Radio Script #1234

Little Talks on Common Things
March 16, 1980

Let us begin this broadcast with attention to Lincoln County, the third oldest in Maine. When Lincoln County was organized in 1760, all of Maine consisted of only two counties, York and Cumberland. York came as far from the Piscataqua as the western limits of Casco Bay in the vicinity of the present communities of South Portland and Cape Elizabeth. Everything east of that in the entire District of Maine, as Massachusetts called that part of its territory, was in Cumberland County. In fact the Massachusetts legislature saw no need to form additional counties where there were so few people. The settlements along the coast from Georgetown to Machias all together did not have as many inhabitants as then resided in Portland alone.

It was the Kennebec Purchase in 1749, and the company’s successful attempts to bring in settlers that caused the legislature to form the new county of Lincoln for all Maine land east of the Androscoggin and established the first county seat at Pownalborough, now the town of Dresden. There they erected a court house which, thanks to the persistent work of Mrs. Mildred Burrage and others interested in Maine history, was restored to its original form about twenty years ago. Now, as the oldest court house still standing in Maine, it attracts every summer hundreds of visitors. In that court house, one of the lawyers who tried cases was a young attorney from Boston named John Adams, the man who some 30 years later became the second President of the U. S.

If you want to note the vast area encompassed by Lincoln County in 1760, take a map and draw on it certain lines. The first line will be from the New Meadow River north to the Canadian border; the second line from there across east of the the St. John River; the third from that point down to Eastport on the St. Croix; and the fourth and last line back to the starting point between Bath and Brunswick. It was indeed a large area of land, only slightly smaller than all the rest of New England. When we point today, in this time of search for all kinds of heating energy, to Maine’s vast supply of wood in its forests, think what must have been the immensely larger scope of woodland in Lincoln County alone in 1760.

That enormous expanse of the county lasted for only twenty years. In 1780 the Massachusetts legislature took from Lincoln land to make two new counties, Hancock and Washington. That left Lincoln with only 17 towns and one plantation. Soon afterward the county seat was moved from Pownalborousn to Wiscasset where it is to this day. Of old Lincoln County the chief port was for many years not Wiscasset but Pemaquid. Later still, the forming of Kennebec, Androscoggin and Sagadahoc counties took land from Lincoln County, until it became one of Maine’s smallest counties in area, and one of our few counties with no city, although it had a number of good sized towns.

Lincoln County still has the distinction of having within its borders some of the places first visited by the European explorers to New England. Long before the Pilgrims landed on Cape Cod in 1629, English fishing fleets had been coming every summer to the mouth of the Damariscotta River and had been drying their fish on the shore at Pemaquid. It was to this place in 1621 that Governor Bradford of the Pilgrim Colony sent the colony’s shallop to get needed supplies from the fishing ships he knew would be there.

At Pemaquid Beach is a stone fort, the most recent of several that began with a log fort in 1635, and still visible are remains
of a paved street that once passed through a considerable village. The nearby cemetery has stones dating back to the early 1700’s. The several present Pemaquid villages, including New Harbor, are all in the town of Bristol, as well as the village of Long Pond off Bristol’s eastern shore. A short distance out to sea off Round Pond is one of Lincoln County’s most interesting places, Loud’s Island. It had the distinction during the Civil War of declaring itself independent and not even in the United States, to say nothing of Maine. It all happened because of error in an early U. S. Coastal Survey, which completely omitted Loud’s Island from the map of Bristol. For many years the islanders paid no taxes to Bristol, but collected and expended their own taxes without authority from the State of Maine or any other government off the island. For years, it had made arrangements with the town of Bristol to have the island inhabitants counted in each census of that town, because admittedly Round Pond on the mainland was the market where it sold the island’s fish and lobsters and where it bought many goods. By way of compensation, Bristol allowed the Loud Islanders to vote in all elections open to inhabitants of the Bristol mainland.

All went well with this incongruous situation until 1863, when in the midst of the Civil War, the government instituted the drafting of soldiers. The story has long been circulated that Loud’s Island then declared its total independence and refused to recognize the draft. The truth is a lot different. Loud’s Island did not withdraw from Bristol. Bristol cast the island off. This is the way it happened.

In 1863 the division of Republican and Democratic voters in Maine was much closer than it became after the Civil War. Lincoln County was very evenly divided between the two parties. At that time U.S. senators were elected by the state legislatures, and Maine was to select one when its legislature assembled in January 1864. So a lot of attention was focused on the election of state senators and representatives. The two candidates for the state senate from Lincoln County were Joseph Smith of Wiscasset and Everett Stetson of Damariscotta, both prominent men. Stetson, a Republican, was a builder of four big wooden ships that sailed the world’s seas. Smith, the Democrat, was the son of Samuel Smith who had been Governor of Maine in the 1830’s. The first count of the votes cast in the whole County gave Stetson 2,648 and Smith 2,641, a very close election. Naturally Smith contested the count. The recount resulted in an upset, giving Smith 2,651 to Stetson’s 2,635.

