Radio Script #1112

Little Talks on Common Things
February 6, 1977

The Kennebec Valley owes much to the Gardiner family whose name is perpetuated in the City of Gardiner. In our own time Tudor Gardiner served as Governor of Maine. When Colby College was founded in 1813, the land on which the first college buildings were built was owned not by local interests in Waterville, but by Robert Hallowell Gardiner, who also at that time owned more than 20,000 acres in the Kennebec Valley.

Founder of the Maine family of Gardiners was Dr. Sylvester Gardiner of colonial and revolutionary times. Born in England, he had come to Boston as a young man, where he not only practiced medicine, but set up a wholesale business in medicines and drugs imported from Europe. His distribution of those medical supplies to retailers all over the northern colonies made him a wealthy man, and he early invested his earnings in real estate, with special attention to the uninhabited lands of Massachusetts’ District of Maine.

The general history of Kennebec land titles has often been told on this program, but in order to understand Sylvester Gardiner’s part in those titles, it may be well to tell the story briefly again.

Soon after their settlement at Plymouth, the Pilgrims turned to trade in Indian furs as the best way of paying off their debt to the British merchants who had loaned them the money to finance the Mayflower venture. They soon learned that Indians on the Kennebec were better prospects for supplies than were those in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts. So, by sending representatives to England, they managed to secure from the Crown in 1629 what became known as the Kennebec Grant. It included all land 15 miles on each side of the Kennebec River from the head of Merrymeeting say to Caratunk Falls above Skowhegan, and gave the Plymouth Colony exclusive rights to trade with the Indians in that region.

The colony established a trading post at what is now Augusta, and to it both John Alden and Miles Standish made occasional trips. For about ten years the Indian fur trade was so successful that the Plymouth colony paid off its British debt. But, when beaver – the chief trading fur – became scarce, the post was abandoned. By 1660, the Plymouth settlers had little interest in the Kennebec. So in 1661 they were glad to accept 460 pounds sterling in payment for that vast tract of land. The purchasers were four merchants of Boston. Their intent to secure settlers came to naught, largely because of the repeated Indian uprisings that began with King Philip’s War in 1675. By 1720, there was not a single settler on the Kennebec above the small group near the mouth of the river, at Arrowsic, Phippsburg and Georgetown, where strong garrison houses had withstood the Indian attacks.

In 1724 the Battle of Lovewell’s Pond on the Saco and the dispersal of the tribe with Fr. Rasle at Norridgewock, had so scattered the Maine Indians that few remained, and those few were peaceful. However a few minor raids persisted, and the menace of the French from Canada, aided by Indian allies continued to be a threat to Maine settlements.

By 1750, however, peace had so long continued that Dr. Sylvester Gardiner persuaded a number of associates to purchase the Kennebec lands from the heirs of the four men who had bought them in 1661. Gardiner was himself one of the heirs, having married into one of the families. He and his associates rounded up enough other descendants to obtain sufficient rights to enable them to secure from the Mass. General Court a charter granting them ownership under the title of “Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase.” As time went on they were able to ascertain and buy most of the remaining rights. But those heirs altogether were so many that the purchase was divided into 192 parts, each representing 1/192 of the entire territory. What the company called shares, however, were 24 in number, each share including 8/192. Dr. Sylvester Gardiner originally owned two whole shares, or 1/12 of the whole acreage, and he eventually bought from other proprietors enough to make his eventual ownership 1/6 of the whole. When the lands were surveyed, portions were left for sale by the proprietary, but other portions were assigned in large lots to individual proprietors. Sylvester Gardiner got huge acreage in what are now Gardiner, Randolph, Pittston and Dresden as his own property.

Gardiner from the beginning was moderator of the proprietors’ meetings, always held in Boston, and from 1753 until the Revolution he devised all the company’s major plans and personally directed them. But he never took residence on the lands. He remained as physician and head of his drug importing business in Boston. However, he did frequently visit the growing settlements on his Maine property, and his descendants became permanent settlers there.

