Radio Script #1100

Little Talks on Common Things
November 14, 1976

This summer on August 14, the Winslow Historical Society opened its building, the old schoolhouse that stands opposite the Winslow Congregational Church on Lithgow Street. Organized only a few years ago, through the diligent work of Clyde Russell and other devoted citizens, the Society needed a place to display the numerous historical artifacts that were coming under its care. That the Society was able to obtain possession of the old schoolhouse solved the problem, at least temporarily. I say temporarily because Winslow is a town so long settled and so rich in history that the Society will soon outgrow this building.

The artifacts on display were well arranged with identifying cards, and they represented many phases of life in the town long ago. Since Winslow’s livelihood was for many years chiefly from lumbering and agriculture, most of the items deal with farming or with the household. A few pieces are indeed so old that the curator does not know what they were used for. That shouldn’t disturb the Society. At the Redington Museum in Waterville are at least a dozen unidentified objects.

In the special issue of the Morning Sentinel for July 10 there appeared a well written article headed “Winslow is Steeped in History.” The facts about the early days were taken largely from Kingsbury’s History of Kennebec County, which this program has often quoted. Printed with the article was a picture taken from a drawing of old Fort Halifax in its entirety, showing not only the single blockhouse that remains today, but the entire palisaded fort with its two large buildings and three blockhouses. At the top of the hill behind the fort are pictured two more blockhouses. Fort Halifax in the early 1760’s was indeed quite a place, the inner barracks housing many troops. But its life as a garrisoned fort was short. Long before the Revolution it had been abandoned, so that when Arnold’s army came up the Kennebec in 1775 the place was already in private hands. The big barracks building was long used as a tavern.

The Sentinel article says that the first town meeting was held in a meetinghouse on land on Lithgow Street given by Arthur Lithgow. That is a pardonable error, for indeed that meetinghouse, still standing, is very old, but it was not built until 25 years after that first town meeting. Winslow was incorporated as a Massachusetts town on April 26, 1771. Under a warrant directed to Ezekiel Pattee the male inhabitants of the town 21 years of age or older assembled for the first town meeting on May 23, 1771, at eight o’clock in the morning. The place of assembly was natural, the only large building in town, the barracks at Fort Halifax. Winslow’s first town meeting was held not in the meetinghouse, but in Fort Halifax. In 1794, the town of Winslow decided to erect a public meetinghouse for the purposes of religious worship, town meetings and other assemblies. For it, Arthur Lithgow gave the land on a lot across the Sebasticook from Fort Halifax.

By that time, the population at the west side of the Kennebec, in that part of Winslow that is now called Waterville, was increasing fast because of the building of the Ticonic Dam in 1792, and the people there disliked having to ford or ferry the river to town meetings in the proposed new meetinghouse. So the building was delayed until in 1796 the town voted to build two meetinghouses, one on the Lithgow lot on the east side and one on a lot given by Obadiah Williams on the west side. The only one of those two buildings still standing is now the Winslow Congregational Church on Lithgow Street. The one on the west side stood on the Waterville Common. When City Hall was built in 1902, the meeting house was moved back and turned around to face Front Street. It was later torn down to make room for the present parking lot behind city hall.

The automobile has been a mixed blessing. While it has promoted prosperity, it has caused the destruction of many historic buildings. It is regrettable that the Waterville-Winslow community does not retain both of its original meetinghouses.

In recent years the public has become more alert to historical preservation. There is now a movement in Winslow for the town to acquire six acres of land adjacent to the remaining Fort Halifax blockhouse so that the entire peninsular where the Sebasticook enters the Kennebec can be preserved as a public park.

The newspaper article also stated: “Settlers who came to the Winslow side proved their mettle by becoming the only settlers to meet the conditions put forth by the Kennebec Purchasers, grantors of the first deeds.”

That statement demands explanation. The land originally owned by the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase in 1749 extended 15 miles each side of the Kennebec from the Cobbosseecontee Stream in Gardiner to the Wesserunsett in Skowhegan. Naturally the proprietors tried to dispose of much of the land in large pieces, rather than directly grant deeds to single settlers. One of those larger scale grants was to six men who received the deed of 18, 200 acres on the east side of the river near Fort Halifax in 1761. A similar purchase was a tract bought by men who all lived in the vicinity of Sandwich, Mass., and their purchase became the town of Fairfield. To understand what happened we need to note that in both cases of Winslow and Fairfield, none of the purchasers then lived anywhere near the land they bought. In both cases they lived in Massachusetts between Boston and Plymouth. It is probable that, before either group bought their Maine land, some one of them had a look at it, and that at least one of them intended to settle. It is true that members of the Howard and Taylor families did settle in Winslow, but not the two members of those families who were the original proprietors. That fact is shown by the records of those six proprietors.

