Radio Script #1096

Little Talks on Common Things
October 17, 1976

As we near the end of the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution, it is well to note a bit about Maine’s part in that war for independence.

We must admit that the war had very little contemporary effect on the Kennebec Valley. The settlements from Old Pownalboro at the head of Merrymeeting Bay to Fort Halifax at Winslow were too new and too small to be much influenced by a war so far away.

It is true that three of the river towns – Hallowell, Vassalboro and Winslow – had been able to secure incorporation by the Massachusetts government in 1771, four years before the shots were fired at Lexington and Concord.

A few men did make their way into the Revolutionary army from the Kennebec towns, but we are sure of only one man who went from what is now Waterville. He lived on the west side of the river in what was then Winslow, because the west side did not become the separate town of Waterville until 1802. He was John Cool, who gave his name to our present Cool Street. He was the only man to own two of the big lots surveyed in 1762 by John McKechnie. Cool received title to Lots 101 and 102, just below the lots taken by McKechnie himself and Obadiah Williams, the man who gave the town the land where are now the Common and City Hall. On one of his lots, Cool developed a prosperous farm and he became a citizen of some means. However, to his dying day John Cool could neither read nor write. He was still living in 1837, when the federal government distributed the surplus money in the national treasury to the states, and Maine permitted its towns to parcel their share out to all inhabitants over 4 years of age at two dollars a head. Receipts for that distribution in Waterville are still preserved, and one of them is marked by a cross, after which is written “John Cool, his mark.”

But Cool has the distinction, so far as I have been able to learn, of being the only man in this immediate vicinity to enlist in the Revolution at the time when he lived here. After the close of the war, a number of veterans of the Revolution came to Winslow and Waterville. Many died here and were buried in local cemeteries. One of the most prominent of those veterans was Asa Redington, whose family has been well known in Waterville for more than 150 years. Still remembered is the Redington furniture store on Silver Street, and still with us are three reminders of the family – the Redington Funeral Home, Redington Street, and the Redington Museum of the Waterville Historical Society.

Most enlistments in the Revolutionary army were short, many not more than three months, though of course numerous men made more than one reenlistment. Asa Redington established the enviable record of five years’ continuous service in the patriot cause. Born in Boxford, Mass., Asa was living with an uncle in New Hampshire when he offered his services to the Continental Army in a New Hampshire regiment. He had the honor of being a member of George Washington’s personal bodyguard at Valley Forge.

In 1784, Redington came to Vassalboro and went to work for an early settler of that town, Nehemiah Getchell, near the river settlement that came to be called Getchell’s Corner. He married Getchell’s daughter. In partnership with his father-in-law, Redington built the first dam on the Kennebec at Ticonic Falls, in 1792, thus harnessing the big river to turn the wheels of gristmills, sawmills, and other factories. Previously mills had to be built on the smaller streams – on the east side along the Outlet Stream that empties China Lake into the Sebasticook on the west side along the Messalonskee, where indeed John McKechnie put up Waterville’s first mill in 1777, on the spot where now stands the pumping station of the Kennebec Water District.

Below the foot of Ticonic Falls, Redington erected his own mill, as well as a shipyard from which he launched several good-sized vessels. Nearby he built his house, which for many years was the largest in town. He engaged in lumbering on a large scale, and built several more sawmills.

In 1814, Asa Redington built for his son, William, a house on Silver Street. It is that building that is now the museum of the Waterville Historical Society. Asa Redington died in 1845, at the age of 83. By that time, the cemetery opened on Elm Street in 1810 was being rapidly filled. That cemetery occupied the site on Elm and Park Streets that is now Monument Park. Only five years after Redington was buried there the town voted to cease all burials in that cemetery and to open a new one on Grove Street. After the first burial in what came to be known as Pine Grove Cemetery in 1851, bodies in the Elm Street cemetery were gradually removed to the new, larger and finer burying ground in the town’s south end. But the body of Redington was not among those taken to the new cemetery. Somewhat like Shakespeare, 200 years earlier, Asa Redington is said to have laid a curse on anyone who disturbed his bones. So it is that the visitor to Pine Grove Cemetery today sees there a towering granite momument to Asa Redington. But the inscription does not say ”Here lies” it says “In memory of,” for Asa’s bones still lie somewhere in Monument Park.