Determined to start a settlement, Gardiner did so by placing a few families at Pownalborough now Dresden, on the east bank of the Kennebec. Failing to interest enough colonial families to move from the safety of places nearer Boston to brave the dangers of the Maine wilderness, the company turned to possibilities across the Atlantic. Through agents they were able, in 1751, to bring to Boston several families of Germans. If those families would settle at Pownalborough, the Company would give to each settler a clear title deed to 100 acres if he stayed in his plot for three years and meanwhile cleared five acres and built a house 20 by 18 feet. The settlement so prospered that in 1761 it became the county seat of the new county of Lincoln. The court house built to accommodate sessions of the county court still stands, well restored, there in Dresden, close to the Kennebec, a national historic site and one of the oldest still standing colonial courthouses in the nation.

By 1753 townships had been granted to two other proprietors, Florentius Vassall and James Otis, but neither had attracted many settlers, although Vassal’s lands would eventually become the prosperous town of Vassalboro. But Sylvester Gardiner had better, fortune with his lands, probably because he was more enterprising and willing to take greater financial risks.

In 1754 Sylvester Gardiner received from the company a grant of the falls and land forming the present City of Gardiner. He got it not as a gift, but as only a part of what he was entitled to in any future division of the 24 shares. In a few years he had built two sawmills, a gristmill, a potash kiln, wharf, stores, and dwelling houses, and had cleared an extensive farm, all at the place he named Gardinerstown, the site of the future city of Gardiner. He also cleared land and built houses on Swan Island down the river near Richmond, and still more clearings and structures at Dresden and Pittston, and as far up the river as Winslow. To all those places he transported settlers and furnished them with initial supplies at his own expense. His gristmill at Gardinerstown served a wide area. Until John McKechnie put up his mill on the Messalonskee at Waterville in 1775, settlers as far up the river as Skowhegan had to carry their corn to Gardiner to be ground.

Within the limits of what is now Gardiner, Dr. Sylvester Gardiner owned 15,000 acres, and his total holdings on the Kennebec at the outbreak of the Revolution exceeded 100,000 acres.

Like several others of the Kennebec Proprietors, including the Vassals, Sylvester Gardiner was opposed to the uprising and revolt that culminated in the American Revolution. He was considered indeed to be a leading and very influential Tory. When the British army evacuated Boston in the spring of 1776, Gardiner was among the Tories who left with the army. He fled to Halifax and later to England. His property was confiscated, and all the tangible goods that could be found were sold at auction. Included in the seizure were his Kennebec lands, but on protest from members of the family who supported the Revolution, including his oldest son John Gardiner, the Attorney General of Massachusetts held that the doctor had been illegally prosecuted, and he ordered new seizure proceedings.

Before those could be concluded, peace was declared. After long legal proceedings his heirs received most of his Maine real estate. The Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolution included terms by which the congress of the new nation agreed to restore to former Tories their confiscated property, and in 1784 Congress passed such an act.

It was Sylvester Gardiner’s son William who, in his father’s lifetime, settled at Gardinerstown and became a prominent citizen of the Kennebec Valley. In fact three families, the Gardiners, the Hallowells, and the Vaughans, dominated business in the valley for many years. Besides property in Gardinerstown, William Gardiner owned 16,000 acres in Pittston.

Because of differences about the Revolution with his sons, although he did not leave them by any means penniless, Sylvester Gardiner’s principal heir was his grandson, Robert Hallowell. Gardiner’s daughter had married Benjamin Hallowell who, though younger than Dr. Gardiner, was one of the Kennebec proprietors. Their son Robert was his grandfather’s favorite descendant. The greater part of his extensive Maine property was left to that grandson on condition that the young man change his name to Robert Hallowell Gardiner. So extensive was that heir’s land holdings at the turn of the century after the Revolution that he was called the Great Patroon of the Kennebec, as the Livingstons and the Van Rensselaers were known as the patroons of the Hudson. As late as 1851, the Gardiner tax list had Robert Gardiner down for a tax of $1,157, while his cousin John D. Gardiner paid only $16.

The prominence of the Gardiners during the 19th century is explained largely by the fact that Robert Hallowell Gardiner was the father of nine children, though only three of them were sons. It was one of those sons, John William Tudor Gardiner, who introduced the name Tudor into the Gardiner line. The other sons were Robert Hallowell Gardiner, Jr., and Rev. Frederick Gardiner, an Episcopal clergyman.

Except for the venturesomeness and the enterprise of Dr. Sylvester Gardiner, the development of the Kennebec Valley would have been much longer delayed.

Year: 1977