Radio Script #1200

Little Talks on Common Things
April 22, 1979

One of the most respected families of Central Maine from colonial times was the Paine family of Winslow. Many people now living recall well when Dr. Edward Paine resided in the old house that still stands just beyond the shopping center near the Sebasticook Bridge, on the road to China.

The Winslow Paines were careful keepers of records. We owe to them our most accurate information about Kennebec floods, especially the great freshet of 1832. Because of their markings on an old tree on the east bank of the river, we were able to ascertain that the waters rose higher in the flood of 1936 than they had 104 years earlier in 1832.

One of the most distinguished members of the family was Timothy Otis Paine, a graduate of Colby College in the class of 1847. He became New England’s foremost Swedenborgian and was a professor in the theological school of that faith, known as the Church of the New Jerusalem. He was a member of the American Anointed Society, a president of the Harvard Biblical Club, and the author of several books dealing with Biblical architecture. Two of them were Solomon’s Temple and the Holy Houses. However, it is a lesser known book written by Timothy Paine, that serves as the principal source of this broadcast.

He called it “The Discovery of a Grandmother”. It tells us a lot about the Winslow Paines during the nineteenth century. The Paines traced their ancestry back to the time of William the Conqueror. In fact Thomas de Payne had come to England from Normandy even before the conquest of 1066 and joined the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings. As happened to so many of the Conqueror’s adherents, Payne received a large grant of English land, several thousand acres of which were later incorporated into the preserve which was set aside as New Forest. It is from that Thomas de Payne that all American Paines are descended.

The first Payne to come to America was William, born in Suffolk, England in 1598. He came to Boston in 1635, only five years after the arrival of the Winthrop Colony. He settled in Watertown near where is now the famous Mount Auburn cemetery. In 1639 he moved to Ipswich, where he built a saw and grist mill. He became interested in iron works, first at Ipswich, then at Lynn and New Haven. His business enterprises spread to the Maine-New Hampshire border, and in 1651 he established at Portsmouth The Piscataquis Trading Co. For a time he owned Thompson Island in Boston Harbor. He became a wealthy man, leaving a large estate when he died in 1660.

It was Lemuel Payne, 6th generation descendant of William, born in 1777, who was the first Winslow Payne. He was an educated man, having graduated from Brown University in 1803, and had then studied law in Mansfield, Mass. In 1805 he left Mansfield for Winslow, making the entire journey by sleigh. On this trip he was joined by his younger brother, Frederick. They soon brought wives to Winslow and built a house in which the two families lived until both had ten children. Then Frederick built in 1814 a new house that was thereafter continuously lived in by Paines until the death of Dr. Edward Paine about 20 years ago. Many people know that fine old Paine mansion situated just beyond the IGA store in Winslow.

Lemuel Payne did practice law, but it was not his major interest. He was instinctively a farmer and he developed a large and prospering farm. With his superior education he naturally became a community leader, holding many town offices, serving in the Massachusetts Legislature and after Maine became a state was on the Governor’s Council. That last office came after the governorship of William King, because Payne had no use for King’s party of Jefferson Democrats. He was a staunch Federalist and a devoted follower of John Adams, our nation’s second president.

Influential in the establishment of Waterville College, that later became Colby, Lemuel Paine served as one of its trustees from 1827 to 1849. His letter of resignation, when failing health compelled him to leave the board, said:

“I was elected to your board in 1827, since which time I have been present at every session of the board, which can be said of no other member except my friend Timothy Boutelle. When I took my seat on the trustees, the affairs of the college were perplexed and its prospects discouraging. Today it affords me great pleasure to contemplate the prosperous condition of the college, its growing reputation and future promise.”

An appreciation of Lemuel’s work for Colby was recorded in its trustees minutes by no less a person than Colby Trustee Samuel Francis Smith, author of our patriotic hymn ”My Country Tis of Thee”. Smith wrote: “This board entertains a high sense of the value of the useful services of Hon. Lemuel Paine of Winslow. He has stood by the college with laudable zeal in days of its weakness and poverty. He has seen the tender shoot planted years ago grow into a fertile tree, giving benefit to both church and state, and blessing a grateful community.”

All his life Lemuel Paine was a classical scholar. It was said that while building a stone wall on his farm, he committed to memory many long passages from the Iliad and Odyssey. Later his nephew, the more famous Timothy Paine, wrote of his Uncle Lemuel: “He was a lecturer in temperance, a civic leader and a prosperous farmer. He was pioneer of the family in Maine, attracted by its waterways and its falls, especially by the big river and Ticonic Falls at Winslow. There he made his home. To that place he brought his young wife, and there he raised their children. His younger brother, Frederick, my father, made his home with Uncle Lemuel for a year before he too married. The two farmers lived together until 1814 when my father built the new house nearer the Sebasticook.”

