Radio Script #1135

Little Talks on Common Things
October 16, 1977

From its beginning this program has given attention to new books about Maine’s past as they came from the press. Such a book, published this summer is Josiah Volunteered, by Arnold Sturtevant of the Livermore Falls Trust Company. It is a book principally about Arnold’s great-grandfather, a veteran of the Civil War, but it contains also important information about other members of a distinguished Maine family and the national events in which they were involved.

Although the editor’s comments and explanations make the book intelligible to a reader not close to the family, it is the excerpts from diaries, letters, documents and newspaper clippings, patiently collected and chronologically arranged by Mr. Sturtevant that makes the book historically significant.

The author modestly states that Josiah and Helen Sturtevant were very ordinary Maine people of no distinction. This is an understatement. They were uniquely cultured persons for their time and place, mid-nineteenth century in rural Maine. Both had an impressive command of the English language and a gift at versification, which was passed on to their children, and a love of good literature. It was their habit to commit to writing, especially in family letters, not only details of family life, but also their thoughts on larger subjects, that makes this book a valuable addition to Maine history.

As the author notes, the Sturtevants were not a thro~~alo?ay family. They saved and treasured the old letters. Otherwise the present book could not have been published.

I have personally known three generations of this Sturtevant family. Arnold’s grandfather, Chester Sturtevant, graduated from Colby in 1892. I came to know him best in the 1930’s when he was a Colby trustee and I was Dean of Men at the college. On one occasion, I was a guest in his Livermore Falls home, when he took time from his pressing duties at the bank to go with me to several homes in the surrounding area to interview prospective Colby students and their families.

Chester Sturtevant’s son, Arnold’s father, was a close friend and associate of mine in Colby affairs. Graduating from Colby in 1921, Reginald Sturtevant, whom we all called “Stibe” succeeded his father as head of the Livermore Falls Trust Co., which Chester Sturtevant had founded in 1895. He served with distinction as chairman of the Colby Trustees. The family had long been devoted Baptists, and Reginald served as President of the United Baptist Convention of Maine. Like his father, he was a supporter of George Hinckley’s Good Will Farm, and he was a member of the Board of Directors of the Good Will Association. He was an unusually gifted public speaker, always choosing just the right words to express his thoughts, and he was a story-teller who delighted many audiences. This book, Josiah Volunteered, is not the first to come from the family. Arnold’s father, Reginald, spent many years compiling records of the town of Livermore that resulted in his writing and publishing in 1970 the History of Livermore.

Arnold Sturtevant himself is the third generation of the family that I have been privileged to know. He and I have served together on the Trustees of the Maine League of Historical Societies. He graduated from Colby in 1951, and of course I knew him as an undergraduate, and knew also his classmate, Leola Whitney, who became his wife. And in one of my classes was Arnold’s sister, Joanne, now Mrs. Neil Stinneford.

The original Maine home of this branch of the Sturtevant family was Fayette, a rural community not far from Livermore Falls. To what was then in the Maine wilderness came Andrew Sturtevant in 1779. After staking out his claim in what was then called the Plantation of Sparling, he returned for a time to Massachusetts and served in the Revolution army during the closing years of the war. In 1786 he married Dinah Besse of Wareham and brought her to establish their home on the Maine plantation. The first U. S. Census gives us the information that in 1790 Andrew Sturtevant, his wife and two daughters lived in Sparling Plantation.

The first settler there had been Asa Wiggin. From him Andrew Sturtevant’s son, Andrew Jr., bought the land and the frame house Wiggin had built, renovated and gradually enlarged the house, so that it became the home where Josiah Sturtevant, central figure of Arnold’s book, was brought up. In that house, looking externally much as it did 100 years ago, but now fully renovated and modernized, Arnold Sturtevant now lives.

Josiah Sturtevant, the great-grandfather of Arnold, was, as I have said, no ordinary man. He had a quality that Maine folks described by the good old Yankee word, gumption. It took a lot of that for a married man with a child of two years to respond to President Lincoln’s call for “three hundred thousand more” in 1862. He enlisted in the 7th Maine regiment and was mustered into the Union Army in August 1862. He was under fire at the battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, winning promotion from private to corporal. Then Gov. Abner Coburn of Maine commissioned him as a lieutenant to be one of the officers assigned to Gen. Ullmann in the questionable venture of organizing Negro troops to fight for the Union. Sent to New Orleans, Josiah Sturtevant then became a lieutenant in the famous Corps d ‘Afrique , the black troops officered by whites. It was the same unit to which was assigned another Maine man, Henry Merriam, a Colby graduate, who continued in military service after the war and became a major general.

