Radio Script #1066

Little Talks on Common Script #1066
November 30, 1975

During the past year, Mr. and Mrs. James Boyle of Waterville have given to the Waterville Historical Society a number of books, pamphlets, and manuscripts of historical importance. These are now carefully preserved in the Society’s library at the Redington Museum.

Jim Boyle, a retired Waterville attorney, is well known, not only throughout Maine, but allover the nation, for his long and brilliant terms of the office of Adjutant General of the American Legion of Maine. In that capacity, Jim attended many national conventions and visited Legion posts all over the country. By personal visits, he became familiar with American military cemeteries in France and Belgium, and with the great battlefields of World War I, on some of which he himself had seen action.

What is perhaps not so well known to our listeners is that Mrs. Boyle is also a talented person. Among the manuscripts of the Boyle papers is an address made by Mrs. Boyle to the Silence Howard Hayden Chapter of the DAR in 1935. It was on the subject of old-time Kennebec taverns, and reveals exhaustive research by Mrs. Boyle.

Taverns were erected to accommodate travelers. The Bible gives us plenty of evidence of that fact. Every Christmas we are reminded that in Bethlehem, Joseph and Mary found no room in the inn. Mrs. Boyle naturally points out that in Maine the early inns were located at important points of travel. Although Indian footpaths were numerous in our part of Maine, long-distance travel by Indians as well as Whites was chiefly by water. Mrs. Boyle says, “In that 17th century there were established water routes between Waterville, Augusta and Portland via the Kennebec River and Casco Bay. There still exists the water route used by the Indians between the Kennebec and the Penobscot, the route that made use of the Sebasticook River.”

Early taverns were numerous in Hallowell and Augusta. The latter was the head of navigation on the Kennebec. The former was, at the beginning of the 19th century, Maine’s largest inland port. In 1763, twelve years before the start of the Revolution, Josiah French built a log tavern in Augusta, at what is now the corner of Grove and Green streets, not far from the present site of the Green Street Methodist Church.

When Maine became a separate state in 1820, there were more than 500 taverns in the new state, and of the listed mail routes, more than a dozen had their starting point at Augusta. One of those stage lines was from Augusta to Waterville via Sidney. In 1935, Mrs. Boyle noted that the building that housed one ancient Augusta tavern was still standing. In its innkeeping days, it was known as Piper’s Tavern, a brick structure on Upper Water Street. It was a traveler’s inn as early as 1812.

The stage line from Augusta to Waterville through Sidney did not end at Waterville. It went on to Solon, through Skowhegan, Norridgewock, and Anson. The old road from Augusta to Norridgewock passed through Belgrade, Smithfield and Mercer. There were two routes from Hallowell to Portland. One, called the upper road, went through Winthrop, Greene, Lewiston and Gray. The lower road was via Brunswick, Freeport and Yarmouth. That was, in fact, long known as the Boston Post Road, because the traveller, bound by stage from Augusta or Hallowell to Boston, would continue on from Portland via Saco, Wells, York and Portsmouth.

Another well-travelled route was from Hallowell to Bangor via Vassalboro, China, Albion, Unity, Troy and Dixmont. The first tavern in Hallowell was kept by Deacon Pease Clark, who arrived there from Attleboro, Mass. in 1762, and built a two-story frame house in which he accommodated travelers. It became a stopping place for many settlers coming into the Kennebec area in response to inducements of the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase.

It was at the tavern of Eunice Hallowell, a building called in the old records “a house of entertainment” that a number of gentlemen of Hallowell assembled to celebrate ratification of the U. S. Constitution in 1788. That was a long time before Maine prohibition, and we can well imagine that those gentlemen had a liquid celebration in the lady’s tavern.

When Talleyrand, the famous French statesman known as the maker and breaker of kings, visited Maine in 1826, he was a guest at the Hallowell inn kept by Billy Pitt.