When Lemuel Paine came to Winslow in 1805, Fort Halifax was already in ruins. Nothing remained except the single blockhouse which interested persons fortunately continued to preserve and repair so that it still stands, a natural historic site, in 1979. Lemuel took active interest in attempts to discover early relics on that historic spot near the mouth of the Sebasticook. Many years later Timothy Paine’s brother, Albert, a Bangor lawyer, wrote about a day spent at Fort Halifax with his Uncle Lemuel in 1842: He wrote: “Uncle Lemuel and I visited old Fort Halifax. He with his spade dug for a long time and uncovered portions of the old fort. He found that the remaining structure, instead of being the garrison house, was only one blockhouse that stood at a corner of the big palisaded enclosure. We did find the well from which, 100 years ago, the soldiers at the fort drew their drinking water. The well was in good order, all bricked up with the original brick unharmed
and undisturbed. ”

Timothy Paine’s book gives information about the bridge over the Sebasticook at Winslow. The first bridge was built in 1799, more than thirty years before there was any bridge across the Kennebec to Waterville. It was a free bridge, built by the proprietors, with inhabitants in partnership. It was carried away by a flood in 1807. Its successor, built in 1812, was a toll bridge financed by private investors. That too was washed away in the great freshet of 1832. The third bridge, also a toll bridge, was built in 1834, and it stood until the big flood of 1901. That bridge was owned by Joseph Eaton, the man whose store at the corner of Lithgow Street also held the town post office. Before 1901 Eaton had sold the bridge to the town so it could become a free bridge. Its successor, the present bridge has same of its abutments still standing, though it was rebuilt entirely of steel after the flood of 1936. The nearby railroad bridge was built in 1852 when the Kennebec and Portland rail line was being constructed from Augusta to Waterville.

Timothy Paine, the writer or preserver of the books and manuscripts from where this broadcast is taken, had a cousin, Henry Paine, son of Timothy’s Uncle Lemuel, who became a well known attorney. Born in 1810, he graduated from Waterville College in 1830, a favorite of the first president, Jeremiah Chaplin, who made him principal of the college fitting school, Waterville Academy, in his senior year. After his graduation from Harvard Law School, he practiced law in Hallowell, then a thriving port and the largest town on the Kennebec. Then he moved to Cambridge, Mass. In 1849 he succeeded his father as a trustee of Waterville College and remained on the board until 1862. For two years in the 1870’s he was an Overseer of Harvard College. For twelve years he was lecturer on the Law of Real Estate at the Boston University Law School

It is noteworthy that the Paine family strongly believed in a college education. The pioneer Lemuel had been a graduate of Brown at a time when very few young men went to College. Henry got his Colby degree in 1830, and Timothy his in 1847, and they would be followed by many relatives in colleges allover the East

What lofty Harvard thought of backwoods education in Maine is shown by a letter which Henry Paine wrote from Harvard Law School in 1832 to his father in Winslow. He wrote:

“As my friend Appleton is about to return to Waterville and will deliver my letter to you, I take this opportunity to write. Coming as we law students do from different parts of the Union, there is little in common among us. A large majority are, of course, natives of Massachusetts and graduates of Harvard College. They look upon Massachusetts as the modern Delphi and cannot conceive of any man being a scholar until he has a Harvard diploma. In their eyes the sons of the Maine wilderness,which they understood is inhabited by wolves and Indians, with a few scattered and timid whites, could not produce men with any claim to literary merit or prestige in society.

“I am really disappointed with Harvard. I had fancied it a place of high inspiration, and that no man could walk on the consecrated soil without elevation of spirit. But alas it is not so. Just as in nature, there are lions and jackals, there are here good teachers and poor teachers, scholarly students and dullards. The great mass of students are fellows of moderate talents, remarkable only for the fashionable cut of their whiskers and their snobbish contempt of everyone else. They are ill qualified for the life of a competent and honest lawyer. I have become intimate with only two or three individuals and I have no desire to pal with more.”

Henry W. Paine had a large practice in both state and federal courts and was Referee in Chancery in many important and difficult cases. He had the reputation of being especially successful in winning verdicts from juries. Henry Paine had a brilliant daughter, Jennie Warren Paine, of whom the great scientist Louis Agassiz said she had the brightest mind of any woman he ever met. Unhappily a feud broke out between the wives of Lemuel and Frederick Paine, who had once lived peacefully together under one roof before Frederick buiit his new home. In a letter from Henry Paine to his cousin, Albert, in
Bangor, Henry wrote: “The family estrangement has been a matter of deep regret. While we were boys at home, there was harmony between the families. But afterward both mother and aunt believed themselves injured beyond repair. Mutual confidence and respect are gone. This is a family feud so bitter that it seems incurable. I do not claim that my mother is free from the frailties of human nature, nor do incriminate your mother, whom, of course, you love and respect. But, if your mother had asked an explanation, she would have found her suspicions groundless, and that the stories in circulation did not originate where she suspected. But I will not rake open the embers of controversy. Rather I will smother them.”

Nowhere in the Paine papers do we learn what the quarrel was about. Anyhow we can record that it had a happy ending. In 1843 Timothy’s mother wrote to Albert: “I am very glad to inform you that reconciliation has been effected between Aunt Jane and myself. We are now on calling terms and shall soon visit.”

Next Sunday I will tell you more about the Paine family of Winslow but now we must say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1979