Radio Script #76
Little Talks On Common Things
September 24, 1950When our broadcasting season closed last spring we had left unanswered the question about Ten Lots. What is the story of that settlement? How did :it get its name? How did it happen to play a prominent part in the early history of Waterville?
Gathering the” exact facts about that interesting settlement has not been easy. Mr. H. F. Sturtevant, descendant of the most prominent of the early settlers, has been most helpful, putting me in touch with several persons who have documentary information to support their own memories.
In a short article in the Portland Sunday Telegram of August 13, 1950 (this year) the reporter states: “The community of Ten Lots was settled in 1784 When a colony of Quakers contracted with the Plymouth Colony of Massachusetts for an 8,000 acre tract of land to be located by their agent. The agent, Elihu Bowman, surveyed and charted the tract. Then the Quakers came. There were only three families settled there at the time. Later ten other families made application to the colony, and another grant of 2,000 acres was procured. This has been known ever since as Ten Lots.”
Now none of my sources — and I think they go back pretty accurately to the old settlers say anything about Quakers. It is, of course, possible that one or two Quaker families had preceded the official Ten Lot settlers, and did live somewhere in the vicinity. But if that is true, Rufus Jones ought to have heard about it. In 1892,· when Kingsbury produced his History of Kennebec County, he asked the young principal of Oak Grove Seminary to write a chapter on the Society of Friends. That young principal was the man destined to become the greatest Quaker of our times, Rufus Jones. In careful detail he wrote for Kingsbury I s history the story of Quaker settlements and the establishment of Friends’ meetings in Kennebec County. He makes no mention of Ten Lots. When we recognize the care with which Dr. Jones always assembled his historical data, that silence is significant. Of course, Ten Lots is now in Somerset County, but that was not true when the settlement was made.
Mrs. Electa Mitchell of Oakland, though now entirely without her eyesight, has gone to the trouble of typing me an account of Ten Lots, which she obtained many years ago from Mrs. Alice Gilman, a descendent of the same Lot Sturtevant who was H. F. Sturtevant’s ancestor.
As Mrs. Gilman told the story· to Mrs. Mitchell, Lot Sturtevant was a Revolutionary soldier. “After receiving his discharge from the army, he came to Maine with two other young men. They came up the Kennebec River by canoe.
When they reached the mouth of the Messalonskee Stream, they decided it would be interesting to follow it. They were looking for good corn land, and held the belief, common in those days, that reddish rocks indicated good· soil for corn. Along the shore, near what is now Ten Lots, they found such rocks. Moreover the land sloped to the east. Here was the place to settle.”
Interesting as is the account attributed to Mrs. Gilman, it is at variance with the documentary evidence. The best of that evidence is a paper read before the Pine Tree Club of Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1896 by Martha Sturtevant Coolidge, grandaughter of Lot Sturtevan~. For the principal facts in this paper I am endebted to Mrs. E. P. Chaney of Freeport, grand niece of Mrs. Coolidge.
Mrs. Coolidge wrote this paper when she was 76 years old, and of course it is possible that some of the facts originally told her by her grandfather and other elderly neighbors had been dimmed by the years •. At. any rate she told a different story from Mrs. Gilman’s. Her grandfather, she says, joined the Continental Army in 1776, when he was only 16 years old. His father and two older brothers also fought in the Revolution. Lot w~s honorably discharged from the army in 1780. He and nine other men secured a grant from the proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase. Probably this was one of those Revolutionary grants common at the time. There was very little cash to pay the soldiers, but there was plenty of land.
So Lot Sturtevant and his nine companions came to Maine to take up their claim. They came, of course, by boat along the coast to the mouth of the Kennebec, then up the river to the head of navigation at Ticonic Falls. They probably spent several days in the town of Winslow, which had sprung up not only around Fort Halifax, but across the river as well.
Mrs. Coolidge says, “They penetrated the woods and about five miles west of the river found a stretch of country with an immense growth of hard wood. They chose it for their own and pitched their tents, all ten adjoining one another. From the beginning the ten adjoining tracts of land were called Ten Lots.”
Now in respect to the way these settlers penetrated the woods, Mrs. Gilman may be right. Mrs. Coolidge implies, but does not state, that they went on foot. It is more likely that they went by canoe up the Messalonskee to the vicinity of Rice’s Rips. But it is not likely that they picked a settlement because of reddish rocks. They were taking up land already surveyed with lots already charted.
Having found the place, Lot Sturtevant and his nine companions built log cabins, planted corn and flax, and one after another returned to Massachusetts to marry and bring back the girls who had been waiting for them.
The names of Lot’s nine companions were apparently unknown to Mrs. Coolidge, but there must be some record about them. Mrs. Chaney, my Freeport correspondent, says she had long been convinced that one of Lot’s brothers was one of the ten. She says that when she was a small child and stayed with her grandmother at Ten Lots, nearly every house was owned by a sturtevant. Yet a good many years had already gone by since the original settlement, and· the descendents of Lot’s eight children would fill many houses. Lot’s son, Reward Sturtevant, had eleven children, among them the Mrs. Coolidge who wrote the 1896 paper. Another of ReWard’s children was Mrs. Chaney’s grandfather, Reward Augustus Sturtevant, who brought his bride to Ten Lots in 1866.
