Radio Script #1073

Little Talks on Common Things

January 18, 1976

Last week we told the story of the Kennebec Proprietors up to the founding of their first Kennebec town, Pownalboro. What happened to that land company after they set up their first town by bringing German immigrants to Pownalboro?

They were determined that their new town should be a focal point to attract settlers on lands farther up the river. Having persuaded the Massachusetts government to agree to the building and manning of Fort Western and Fort Halifax, their next step was to encourage individual and group settlements by alternative offers. To individuals they offered 100 acres of land, a warranty deed to be given the settler after he hadlived on the place for seven years, within the first three of which he must build a house, 20 by 18 feet, and clear at least five acres of land fit for tillage, and harvest at least two crops. In addition, he must agree to work six days of each year on the public lots, those reserved for the minister, the school, and for other governmental purposes, and work likewise six days each year building and maintaining whatever roads the proprietors deeded must be within the granted territory.

The proprietors practice of grants of larger areas to enterprising groups is typified by the town of Winslow. To six men living in or near Plymouth, Mass., the company granted 18,200 acres of land on the east side of the Kennebec near Fort Halifax. It is worth noting who those six men were. Gamaliel Bradford of Duxborough was a descendant of Willian Bradford who had come in the Mayflower and was the Plymouth Colony’s first governor. John Winslow of Marshfield was related to the John Winslow who had been one of the four Kennebec purchasers of 1661, exactly a century earlier. David Howard was the pioneer ancestor of Winslow’s important family of Howards. James Warren of Plymouth, James Otis of Barnstable and William Taylor completed the sextet. Only Howard and Taylor ever took residence on the granted land. Of course the grant was given with the stipulation that the partners secure at least 50 settlers within five years. They did it easily.

To secure increased importance for their established town, the proprietors fostered what at first seemed a hopeless plan to set up a new county in the Kennebec area. In 1760, they won that battle, despite strong Boston opposition and Lincoln County was established. At that time it included all of Maine east of the Androscoggin, most of it complete wilderness – of course those politically influential proprietors saw to it that their town of Pownalborough was made the county seat, and they promptly erected the handsome three-story courthouse which carefully renovated, stands there today.

Meanwhile individual proprietors were getting busy. The largest shareholder was Dr. Sylvester Gardiner, and he was one of the few who personally came to his Kennebec lands and promoted, first hand, their development. To him the City of Gardiner owes its origin and much of its business success. On the Cobbossee Stream, Dr. Gardiner built several mills. He built numerous houses for what the south would have called tenant farmers, except that Gardiner’s intention was that the tenants should eventually own their farms. He set up stores to handle merchandise from Boston. He built ships for both river and coastal traffic. And with it all he kept buying more land. As minor, fractional shareholders came to need money or for any other reason, wanted to dispose of their Kennebec property, they were likely to find Dr. Gardiner ready to buy, especially if he thought the price was low enough. Before the revolution, Sylvester Gardiner had become the greatest landholder on the Kennebec, almost equivalent to the Schuyler patroons of the Upper Hudson.

Although Florenius and William Vassall never saw their Kennebec lands, they did promote settlement, and appropriately the town of Vassalboro was named for them.

Often grants made by the Company to individual settlers were of what was called undivided land, that is, land held in common by the company. But there was also divided land, tracts assigned directly to members of the Company. For instance, James Pitts, an original proprietor, was the first owner of Lot 105 in Waterville, the lot later owned and developed by Timothy Boutelle, to make it the heart of Waterville’s business section. Many such lots were never lived on by the proprietary owners, but in any event they became sources of profit to those who shared in the proprietary division. But, during the period just before the Revolution, the assigned or divided lots were relatively few, and any prospective settler had choice over a very large area for a site on which to build.

It was the American Revolution that smashed the well laid plans for spectacular success for the Kennebec Proprietors. As early as 1773 political factions had begun to split the Company. Though they won some of their legal battles concerning boundaries, they lost others, and the time came when it seemed useless to pursue their claims before the Lords of Trade on the royal courts in England. It was no time for the independent-minded legislature in Boston to be petitioning the King about lands in Maine.