And that, briefly, is something about Waterville’s most renowned Revolutionary soldier, Asa Redington. Of course he was not alone among the veterans who made their homes in Waterville and Winslow after the war. Others were Elnathan Bangs, grandfather of Waterville’s only Civil War general, Isaac Bangs; Thomas Bates, who settled at Ten Lots; Manoah Crowell, early settler of Oakland; John Davis, drum-major at the Battle of Monmouth; Oliver Downs, veteran of Ticonderoga and Saratoga. Sampson Freeman, a negro who as a free man had fought in the Continental Army, came to Waterville and lived on the second rangeway farm later owned by Colby Blaisdell. Also were Seth Getchell, whose granddaughter Julia Stackpole conducted a well-known private school on Waterville’s School Street; and Salathiel Penney, the first of the many citizens of that name on Penney Hill. The original Penney farm is now the site of the physicians’ complex on Kennedy Drive.

The community was not entirely unaware of the Revolution, quite apart from the enlistment of John Cool. After 1773, every Massachusetts town had a so-called Committee of Correspondence, and Winslow was no exception. But in the 1770s there was no mail service to the Kennebec Valley. Only the larger boats that reached Hallowell brought any news from outside, and it took even longer for news to reach Winslow.

The town, however, did get a taste of hostilities in September 1775, five months after the fight at Concord Bridge. The event that reached Waterville was the passage up the Kennebec of Benedict Arnold’s army of 1,100 men, on their famous but ill-fated March to Quebec. At least one man who lived on the Waterville side of the river at Ticonic Falls had a part in this. John McKechnie had some medical skill, and at Fort Halifax, he treated several of Arnold’s sick soldiers. Nehemiah Getchell of Vassalboro, to whom we have already referred, served as one of Arnold’s advanced scouts. Furthermore, Ticonic Falls presented the first obstacle to Arnold’s passage, and his soldiers got their first of many arduous tests when they carried the heavy bateaux around those falls.

Naturally, Maine towns nearer Boston especially those on the coast played a larger part in the Revolution than did towns on the Kennebec. As early as 1770, a company of militia had been organized in Gorham, 16 miles from Portland. When news came of the fighting at Concord, and that news did reach Portland in a few days, Col. Edmund Phinney, commander of the Gorham militia, immediately rushed his men into Portland, then called Falmouth, and the next day started for Cambridge. They got as far as Wells, when the Mass. government ordered them to return to protect Falmouth and its surrounding towns.

In Falmouth itself, in January 1773, the town meeting passed the following resolution: “Through the channel of corruption in the late ministry of Great Britain, Parliament has passed several acts burdening the American people with unconstitutional taxes. Parliament has no more right to take money from us without our consent than they have to take it from the inhabitants of France and Spain. It is clearly the opinion of this town that the rights of the colonists are fairly and justly stated by the inhabitants of Boston in their printed pamphlets distributed to the several towns.

“Our thanks are given to the town of Boston for their vigilance and patriotic zeal shown in the defense of the British Constitution and charter rights. It is better to risk our lives and fortunes in defense of our rights, civil and religious, than to die piecemeal in slavery.”

In December 1775, Col. Phinney did lead a whole regiment on to Cambridge. It was known as the 18th Continental Regiment,and was mustered into Washington’s army on January 1, 1776.

Meanwhile in Maine, the Revolution saw the burning of Falmouth by the notorious naval Capt. Mowatt on October 18, 1775. Because the inhabitants of what is now Portland refused to give up certain arms, Mowatt turned his fleet’s guns on the town, continuing the bombardment for eight hours. Churches, stores, warehouses, and 130 dwellings were destroyed. People fled to Windham and Gorham, to Scarborough and Saco, and even to Brunswick.

The selectmen, after Mowatt’s departure, issued a statement saying, “Our hearts ache for the misery of our people. We were impoverished even before this catastrophe by the decay of navigation and trade. We are utterly dependent on aid from larger towns remote from us, and it must come speedily.”

Though aid came slowly, it did come in some measure, Falmouth rose from its ashes, many families returned, and not again during the entire Revolution was it attacked.

Well, this has been a somewhat rambling account of a few incidents that affected Maine in the Revolution.

Year: 1976