Radio Script #1266

Little Talks on Common Things
March 8, 1981

As long as thirty years ago, on this program, I began to refer to the Kennebec community of Ten Lots, situated on the boundary between Oakland and Fairfield. About 1880 it changed its name to Oakland Heights, but fortunately in this century it reverted to the original name, which it was given at the time of the Nye-Dimmicksurvey because it consisted of ten left-over lots in the northwest corner of that tract which two men from Sandwich, Mass., had purchased from the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase in 1781.

The Town of Winslow, incorporated in 1771, was originally much larger than that present town. It included all of what is now Waterville and much of what is now Oakland on the west side of the river. On the extreme west end of that tract was part of the area sold to Nye and Dimmick. In 1784 a group of Massachusetts veterans of the Revolution, led by Lot Sturtevant, got a soldiers’ grant of 2000 acres in that northwest gore of the Nye-Dimmick lands.

Already settled at North Fairfield since 1781 was Elihu Bowerman, who was engaged to layout the 2000 acres into ten lots of 200 acres each. That fastened on it the name Ten Lots. Sturtevant and his companions came by schooner to Fort Western at Augusta, where they changed to a smaller craft to go up the river to Fort Halifax, just below Ticonic Falls. Five miles inland on the west side of the Kennebec they found the area where their 2000 acres could be located. They noted with pleasure that it had many hardwood trees as well as the more common pines. They knew that such wood meant that, when the land was cleared, the soil would be rich and fertile, because every autumn the falling leaves would have enriched that soil far more than would pine needles.

Their first crop was oats, because that grain is easiest to raise in half cleared land among tree stumps. When they burned the trees, they found a ready sale for the ashes at Southwick’s potash kiln in Vassalboro. There the ashes were turned into potash and shipped to England for use as soap in that nation’s washing of many operations of wool between sheep and finished cloth. Within a few years the Ten Lots crops had expanded into corn and flax.

After returning to Mass. to claim the girl who had waited for him, Sturtevant brought her to the cabin he had erected in the Maine wilderness. She did not come empty handed, but brought many articles needed in any home, however, primitive its surroundings. She brought to Ten Lots a quantity of homespun cloth, for she knew she would need it for sometime before they could raise any wool or flax from which she could do her own spinning and weaving. But she was prepared for that later, because she brought along her spinning wheel and small loom. She also had half a dozen handwoven petticoats and underwear, linen sheets and pillow cases, blankets, and a wool comforter – all made in her Massachusetts home. Seasickness from the rough voyage had made Mrs. Sturtevant so ill that when she arrived at Fort Halifax, she had to be placed on a litter and carried by two men over the rough footpath from Ticonic Falls to Ten Lots. It was merely a path that had been blazed out the year before by her husband and his companions.

Lot Sturtevant and his wife were parents of eight children, and it was one of their descendants, H. F. Sturtevant, living at Ten Lots thirty years ago, who gave me my first detailed information about that community. It is to Lot Sturtevant’s granddaughter, Martha Sturtevant Coolidge, that we owe much for writing reminiscences of her grandparents about the pioneer days. She was the oldest child of Lot’s son, Reward Sturtevant, a well known citizen of this area in the mid-nineteenth century. She tells of her grandmother’s careful preservation of leaven to make bread. The common yeast cake was then unknown, and after each baking of bread it was necessary to preserve a quantity of leavened dough. That practice is well known to readers of old time customs. What is not so well known is the way Mrs. Coolidge tells us the pioneer women got baking soda, which they called saleratus. Lot Sturtevant’s wife would sweep the hearth clean, then spread on it a number of corn cobs, which she would set on fire. When they were thoroughly burned, she would carefully collect the ashes, separated from other fireplace residue, and put them in a pitcher of water. When the ashes had settled, the remaining liquid was her baking soda.

Very soon the crude footpath from Ticonic Falls was cleared for riders on horseback, but not yet wide enough for the two-wheeled carts of the time. To get their grain ground, the Sturtevants had to take it on horseback to John McKechnie’s mill on the Messalonskee, near where the pumping station of the water district now stands. Mrs. Coolidge remembered well the Ten Lots District School which she attended first at the age of four. Like most younger pupils, her first attendance was during a summer term, when the older boys and girls were needed to work on the farms. In her first term the school had 30 children from 18 families. The place was indeed a little red schoolhouse, painted red on the outside, but utterly without paint inside. It was a square building with windows on three sides. On the fourth side was a huge fireplace taking four-foot logs, and on the same side was the room’s only door that led directly out on to the doorstep.

