Radio Script #1247

Little Talks on Common Things
September 28, 1980

Today I want to tell you about a prominent Maine legislator of the 19th century. What Louis Jalbert of Lewiston has been in this century, August William Dickey of Fort Kent was in the previous century. It might be appropriate today to use a title similar to that once conferred upon Dickey. Just as the St. John Valley man was called the Duke of Fort Kent, why not call Jalbert the Lord of Lewiston?

Dickey’s service in the Legislature like Jalhert’s covers a number of terms. Dickey was regarded as one of Maine’s most important sons. Like Jalbert, he was an ardlmt fl(·mocral. That FlIrt K(‘nt man is perhaps best remembered because his name is associated with one of the most controversial power projects of recent times, the Lincoln-Dickey dams on Time St. and John River.

It was early in the 19th century, in the year 1810, when William Dickey was born on the Maine coast, in the town of Bristol. His father, an adventurous sea captain, was lost at sea in 1819, when the boy was only nine years old. Young Dickey could remember many of his father’s stories of life at sea – of his ship being captured by a French privateer and its later release, of his own service on an American privateer in the War of 1812, and of adventures with natives on South Seas islands. On one occasion, seeing that his ship’s capture by an enemy privateer was inevitable, Captain Dickey ordered his four-man crew below decks, while he remained above with only the ship’s boy for a crew. The capturing commander expressed amazement that one man and a boy could manage an ocean-going ship. Captain Dickey told his captor that the rest of the crew were confined to their bunks with West Indies fever – the name of a currently raging plague. Having no desire to expose his men to the dread disease, the French officer left only a five-man guard, and departed with all the other invaders. As soon as the French vessel was out of sight, Captain Dickey’s four sailors enjoyed a miraculous, speedy recovery, came on deck and quickly overpowered the guards. After his father’s loss at sea, William Dickey kept all his life the cutlass which his father had taken from the officer of the guard in that affair.

After the captain’s death, Mrs. Dickey moved to the inland Maine town of Avon in Franklin County, where she acquired 160 acres of land. William and his older brothers built a log cabin and a barn. When he was 14, young Dickey packed his few possessions on his back and hiked 16 miles to Farmington, determined to find some way to at tend Farmington Academy.

Arriving tired and hungry, the boy was l<‘nning on a fence in front of the village park, when Thomas Hunter a trustee of the Academy, stopped his horse to speak to the boy. He found the boy was a member of the Dickey family he had known in Damariscotta before they came to Avon. Hunter took young Dickey to his own home and on the very next day enrolled the boy in Farmington Academy. He arranged for Dickey to ring the school’s famous Paul Revere bell and sweep the floors in payment of tuition, and the lad did chores at the Hunter home for his board.

Just as, through much of the 19th century, the colleges had their long vacation in the winter to permit their students to teach in the academies, so did the academies themselves use a similar vacation to allow their students to teach in the State’s numerous one-room common schools. William Dickey got a job teaching the winter term at such a school in Wilton. The lad had just reached his 15th birthday and was naturally uneasy about his ability to control students older and larger than himself. Those big boys had literally tossed four previous teachers out of the schoolhouse. Dickey at once
suggested to those half dozen big boys that they organize a sliding party and challenge another nearby school to a sliding contest. That made Dickey so popular that he had no disciplinary problems. Of course it helped that, by the age of 15, he had developed some of the muscular ability of his sea-captain father.

It took Dickey five years to finish the course at Farmington Academy, because he could not attend every term of the year. In those instances he held jobs on farms and in lumber camps. Upon graduation he went to work in the store of Colonel Eastman at Strong. He did so well that after a year, his pay was raised from $7 to $20 a month. In 1831, when he became of age Dickey went into business for himself in Strong in the building, across the street from L::;tm<1n’H. Ill’ was elected
Captain of the local militia company. :lnd In 18)1~ became major of the Second Brigade, 8th D1vision. Na.lnl’ Nll1ti:l. For the rest of his life he was known as Major Dickey.

It was President Andrew Jackson who appointed this loyal Democrat to public office when he received a commission as Postmaster at Strong. In 1842 he was elected to his first of many sessions in the State Legislature. It was an exciting time to be in the Legislature. It was immediately called into special session to consider the State’s acceptance of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty that had been agreed upon between the U. S. Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, and the British Prime Minister, Lord Ashburton. Because the issue concerned the northern boundary of Maine, the consent of the State as well as that of the Federal Government, was needed for ratification.

Dickey was made a House member of the joint committee on the Treaty. Instead of having Webster himself appear before the Committee, the U.S. Government was represented by Peleg Sprague of Hallowell. During the hearing, Dickey asked Sprague, “Where is Mr. Webster?” Sprague replied, “He didn’t come. His politics doesn’t agree with yours.” That, of course, refers to Webster’s cabinet position in a Whig president’s administration while Dickey was a confirmed Jacksonian Democrat.

In 1843 Dickey moved from Strong to Gardiner, where he engaged in lumbering, trading, and other enterprises. It was not long before that town sent him back to the Legislature. When he was threatened with tuberculosis in 1850, a doctor told him that there was no bettcr climate f”r 11In~ t rouhlc than that in the Upper St. John Valley

So Dickey moved again, thistime to the comparatively new town of Fort Kent, where stood one of tll(‘ forts (‘rectNI hy til(‘ State only a few years before In connection with that boundary df!;PlItl’ tlt.1t Dickey had seen settled by the Hebster-Ashburnton Treaty.