Dr. Gardiner, a Loyalist persistently on the side of England during the Revolution, would have carried on the litigation, but the Company had in its ranks such influential Whigs as the two Bowdoins, James Pitts and John Howard. Benjamin Hallowell and Florentius Vassall sided with Gardiner. When the Revolution came, all three were forced to flee the country and take refuge either in Canada or across the sea in England. After the war, Dr. Gardiner did return to this country, but not back to Maine. He spent his last days in Rhode Island. The family eventually got back most of the property that the Continental Congress had confiscated when it declared Gardiner a public enemy, but it took a long time to secure that restoration. Dr. Gardiner did not live to see its final completion by his grandson and principal heir, Robert Hallowell Gardiner.

Even before the Declaration of Independence, the Kennebec Proprietors were finding it hard to control their settlers. The spirit of independence was abroad in the land. As one by one, the Kennebec towns were incorporated, the local people used the town meeting to take control of their affairs. The people, not the Company, began to set the church rates, decide where roads would be built, and manage their own schools.

What made an even bigger problem for the Proprietors was that the town meetings insisted on levying local taxes based on land ownership, and often the land in any town was largely absentee owned, usually by one of the Proprietors himself. As the independence movement grew, the Mass. Legislature encouraged each town to appoint a Committee of Correspondence, sometimes also called Committee of Safety, to to correspond with other Mass. towns on common defense., That policy added to the strong demand for freedom from Company control.

Another cause of trouble was the King’s Broad Arrow. Trees suitable for masts in the British navy and commercial marine were so scarce in England that long before 1775, the New England colonies had become the chief source of these masts. Through the woods along the coast and up the rivers went the King’s commissioners placing the mark of the broad arrow on the best pines. If a community could control its taxes, why shouldn’t it protect the owners of its land? The very thought that every pine tree belonged to the King, not to the settlers, became intolerable. The great mast controversy was indeed one of the causes of the Revolution.

The war for independence also gave the settlers a chance to even old scores with the Tory proprietors like Gardiner and Hallowell. They did not hesitate, through the town meeting elected assessors to place high values on proprietary lands, thus hitting the small shareholders so hard that many of them sold out at almost give-away prices. Those who accepted the mounting assessments did so only in the hope that sales values would eventually be higher. In some cases the settlers became so intent on exploiting the proprietary lands that they neglected to grow crops and brought supplies from Boston at exorbitant prices. So, in the long run, many a town lost more than it gained in trying to beat the proprietors. In fact, there was real hardship in the early 1760’s. For instance, when winter came in 1761, settlers in Pittston suffered terribly. A few actually starved – many went hungry. Misery and famine stalked the whole Kennebec in that desperate year.

Somehow the Company struggled on between 1775 and the end of the Revolution, but they accomplished little. Three of the leading shareholders – Gardiner, Hallowell and Vassal – were in exile, as were many lesser lights. The demands of the war made it almost impossible for the remaining patriot proprietors to get settlers. For several years they held no proprietary meeting at all.

When they were at last able to reassemble in 1783, they could forsee the inevitable dissolution of their once confidently predicted empire. Now led by the patriot proprietors, the Company tried hard to resume control over the settlements. But it was too late. The national independence won by the Revolution had sifted down to local communities. They would no longer stand for governmental control by absentee landlords.

Veterans of the Revolution army played considerable part in the movement for increased local control. As the war ended, and even before the new state of Mass. offered veterans land grants, they began to pour into the Kennebec region. Some of them, like Obadiah Williams, received or, at least, manipulated large grants. Williams was at first granted a large acreage that included what are now the towns of Mount Vernon and Vienna, acreage that he later exchanged for land in Waterville. He became Waterville’s largest landowner in the 1790’s. More often, however, the veteran was content with the usual hundred acre lot. That would have given the Kennebec Proprietors little trouble if the veterans had dealt with the Company. But having won independence for the nation, they were determined to be independent settlers. So they simply came in and took over a tract of land, cleared the fields, built a cabin, and paid no attention to the proprietors rights. In a word, they were -squatters – the kind of people that later caused the so-called Malta War against the claims of Robert Hallowell Gardiner in Windsor.

In 1777, the proprietors made grants that comprised the later towns of l.fuitefield and Old Canaan. The latter was the name for the tract that included what is now the present town of Skowhegan, and parts of Norridgewock, Madison, Canaan and Cornville.

On June 22, 1816, the company known as The Kennebec Proprietors was officially dissolved, and next week we shall tell you about some of the men who made up the Company.

Year: 1976