I am sure my listeners all know that the great benefactor of Oakland was Milton LaForest Williams. It was he who built the lovely little chapel at Ten Lots in memory of his grandfather, Asa Bates. Was a Bates one of the ten original settlers, or did that family come later?
Mrs. Chaney· tells an interesting story about Mr. Williams’ first trip to New York. Determined to go there, he was trying to raise the money. He approached Reward Sturtevant, Mrs. Chaney’s grandfather, who paid him $13 for a few sheep. As all Oakland knows, Mr. Williams made a fortune in New York.
He not only gave Oakland a high school and Ten Lots a chapel, but he remembered the old friends and neighbors at Ten Lots. To Reward Sturtevant he gave a thousand dollars for every dollar Mr. Sturtevant had paid him for the sheep, a splendid gift of $13,000, coming to Mrs. Chaney’s aged grandfather just before his death in 1919, When he was 90 years old.
The original chapel is said to have been built at Ten Lots in 1836. It was from the first a union church, but its association with the Baptists was very close. As one of the tablets on the front of the chapel testifies, Samuel Francis Smith, author of America, was its early minister. Smith had become pastor of the First Baptist Church in Waterville and Professor of Modern Languages at Colby in 1834. Like most of those early pastors, he ministered to more than one church, and from 1838 to 1842 he regularly preached at Ten Lots as well as at his principal church in Waterville.
Vital interest in religion at Ten Lots had long preceded the building of the 1836 chapel. The old records of Waterville’s First Baptist Church, to which I have had frequent access, make that point clear. In that church’s third pastorate, that of Rev. Harvey Fitts in 1830, ten persons from Ten Lots united with the Waterville church, seven of them being members of the Bates family. Of this incident, Mrs. Minnie Philbrick, the church historian, writing a hundred years later said: “In 1830 a revival sprang up, beginning as has many another at Ten Lots. These new members formed a strong corps of helpers, and their relatives and descendents are still in our church and hold the same high ideals as those who first came to us in 1830.”
In his “Personal Recollections”, written when he was a very old man in 1890, Samuel Francis Smith said: “I found my congregation at Waterville somewhat peculiar, being made up of three elements — the college, the village people, and the families from the farms in different directions for five miles. In 1838 there was a season of deep religious interest which had its origin in the families at Ten Lots and thence extended to other parts of the town. The singing of familiar hymns had a large place in the social services, especially at Ten Lots. There was no visible excitement and no sensational disclosures. The spirit spoke with still small voice, and human hearts listened and obeyed.”
I’m sure this isn’t the last we shall hear about Ten Lots. There is much more than the names of Lot Sturtevant’s nine companions still to be learned.
Who will help us?
We have just a few minutes left to turn to a contemporary subject. In these very troublous times, when the cold war of diplomacy and economics has turned to the hot zing of bullets and the crash of bombs, it is well for us to reflect how the Russian government has maneuvered this situation so that not a single Russian soldier faces our troops in Korea. That is the Russian strategy — to take over, by native communist domination the government of one nation after another. Then, when a situation like that in Korea forces u. N. intervention, it is the natives, not the Russians, who fight the u. N. forces.
So, just for a moment, notice how Stalin and his Kremlin company proceed to take over a country. Let us look at Rumania. In 1940 Rumania with a population 6f 16 million had less than a thousand Communists. In 1945 Soviet troops occupied Rumania and forced King Michael to name a Communist stooge, Peter Groza, as prime minister. By 1946 the Communist government had broken.
up the big estates, given land to the peasants and increased wages; had, in short, made their usual bid for popularity. Opposition parties were still tolerated. But in 1946 all voters were ordered to approve a single slate of candidates picked by the Communists. Russian managers now ran Rumania’s industries.
In 1947 the Communist government adopted another well known Russian device — they put on a nation-wide purge of non-Communist leaders, jailing thousands and executing more than a hundred. King Michae~ was forced to abdicate.
In 1948 the Rumanian parliament, without debate, approved by 414 votes to none, the new Rumanian constitution. Under it, Stalin’s friend, Mrs. Aria pauker, got full power. In 1949 Moscow ordered a Rumanian party purge, ousting all who deviated from the party line. Leaders of the church were especially persecuted. Rumania’s entire economy was now run from Moscow.
In this autumn of 1950 what is the situation? All opposition to Moscow’s will has disappeared. Rumania can at any time be incorporated into the Soviet union by a mere telephone call from Moscow.
That is quite a story of ten short years. In 1940 less than a thousand Communists in Rumania; in 1950 completely Communist, and, what is more, complete Russian domination of the country. That, my friends, is the way Joe Stalin takes over a nation in these very troublous times.
Year: 1950