Determined to be a successful trader at Fort Kent, Dickey purchased goods in Boston, transported them by sea to Bangor, then over 140 miles of coarse roads to Masardis. There the goods were again placed on boats and brought down the Aroostook River to Ashland, then overland in carts to the Fish River and down that stream to Fort Kent near its junction with the St. John. At once Dickey repaired a broken down sawmill, built a gristmill, and cleared land for a larger farm. He erected a boarding house to accommodate his mill and farm workers. Then he put up a schoolhouse, because there was none within 50 miles.

Whether it was because of the st. John climate or some other reason, Dickey was freed from all signs of tuberculossis. Feeling so much better, he went in 1854 to Haverill, Mass., where he opened a hat factory and a plant to produce doors, sashes and blinds. Three years later that plant burned and Dickey decided to return to Fort Kent.

He had been home only one year when, in 1858, the Fort Kent voters again sent Dickey to the Legislature, and in subsequent elections they kept returning him as their representative. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Dickey asked Governor Israel Washburn for command of a Maine regiment. By that time the State was under control of the new Republican Party that had put Abraham Lincoln in the White House. Washhurn could not stomach a Maine Democrat as head of one of the State’s rel~11’l(,lltS. and th” rl”l”pstPc! nr’pointme-nt …… TIt to another man.

Governor Washburn t s BU(“C'(“;~;(lr, Ahner (‘,,!ll1ro. t h(‘III’.ll a1 so’ a Republican, thought better of Dickey. Cohllrn ~;(‘nt him ~;Ollt h to Un inn Army camps, to look after till’ s<lnitary cOl1clitlnllf: of H.1inc tn’ops. Meanwhile, Dickey’s
oldest son had become a captain in the Union Army.

Returning to Fort Kent after the war, Dickey at once plunged again into politics. He was president of the Democratic Convention in Houlton in 1866, and was chosen Democratic leader in the Maine House in 1868. Taking an interest in the thinly populated plantation which he regarded as badly neglected by the State, Dickey introduced legislation to open roads and assure free elections in the plantation. For that activity the Somerset County Reporter, a prominent weekly newspaper, gave Dickey his title of Duke of Fort Kent.

Though not himself of French descent, Dickey became a strong supporter of French-Canadian interests on the St. John. He introduced into the Legislature a bill to divide Aroostook into two counties, making the Madawaska area and adjoining French-speaking territory a separate county. The Somerset Reporter said: “When in one Maine county we have 500 voters who speak no English and know nothing about our institutions except that they have the right to work, and when those votes are controlled by one man, we must sound the warning, ‘Beware the Duke of Fort Kent’.”

It is to be noted that most of those French-Canadians had come to the St. John Valley not from the St. Lawrence towns and hamlets, but from descendants of the French of Nova Scotia expelled by the British in 1754 – a story made famous by Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline.” They were the people of whose Longfellow had written. “This is tbt’ forest primeval,
thc murrr.l1Jring pil1(‘!; :lnd tho hemlock!”

Dickey pa inst:ll: Inr,ly chilr’l’loncd t ht· rH’nch-Calla” Indian land claims in the Legislature and he won 11;10)’ C;ISCf. ftlr tho!;e loyal American citizeI)s.

Perhaps Dickey’s greatest achievement nchlc\’t’mcnt was the founding of the Madawaska Training School. Th:lt !;cLnol is now the University of Maine at Fort, Kent and was previously one of the State’s several normal schools. Dickey secured its foundation in 1878 deliberately to provide bilingual teachers for common schools in the St. John Valley. In his successful
plea to the Legislature, Dickey said: “The Madawaska region has a population of 4,060 Acadians, descendants of the people driven from their homes more than a century ago. The descendants of those exiles are now our own people. The region has a total of more than 8,060 inhabitants, some of English descent, as well as Acadians. Some of the French- speaking families came in from Quebec. Our people badly need this school.”

Dickey saw to it that there was placed in the school’s charter a provision for instruction in the French language as well as in English.

At the age of 85, Dickey was still in the Legislature in 1895. He successfully defeated a bill demanding that instruction in Maine’s public schools be entirely in English. As Jackson Day speaker in Portland in 1896, Dickey recalled taking the stage many years earlier from Strong to Boston to attend the city’s reception to President Andrew Jackson. It was his first meeting with the national leader whom he adored. He somewhat sadly recounted his place in a minority party, but expressed admiration for such Republicans as Blaine, Hamlin and Fessenden.

One of Dickey’s major activities was getting funds to build bridges across tIl!’ \,:lr j 0115 strC:1:’l~ In ~iort hi~nl ~’f;l file. t.’-hl’!1 he arrived in Fort Kent, there \J.1~ 110 hrlor.e to tIll’ more pOI'”1()\1~; r.all.I.!fan rdde. Before he died he scl\J brjd}'{‘~; !q .In tIll’ St •• h’hn, till’ ~·.t.Frallt to;, l”t~ Fish and Aroostook rivers. lnlen \.: 111f nm Di C’ kl’Y <lll’cl In 1897. t IH’ KI’n!1chcc .Iollrnal corumen ted:

“William Dickey \./<15 nut only :l pO\J(‘rf\ll :1lld popular lumherman on the St. John, he was also a major political influence in the whole State of Maine through a long series of terms in the Legislature. The people of the Madawaska area
have lost their most valiant champion.”

In 1893, when Dickey was already Maine’s oldest legislator, his return to Fort Kent from the legislative scene was greeted by a grand celebration. The Fort Kent Brass Band led a parade of 500 citizens who, in carriages and on foot, escorted their Duke to his home.

Year: 1980