Many Waterville people today remember well the delicious dinners served at Hallowell’s Worster House. What a grand Sunday dinner one used to get there 30 to 40 years ago for one dollar! The building in which we ate those memorable meals is itself very old. Built in 1832, throughout its venerable years that inn welcomed many distinguished guests. Among them were Daniel Webster, President Franklin Pierce, and the great New England authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Mrs. Boyle tells us that the little village of Manchester had three taverns, the oldest of which was the Mansion House. She says the Manchester inns were patronized chiefly by the shingle weavers. Winthrop was one of four towns incorporated on the same day in 1771. The others were Hallowell, Vassalboro, and Winslow. Winthrop held its first town meeting in the tavern of Squire Bishop. In 1935, when Mrs. Boyle wrote her paper, the Winthrop House, built in 1802, though afterwards much enlarged, was still doing business accommodating travelers. Even East Winthrop had its tavern, opened by Benjamin Packard in 1821. As early as 1827 there was hourly stage service between Hallowell and Augusta, and out of Hallowell went a daily stage to Portland, one three times a week to Winthrop, one every day to Bangor, another three times a week to Waterville, and one twice a week to Farmington. At the end of the first quarter of the 19th Century, there was a lot of stage travel in Maine, and those passengers had to have places to get meals in route, and frequently also to stay overnight.

The arrival of the mail stage at any point was an important event, and often every villager who could snatch a few minutes from work came to the tavern where the stage stopped and often changed horses. The excuse, of course, was to get the mail. But they couldn’t get that until it was taken to the post office, sorted, and made ready for delivery. But certainly in the old days everybody had to go to the P.O. to get his mail. House-to-house delivery was then unheard of.

Mrs. Boyle explains that letter postage was rated by the number of sheets of paper and the distance the letter was carried. If it went more than a hundred miles, the postage was 25 cents in 1830. The lowest postage, to the nearest office was 6 cents. Mrs. Boyle might well have added that postage was then paid by the receiver, not the sender of mail. Prepaid postage did not come until the introduction of postage stamps in 1847.

On this program I once referred to an amusing incident connected with the receiver’s payment of postage. In 1835, a woman in Anson paid the postage of 25 cents on a letter from her husband on a business venture in New Orleans. He told at length about a festival we now know as the Mardi Gras, and what a gay time he had at the major festival ball. It cost that good lady up in Anson a quarter to learn what a jolly time her husband was having with the fashionable girls of New Orleans.

One of the best known of Kennebec taverns was that of Benjamin Brown in the settlement known as Riverside in Vassalboro. High on the east bank of the Kennebec at Brown’s Corner, it was a stage stop for change of horses and refreshment of passengers for many years. Brown became renowned as the founder of Maine’s insane hospital at Augusta. Mrs. Boyle said of the old Brown Tavern in 1935: “It has today much of the charm and hospitality of yesteryear. The front door opens into a small hallway, and the staircase is also of abbreviated design. The bedrooms are large and airy. The mammoth hand-hewn timbers and studding are, in many places still held together by wooden pegs. Among the rooms were the bar, the kitchen and the milkroom. ”

In Albion, the first tavern was operated by Nathan Haywood in 1805. As we would expect, Mrs. Boyle mentions the Reed Tavern in Benton. She said that the bar and its equipment were still in existence in 1935. Now forty years have passed since Mrs. Boyle delivered her paper to the DAR, and the present owners of the old Reed Tavern, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Dyer, have carefully preserved many of the features of the old Tavern days including the imported French wallpaper in one room. The collection of bottles still kept at the Reed Tavern bar is impressive – but alas, they are all empty.

A well known family name in Clinton is that of Hunter. In fact, the village was first called Hunter’s Mills. In 1834, Alfred Hunter kept a tavern there. Sidney had a very early inn, opened on the River Road by David Smiley in 1792.

Oakland had several early taverns: Major Bull’s on Summer Street, the Montgomery House on the Belgrade Road, and Hubbards in the heart of the village. Later there was the West Waterville House, whose ancient sign is now preserved at the Redington Museum.

The Danforth House in Norridgewock was one of the largest Kennebec inns at a time when Norridgewock was not only a thriving trading center, but also the county seat of Somerset County with its busy courthouse. The inn had more than 30 rooms for travellers, most of them filled by lawyers and witnesses when court was in session, and its best room was always reserved for the judge. Its twelve fireplaces used up 70 cords of wood a year.

Winslow’s first innkeeper was Ezekiel Pattee. When Arnold made his expedition to Quebec in 1775, young Aaron Burr was Pattee’s guest. Evidence is vague about the Waterville inns before 1820. But soon after that date, a Mr. Robbins was keeping one on Silver Street. Seven years later there were three taverns in Waterville: one on Main Street opposite Silver, which soon afterward became the Williams House; a second on Silver Street; and a third near the corner of Silver and Main. In 1837, Deacon Follansbee opened a temperance hotel in the old farm house of James Wood, which stood on the site where a few years later was built Waterville’s renowned, Elmwood Hotel.

We are grateful to Mrs. Boyle for placing her valuable manuscript in the custody of the Waterville Historical Society.

Year: 1975