Against the wall on one side was the teacher’s desk, on a raised platform. In front of it were backless benches placed in front of a long stand on which pupils could write on their slates, or more rarely on paper. Not until Mrs. Coolidge had left the school did it have desks and inkwells. On the backless benches the pupils were seated by ages, the youngest in front. When a class was called to recite, they came forward and toed a line marked on the floor. There they stood until, one by one, they had been called upon. For the youngest pupils, instruction began with the alphabet and learning the successive numbers to 100. From that start they went on to reading by a phonetic system, and to the four elements of arithmetic: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The girls seldom went beyond simple fractions. That was considered enough arithmetic for female minds.

In the upper years of the one-room school much of the teaching was in what we would call basics or fundamentals. It concerns especially English grammar, a subject of which many a modern college student is woefully ignorant. That indeed is the way I learned English grammar three-quarters of a century ago, and I have always been grateful for the experience. The method was parsing and sentence diagraming. Something no teacher would consider proper today.

When Mrs. Coolidge attended the Ten Lots school, few pupils went on to attend an academy, and it was not until the 1870’s that Maine got free high schools. Very early, however, a few boys did come in to Ticonic Village to attend Waterville Academy, which had been started in 1828, and later became Coburn Classical Institute.

Organized religion was not long in coming to Ten Lots. Even before 1800, itinerant preachers of different denominations had held services there, but it was the Baptists who got a firm foothold after the organization of the Waterville Baptist Church by Jeremiah Chaplin in 1818. When Rev. Harvey Fitz became pastor of that church in 1829, he found Ten Lots a rich field for his labors, and he frequently held meetings there. During his pastorate he brought 16 persons from Ten Lots into the membership of his church.

The most distinguished religious worker at Ten Lots was, however, Fitz’s successor, Samuel Francis Smith, who served as pastor of the Waterville church from 1834 to 1841. He was indeed the most famous of that church’s pastors through the 162 years of its existence to 1981, for he was the renowned author of the patriotic hymn ‘Thy Country Tis of Thee”. One of the group baptisms that Smith held for Ten Lots converts is worthy of special mention. On December 5, 1838 he baptised 17 young people, all of whom were residents of Ten Lots. Today, with comfortable indoor baptisms in heated baptistries, that date would not seem unusual. But in 1838 the Waterville Baptist Church had no indoor baptistry, and Smith baptized those Ten Lotters in the cold Messalonskee Stream.

Besides Sturtevant, among the best known family names at Ten Lots were Bates and Williams. Members of the Bates family became prominent residents of both Waterville and Oakland, and since 1820 some of them have been residing at Ten Lots. Mr. Ernest Bates is still a resident of that community. Born in Ten Lots was Milton Williams, a descendant of the pioneer Asa Bates. He left his native place to seek his fortune in New York City, where he met with pronounced financial success. It was Reward Sturtevant who advanced him the money to go to New York. When Mr. Sturtevant was in hi 90th year, he received a gift of a thousand dollars for everyone of the thirteen dollars he had given Williams years before Williams gave to Ten Lots the attractive little chapel in which Sunday services are still held, and he gave to the town of Oakland its Williams High School, now used as the district junior high.

An oddity regarding Ten Lots is that it has no community cemetery. Ernest Bates tells me that he never heard of one, although there is a large family burying ground a short distance down the road from Ten Lots to Norridgewock. That graveyard may indeed contain bodies from more than one family. But most of the Ten Lot pioneers, including Lot Sturtevant, were buried in the old cemetery in Oakland Village, near the foot of Messalonskee Lake.

Still standing at Ten Lots are some old homes which were built in the early 1800’s. They have homemade nails, handwrought hinges, and huge homemade locks with giant keys. Some of their timbers were cut in old, up-and-down saw mills before the common use of circular saws. And sometimes, holding the frame together were not even handmade nails, but old wooden pegs.

And with that salute to Ten Lots we now say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1981