Radio Script #999

Little Talks on Common Things
February 3, 1974

A few weeks ago, when I talked about the Kennebec town of Winthrop, I told you I had more to say about that town than we could get into a single broadcast. Today I want to give some information about Winthrop churches.

Waterville people have a connection with this subject, because, when the Waterville Baptists, under the leadership of Rev. Jeremiah Chaplin, Colby’s first president, decided they could raise the funds to build their meetinghouse, the first to be erected by anyone denomination in Waterville, they told the contractor just how they wanted it built. It was to be the same dimensions, and have the same interior form, with high pulpit, box pews, and a balcony on both sides and the rear, as the Baptist Church in Winthrop, which had been opened only two years earlier in 1823. That edifice was not in Winthrop Village, but at East Winthrop.

The Winthrop historian tells us that, for the first 29 years after the town’s incorporation in 1771, there were only two years when the voters made any pretense of obeying the Massachusetts law to provide preaching at taxpayers’ expense. At one time the town actually voted to build a meetinghouse, but made no attempt to collect the necessary taxes for it.

They did make several attempts to hire a preacher to be paid entirely in grain, with the cautious stipulation if prices of corn and oats should rise, the “Quantity of grain aelive fed to the minister would be correspondingly reduced.” To no one’s surprise, that call to spread the gospel in Winthrop got no response from any prospective minister.

The old state church of Massachusetts, the one that so long fought off the competition of other denominations, even to the banishment of the Baptist Roger Williams, and the hanging of Mary Dyer, the Quaker, had a hard time getting a foothold in Maine, especially in the towns east of Portland. That state church was, however, the first denomination to get a foothold in Winthrop. When the church there was organized in 1807, the denomination was already known as the Congregationalists. They had already become well known for their educated clergy, many of them graduates of Harvard. It was a Yale man, however, Jonathan Belden, who arrived in Pond Town in 1799, as a missionary to the unchurched settlers of the Maine wilderness. The town elected him their tax-supported minister, and he stayed for five years. In 1807, Belden was succeeded by David Thurston, a Dartmouth graduate. It was he who made the Congregationalist the leading church in Winthrop, staying as pastor for 44 years until 1851. Under Thurston, Winthrop was one of Maine’s first towns to have Sunday School, which opened in 1808, fully 20 years before most Maine churches had recognized that new movement.

That Winthrop Congregational Church had, however, actually been organized long before even Belden came to the town. Only five years after the town’s incorporation, that church was formally organized in the very year of American independence, 1776. There were 26 original members of that Winthrop church. Just as was later done in Winslow, the town voted in 1781 to build two meetinghouses, one in the east part of Winthrop and one in the west. In 1776 the exterior of crude meetinghouses had been put up, but had never been finished.

Despite the vote of 1781, no fully completed meetinghouse was built until 1786. That one was built by vote of the town and the money was raised by taxation, but it was from the beginning dominated by Congregationalists. The first competing sect to get a foothold in Winthrop was the Methodists. The great Methodist missionary, Jesse Lee, formed the group there just as he did in numerous other Maine towns. The Methodist system was to organize so-called classes that met in homes until several classes could form a church. The classes were grouped into what the Methodists called a circuit. Lee set up the Readfield circuit, which extended from Hallowell all the way to the Sandy River and of course included Winthrop, where five persons led by Nathaniel Bishop had the only Methodist class.

In 1811, the Methodists, then numbering more than 30, applied for a share in the town’s ministerial fund, raised annually by taxation, but they were turned down. However, the next year the voters did agree to relieve the Methodists from the ministerial tax.

In 1825 the Winthrop Methodists built their meetinghouse. By 1836 they had more than a hundred members. Unlike the Methodists, the Baptists did not get started in Winthrop Village, but rather in the east part of the town. As early as 1791, Elden Potter of Litchfield came to preach to the few Baptists in East Winthrop. It was however, a Baptist itinerant minister as famous as the Methodist Jesse Lee, who got the Baptists fully under way at Winthrop. That man was the Rev. Isaac Case, who after preaching as a traveling missionary allover Maine, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, had settled down to a resident pastorate at Readfield. He organized the Winthrop Baptist Church in 1807. That church applied for a share in the ministerial fund in 1809, but, like the Methodists, they too were refused. But they granted exception from the town’s church tax. On November 10, 1823, in East Winthrop, they dedicated their own meetinghouse. By 1824, under the dynamic pastorate of Phineas Boyd, the church had grown to 112 members.

