likeness or the beautiful finish and artistic elegance of the picture.”

In 1850 coal was just beginning to be used for fuel in Maine, and an announcement in the Waterville Mail said: “On the Atlantic and St. Lawrence wharf at Portland there has arrived 4,500 bushels of coal for stoves and grates.” Note that in 1850 coal was not sold by weight, but by the bushel.

In 1852 the Mail announced: “Emery Mellen has taken a contract to build two schoolhouses on Pleasant Street, one at the corner of North and Pleasant, the other at the corner of Pleasant and School Streets.” For more than a hundred years those locations were the sites of Waterville schools. At Pleasant and North stood the North Grammar School, at Pleasant and School Street was Waterville’s first high school.

On December 14, 1853, the Mail told everybody, “The telegraph is now in operation between Waterville and the rest of the world.”

In 1854 the paper heralded the building of the railroad bridge across the Kennebec, just above Ticonic Falls, and the next year announced that trains of the new Somerset and Kennebec R.R. were crossing that bridge, also that the broad gauge Penobscot and Kennebec now connected Waterville with Bangor.

Year: 1973