Radio Script #1263

Little Talks on Common Things
February 15, 1981

During its 33 years on the air, this program has paid much attention to the Gardiner family long prominent in Maine business and government. The first member of that family to show interest in Maine was Dr. Sylvester Gardiner, Boston merchant and financier, who was chiefly instrumental in forming the company called Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase in 1749. It was Dr. Gardiner who founded and developed the Maine community that is now the City of Gardiner.

We have given less attention to another family that deserves mention because that family gave its name to Augusta’s neighboring town of Vassalboro. Though no member of the family ever lived in the town, a number of them visited it while the family’s financial interest in the area continued.

It was Florentius Vassal who actually attached the family name to Vassalboro, because he was the family member most intimately associated with the town’s settlement and early development. The fact is, however, that the name was a tribute.

A published genealogy of the Vassal family tells us of this family’s historic importance. In England the first Vassal of prominence appeared in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. He was John Vassall, alderman of London, who had such wealth that at his personal expense, he fitted out two ships for the fleet of Sir Francis Drake that defeated the Spanish Armada and set England on the way to its supremacy of the seas.

I was personally interested in something that Mrs. Rollins’ History of Vassalboro tells about that John Vassall of the 16th century. She said he was a French Huguenot refugee whose Protestant belief had made it necessary for him to flee from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. That was exactly the case with my own paternal ancestor, John Marriner, who founded the American branch of the Marriner family. In the 17th century he came to Boston, and it was his son who was a pioneer at Cape Elizabeth in Maine, and from whom I am descended.

John Vassal had two sons who became interested in that part of the land across the Atlantic called New England. When there was organized in England the Massachusetts Bay Company, following the earlier Plymouth Company, to foster settlements in New England, it founded the colony at Boston and Salem under John Winthrop in 1630. In 1630 William Vassal arrived in Plymouth. Within a year he returned to England, but came back to America in 1635, this time to Boston. After 13 years there, he went to the West Indies island of Barbados, where the family had plantation interests. When William left Massachusetts, he was already one of its wealthiest men.

In England both William and Samuel Vassall were members of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Sam’s major colonial interest was in Barbados, where his son John became a prominent plantation owner and trader, and where his son William
succeeded him. It was that William Vassall who was the father of Florentius

Vassall, founder of Vassalboro, Maine. Florentius was thus the great grandson of Samuel Vassall of the Massachusetts Bay Company. The Vassalls were a prolific and prosperous family. One member of the Boston branch had 14 children. By 1750 four Vassalls had graduated from Harvard. One of them, Jonathan John Vassall, built Craigie House, the Cambridge mansion accepted by George Washington as his headquarters at the start of the Revolution, and later the home of the poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Like Dr. Sylvester Gardiner and several other Kennebec Proprietors, the Boston members of the Vassall family, at least the prominent ones, were Loyalists at the time when Massachusetts was the hotbed of revolt against Great Britain. As the Revolution cause came to prevail in the colony, Florentius Vassall, like Sylvester Gardiner, was forced to leave Boston, and both of them fled to England. Like Dr. Gardiner,the Vassalls had many of their American lands restored to them after long litigation, when the Revolution had ended.

Florentius Vassall was born in Barbados in 1709. As a young man he came to Boston where he developed a large business as merchant and ship owner, as well as investor in land development. Because many coastal vessels plying north from Boston entered the Kennebec River and came even above Merrymeeting Bay to the site of the present city of Hallowell, it is possible that Florentius Vassall did at some time see his Kennebec lands, but we have no substantial evidence that he ever came to Maine. Unlike Dr. Gardiner, he was never a resident on his Maine property.

How did Florentius Vassall get his Maine lands? In 1661 four men had bought from the Plymouth Colony the land on the Kennebec River that the colony had been granted by the King of England in 1629. It was a tract 15 miles on each side of the river from Merrymeeting Bay to the Wesserunsett Stream at Skowhegan. During the subsequent century hostility of French and Indians made it impossible for the four shareholders to get settlers.

In 1749 a group of Boston merchants, led by Dr. Sylvester Gardiner, felt the time had come to do something about that Kennebec land. They formed a corporation called the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase which immediately set about the formidable task of purchasing from the heirs of the four men of 1661 all rights in the Kennebec lands. The number of heirs they finally located were 192, so that complete ownership by the Proprietors was divided into 192 shares.

The Proprietors proceeded to divide the large tract among them according to their number of shares. Florentius Vassall received some tracts. One was in what is now the Town of Pittston, not far from the Company’s original settlement at Old Pownal borough, now Dresden. A large piece that came to him was 3,200 acres just north of the tract allotted to Benjamin Hallowell, so that Vassall’s south line adjoined the north line of what is now Augusta.