After the war, Josiah Sturtevant worked in Washington in the Treasury Department, and as Assistant Postmaster of the U.S. Senate. Returning to Fayette, he spent his last years on the family farm. He had a rich tenor voice, and sang not only in the local church choir, but in concert groups that traveled around the state.

This book begins with letters written between the Civil War soldier and his relatives when Josiah was in service. Typical of the good humor and cheerfulness that the family showed, despite anxiety about their soldier, is this extract from a letter written to Josiah by his wife Helen on April 7,1863: “Today I brought down all the pretty rags I could scare up and have been busy commencing to draw a rug. I guess I shall have a pretty one. Lieut. Sturtevant will have the honor of wiping his feet on it if I get it done before he gets home. My mince pies are waiting for you, but the sausages are gone. But we have some tip-top bacon. May (their only child at the time) is well and full of life. She is already teasing me to teach her letters, and already knows half of tthem.”

Josiah’s war experiences are shown by extracts from his diary. “December 14, 1862. Yesterday we came on to the battlefield at Fredericksburg. We were under fire from noon until dark. The shells flew thick and fast around us. We lay on our arms all night. Dec. 15 – This has been a terrible day. God has seen fit to spare me.” What had happened was described by Maine’s famous General Joshua Chamberlain in these words: “We had to pick our way over a field strewn with incongruous ruin: men torn and broken, cut to pieces in every indescribable way; cannon dismounted, gun carriages smashed and overturned, ammunition chests flung wildly about, horses dead but still in harness, accouterments of every kind scattered as the whirlwinds.”

While he was in command of Negro troops in Louisiana, Josiah wrote to his father back in Fayette a letter which said in part: “I hasten to drop you a few lines and enclose a draft of $200. I presume any of the banks will cash it. Use to pay the doctor’s bill for Helen’s sickness, and if possible repay the money I got last spring from David and Mary. This is the first payment of any amount I have received as an officer. I hope this war may soon end, but not until it can end right.”

In May 1865, after Lee had surrendered at Appomattox, but before Josiah had been discharged from service, he received a long letter from his father Andrew in Fayette. It referred to the rejoicing at Lee’s surrender, followed by the gloom and grief caused by the assassination of Lincoln. Then the father wrote: “There is great work left yet for President Johnson and the American people to perform, and I hope they will seek wisdom from that source that never fails, and be able to establish the government on a firm and more equal foundation than ever before.”

A number of the book’s letters are those written to and by Chester Sturtevant when he was a student at Colby in the opening years of the last decade of the nineteenth century. It was a time when the leading college sport was baseball, and Chester’s frequent mention of it to his mother caused her to make this reply: “What laurels your Colby boys are winning in baseball! I wonder if you play it much. I hope not. It is too dangerous – heats your blood too much.”

While in college Chester made frequent calls on a young lady in Oakland, Mary Lamb. At first his mother was skeptical, but she later came to have a lot of sympathy for the girl, who though ill herself, was worked hard by the family with whom she lived. In January 1892, in the middle of his senior year at Colby, Chester wrote his mother: “I found Mary upstairs with all the Ayer children, where she has to stay to keep them away from the sick Mr. Ayer. It is enough to drive a well person crazy and Mary is not well. But it wouldn’t do any good to say anything to Mrs. Ayer. She will let Mary do this just as long as Mary can keep it up. But I think it is too bad, for they have help enough now.” Chester’s mother replied: “If Mary Lamb were only here to live with me! Poor girl! It is a shame for those people to work her so hard. I wish she would leave there altogether. If she could get anyone to take her for the winter and spring, I would take her all the summer and fall.”

However, the girl whom Chester Sturtevant married was his only employee in the bank he started in Livermore Falls. She was Charlotte Ham, who became the gracious mother of Reginald and the grandmother of Arnold Sturtevant.

There is much else in this book, including letters to and from California where Josiah’s wife H~den had gone to seek healing for their tubercular daughter, Maud. Those letters recount the anxious days while Maud’s life gradually ebbed away.
Altogether it is an absorbing volume, with a helpful appendix of documented items, and a wealth of illustrations. Especially interesting is a photograph of the old homestead at Fayette with Josiah’s family gathered in front of it, then an accompanying photograph of the same place many years later with Arnold’s family gathered in front.

And with this salute to one of Maine’s distinguished families, we say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1977