The Kennebec Valley owes much to the Quakers, the Society of Friends, and that is true of Winthrop. A group of them had settled in the part of the town known as Winthrop Center. Just as the Methodists had Jesse Lee, and the Baptists had Isaac Case, so the Quakers had their own itinerant missionary, David Sands.

It was he who organized the Quakers in the whole Kennebec region. He came to Winthrop in 1777, and 15 years later a local group led by Stewart and David Foster organized the Society of Friends in Winthrop Center. In 1798 they built their own meetinghouse, the first church edifice in Winthrop to be heated.

Theological beliefs were more strenuously held in the early 19th century than they are today. It was doctrinal beliefs that split Protestant communities into different sects. Calvinism, with its doctrine of predestination, prevailed among both Congregationalists and Baptists, to a lesser degree among Methodists. Most of them were influenced by John Wesley’s preaching that any person could get salvation by confession and true repentance, but that after Adam’s fall most persons had been too depraved to accept God’s grace.

The Quakers introduced a very different idea – the inner light, by which a devout person could secure God’s guidance. Having no clergy, they also held that every man is a priest. The silence of a Quaker meeting, out of which came a united “sense of the meeting” was their customary procedure for community decisions.

At the most liberal extreme of the different sects, in the early 19th century, were the Universalists, who taught the eventual salvation of all mankind. They contended that a good and merciful God would not mark either for heaven or for hell any individual before he was born and regardless of his conduct during life. They admitted it might take thousands of years after death to save some wicked souls, but in the long run of the ages God would finally win them all. Salvation of all souls was their fundamental belief, and that is why to this day many a Universalist Church carries the name All Souls Church.

There were other differences among the denominations 150 years ago. Methodists and Baptists, confident in their belief in direct divine inspiration – namely, that God would directly tell every converted person what he ought to know, without any intervention of clergy – those sects had no use for the scholarly written sermons of the Congregationalist educated ministers. Their preachers were expected to speak extemporaneously, with God putting words into their mouths.

In this discussion of early churches in Winthrop, why have I said nothing about Episcopalians or Unitarians, and especially about Roman Catholics? The answer is that, in most of Maine communities in the early 1800’s there weren’t any persons of those sects, or if any, so few as to have no organization. It is true that before 1800, Episcopalians had organized in a few Maine settlements, especially at Gardiner, where they formed the town’s first church, and soon afterward they were strong at the Hook (Hallowell) and at the Fort (Augusta). That was because the leading Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase, such as Sylvester Gardiner and Benjamin Hallowell, were staunch supporters of the Church of England, which in Boston was already strong enough to give serious competition to the established Congregationalists. But elsewhere in Maine it was many years before the American Episcopal Church, not the Church of England, made any headway.

As for Catholics, in 1800 there was not a single organized church with a resident priest anywhere in Maine, though they did organize in Portland and a few other places before Maine became a state in 1820. Everywhere in Maine their numbers were small until the development of the cotton mills brought large numbers of French-Canadian Catholics to Maine cities. Their first real stronghold was on the upper St. John River, from Van Buren to the Allagash.

As for Unitarians in 1800, they hadn’t really got going, even in their later stronghold of Boston. It was the period between the Mexican War and the Civil War when they became prominent, winning over from the Congregationalists such intellectual leaders as Ralph Waldo Emerson.

When Catholicism did reach Winthrop it became such an important factor in community life, that a Winthrop historian has written: “By far most significant in the religious life of the town has been the rise of the St. Francis Xavier Parish. A mission in its early days, it was started by Rev. Charles Eagen, who came to town and held mass for three families in 1859. Their church building was erected in 1887, was disastrously burned, but a new church soon went up in its place. In 1922 a renovation doubled the size of the building, giving it a seating capacity of 500.”

This account has, in brief resume, given you the story of Winthrop churches. Next Sunday will mark a very important occasion for Little Talks on Common Things, the occurrence of its 1000th broadcast. Yes, on next Sunday, the 1000th different broadcast of this program will go on the air, and that does not count the summer repeats made in July and August.

But today, as we end this 999th broadcast, we must say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1974