Their local agent, in charge of selling settlers’ lots and attending to all local affairs of the proprietary was Ezekiel Pattee. It was the devoted work of Pattee and a few others whom he brought in that did far more than the six proprietors themselves to persuade people to take up Winslow lots and to stay on them for the time required for settler deeds. A settler had to agree to clear for cultivation at least one acre of land in the first year, five acres by the end of three years, build a house 20 feet square, and produce two seasons of acceptable crops, and he must agree to stay on the place for at least five years.

It was Pattee’s job to see, on behalf of those six absentee proprietors, that those settler obligations were lived up to, and the records show that he had considerable trouble – so much, in fact, that when the proprietors would hold their annual meetings in Boston they often wondered what was going on. Correspondence between Boston and the Maine wilderness was difficult and unreliable, so the proprietors frequently sent someone down from Massachusetts to confer with Pattee, to see for themselves just how many settlers there were and how they were getting along.

The records abundantly confirm Ezekiel Pattee’s industry and integrity. Those visiting agents always found that Pattee was doing his best under very difficult conditions. Often, after one tough Maine winter, a settler would give up and leave. When someone was secured to take his place, there was the problem of who would pay for the improvements the leaving settler had made.

After five years a settler received a free deed to his hundred acre lot. The rapidly increasing population of Winslow shows that the majority of settlers did stay and gradually most made their land into prosperous farms. Others built mills and became merchants, and soon the town had physicians and lawyers. It is high tribute to those early settlers to record that by 1771, only ten years after the first big purchase, they were sufficiently numerous to be incorporated as a town.

The other big purchase to which I have referred was first called the Nye-Dimmock Survey. It was on the west side of the Kennebec, beginning at the north line of Waterville (which was then, of course, part of Winslow), and extending to the Skowhegan line, and six miles back from the river on its west side.

As almost everyone knows, the Nyes became a very prominent family, and they brought with them from Sandwich, Mass. a number of neighbors. Their first settlement was not at what is now Fairfield Village, but at Fairfield Center. In the settling of both Winslow and Fairfield, it is worth noting that many families had known each other before they took up their Maine lots.

But sale of large pieces was not the only way land in this region was first settled. An even more common method is shown by what happened in Waterville. The Winslow purchase of 1761 was all on the east side of the river and comprised only 18,000 acres, about half a township.

In 1762 the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase, who still owned the west side land, employed John McKechnie to survey into lots all the area from the north line of Vassalboro to the Wesserunsett Stream. He surveyed the territory into three tiers of great lots, each a mile on the river and three miles deep. Then he divided those great lots into settlers lots, 40 rods or 1/8 of a mile on the river and one mile deep. Every fourth lot was reserved as a proprietor’s lot, belonging at first to the entire proprietary, but later divided among the individual proprietors. So in each of the mile long great lots there was eight settlers’ lots, two of them owned by proprietors. The other six lots in each great lot was sold either directly to settlers or to speculators who rented them to folks who did settle. Those lots that are now within Waterville and faced directly on the Kennebec were numbered 82 to 116 between the Sidney and Fairfield lines. Owners and occupants of those lots who got them directly from the Plymouth Co. included James Crommett, Peleteah Soule, Daniel Webb, Isaac Wing, Asa Redington, Reuben Kidder, John Cool and Obadiah Williams.

Especially interesting is the history of Lot 105, one of the proprietor’s lots. It was first assigned to James Pitts, one of the Boston Proprietors of the Plymouth Co., more correctly entitled the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase. He never occupied it, but sold it to Samuel Temple, whose son Isaac Temple lived on and developed the property. Its forty rods on the Kennebec started just above Ticonic Falls and went up as far as the present Appleton Street. Across it was put in one of Waterville’s earliest streets, that part of Temple Street that still exists. Before Timothy Boutelle came to Waterville in 1804, some of the lots along Main Street had been sold and part of it had been taken by the town for the cemetery that was laid out where is now Monument Park.

Boutelle bought what was left of the big lot, extending from the Kennebec a mile back to the First Rangeway. He gave two pieces of it for institutional use – one to the First Baptist Church for its still standing meetinghouse, the other to the Trustees of Waterville College to put up an academy building, the school that later became Coburn.

Year: 1976