Then Stetson turned to the Maine Senate for a decision under Maine law. He declared that 38 of Smith’s votes were cast by the residents of Loud’s Island who were not in the town of Bristol, and those ballots could not be included in Bristol’s return of the election. Stetson pointed out that Loud’s Island lay in Muscongus Bay more than a mile east of the town of Bristol as shown by the U. S. Coastal Survey. Stetson admitted that certain Massachusetts statutes did allow voting in the town of Bristol to the people of Loud s Island, but only when they were assessed by that town. He then showed that Bristol had placed no assessment on Loud’s islanders for more than twenty years. The State Senate upheld Stetson’s claim, the 38 votes from Loud’s Island were cast out, and Loud’s Island became an orphan child. No wonder they demanded exception from the Civil War draft. If they didn’t belong in Bristol or Lincoln County or the state of Maine, they must be definitely independent. No officers of Uncle Sam were going to draft their young men for war. Later the whole affair was calmly settled, Loud’s Island got back into the U. S. as part of the old town of Bristol.

Another Lincoln County piece of historical interest is the bridge that connects the villages of Newcastle and Damariscotta.
In 1639, six families had come up the Damariscotta River from Pemaquid and had settled near where the villages later sprung up. They could cross the river only by boat, before their numbers could increase enough even to give thought to a bridge, they were driven off by repeated Indian raids. No further settlement was attempted until 1729, and those settlers, too, could only cross the river by boat. Soon there were enough people needing frequently to cross the stream to warrant regular ferry service, which did a brisk business between 1750 and 1790.

In 1795 two resourceful Irishmen, James Kavanaugh and Matthew Cortrell, took steps to interest the inhabitants in a bridge, and they applied to the Massachusetts Legislature for a charter. The charter would establish a private company which would sell stock to raise the funds to build the bridge, and would be recompensed by charging toll. That was indeed the way bridges across the larger streams were usually built until beyond the middle of the 19th century. Nothing came of the attempt for two years, but at last in 1797 the petitioners got their charter with the right to collect tolls for 20 years on the bridge they agreed to erect. The day came for the bridge’s dedication, and people gathered from miles around. A boy was paid 6 shillings for playing his fife there all day. A rope was stretched across the middle of the bridge. Residents of Newcastle stood on one side of the rope, those of Damariscotta on the other side. Speeches were made by first selectmen of both towns. Then the rope was cut simultaneously by two Revolutionary veterans, one from each town.

All day long people came to see the bridge across what seemed a vast expanse of water, because at that time there was no bridge across any of Maine’s large rivers, not even the Saco, where population had long been much larger than in Newcastle and Damariscotta. It was such a gala occasion that there was naturally a large consumption of the refreshment that always accompanied such occasions 175 years ago – rum and gingerbread. One man became so tipsy that he let out a war whoop and jumped off the bridge into the stream. Fortunately he was pulled out with only a good soaking.

Like all early bridges, this one was soon swept out by freshet. After two such disasters, it was thoroughly rebuilt and raised higher in 1851. It was then released from toll and taken over by the towns in 1851 was indeed early for any large free bridge in Maine. While the bridge was under toll a lot of chicanery went on. Because it was possible for a man to secure for himself and his family a year’s toll passage for a single annual fee, someone would often borrow a neighbor’s annual pass to escape paying his own toll. It became necessary to hire as toll keeper someone who knew nearly everyone who lived in either town, and be on the alert to detect such scalpers. When the 1851 bridge had to be replaced in 1867 it cost only $5,000, $2,500 for each of the two towns.

Not until 1799, at the end of the 18th century and nearly twenty years after the end of the Revolutionary War was Kennebec County formed by the Massachusetts legislature. Thus the region around Waterville was during its early settlement in the 1760’s a part of Lincoln County. All of the Winslow probate records were recorded in the Lincoln Probate Court until 1800. Thus it is in those records, not the Kennebec records that we find the will of such pioneers as John McKechnie, the man who built Waterville’s first saw and grist mills, and who as early as 1762 had surveyed the lots on the west side of the Kennebec from Vassalboro to Skowhegan.

Dying in 1782, McKechnie left a considerable estate. His Waterville property alone (Waterville was then a part of Winslow) was valued at $1,050, equivalent then to $5,250, in terms of today’s value at least $100,000. He had property in Bowdoinham valued at $1,500, and he had $200 more in Augusta. He was worth, in terms of today’s values, about $200,000. At the time of his death he had six minor children, three sons and three daughters, of whom his widow Mary McKechnie was appointed guardian. He also had seven older children, two sons, and three married and two unmarried daughters. With thirteen children in the family, we can well understand that, after Mrs. McKechnie’s death, the estate became rather thinly distributed.

Year: 1980