That Florentius Vassall had continuing interest in the Company’s whole tract, as well as in his personal holdings, is shown by a letter which Mrs. Rollins quotes in her History of Vassalboro. It was written by Vassall to Dr. Gardiner in 1769, and said: “Regarding the new lands 50 miles above Fort Halifax, you say they are a very good 40,000 acres. I recommend dividing them into such lots as was originally done for our own lots down the river. But I am not myself inclined to buy more land at this time. Instead I desire that the Company grant or sell to me land between my lot near Pownalborough
so as to bring my holdings through to the Sebasticook River.”

That letter shows that Vassall, in addition to his land above Augusta, had ownership to land near the present town of Dresden. Florentius Vassall was indeed more ambitious for development of the Kennebec Company’s land than the situation in mid-eighteenth century warranted. In 1753 he proposed to the Massachusetts Legislature that the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase be awarded an additional new grant from the unsettled lands belonging to Massachusetts in Maine. He asked that the Company be granted ownership of all land between the Kennebec and the St. Croix Rivers;
in other words, all of Eastern Maine.

The Massachusetts government assured Vassall that the requested grant would be made if the Company could have at least 5,000 settlers with an appropriate number of Protestant ministers in settlements all the way from the Kennebec to the St. Croix, three miles from the coast within two years. That stipulation could not be met. The French and Indians still stood in the way. After the Revolution several descendants of Florentius Vassall came to Maine, trying to secure through the courts compensation for what they claimed as their interest in lands held by others on the Kennebec. Those claims were not finally settled until the middle of the 19th century.

Leading Kennebec Proprietors besides Dr. Gardiner and Florentius VassaIl were Christopher Appleton, James and William Bowdoin, Benjamin Hallowell, Thomas Hancock and James Pitts. It was Pitts whose allotted land included Lot 105 of the McKechnie Survey in Waterville, the lot later developed by Timothy Boutelle, and on which stands Waterville’s oldest extant public building, the First Baptist Church.

In 1760 the Company found it necessary to survey and layout in lots that land north of Gardiner. They employed Nathan Winslow for the job. His designated lots 54 to 102 on the east side of the river became the present town of Vassalboro. But the Proprietors’ land then included also the west side, which is now Sidney. So originally Vassalboro included lots 35 to 82 on the west side of the river.

In colonial times Vassalboro was in the heart of British North America, sacred for the King’s masts. The King’s broad arrow became famous in England and infamous in New England. Allover Maine, where trees were anywhere near navigable waters, the King’s surveyors had placed the broad arrow on the tallest and straightest pines, signifying that the tree must not be cut by settlers on penalty of imprisonment.

As people settled the land and improved it, they resented the coming of the King’s representatives to take from their land those best pines. Even when the settler was just a squatter without a deed to the land, he made life difficult for the King’s men. However, so many of the Kennebec Proprietors were Loyalists that there was little official objection to removal of mast trees for the Royal Navy and merchant marine.

For many years there were disputes about the location of settler’s lots. The confusion was caused because so many deeds named boundaries that were natural objects which were obliterated with time. An important corner marker by a deed described as a large Norway pine, or a big red oak tree, eventually rotted away even if someone did not cut it. Even such a marker as a granite boulder might be blasted to make a foundation for a building. So, all along the Kennebec, land disputes have been in the courts for more than 200 years.

In 1771 the region had enough settlers so that the Massachusetts Legislature incorporated four towns – Winthrop, Hallowell, Vassalboro and Winslow. The act incorporating Vassalboro said: “Incorporating a tract of land in the County of Lincoln into a territory by the name of Vassalboro, bounded as follows: Beginning on the east side of the Kennebec River in the north line of lot number fifty; and running from the Kennebec River on said line, an east-southeast course, five miles (being bounded thus far by the Town of Hallowell); from thence to run northerly about eight miles, more or less, on
such a course as to meet the east end of a line running five miles east southeast from the Kennebec River along the southerly line of lot number 102, fronting on said Kennebec River; from thence to run west-northwest on last mentioned line to Kennebec River and to run on the same course across said river and continuing for five miles; from thence to run southerly to the northwesterly corner of the Town of Hallowell; from thence to run east-southeast five miles along the north line of said town to the Kennebec River; and over said river to the first mentioned bounds.”

The warrant to call Vassalboro’s first town meeting was issued to a member of a family that became well known in both Vassalboro and Winslow. Jonas Howard was authorized to call together the legal voters within the designated limits to elect officers and start operating as a town in 1771.

And with that brief account of ancient Vassalboro, we say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1981