Radio Script #291
Little Talks On Common Things
February 5, 1956
I have just been looking again at the old atlas of 1868, from which I got my information on the lack of any attention to Christmas during the Civi I War.
On one page of that atlas are depicted the coats of arms of the states, and there are only 34 coats of arms. Yes, 34 was the complete number of states in 1868. The map of the United States shows no North or South Dakota, but only one vast Dakota Territory. There is no Oklahoma and no Wyoming, but there is a tract marked Indian Territory, out of part of which the now great state of Oklahoma was later carved.
The map of Maine shows Presque Isle, but not Caribou, which is designated as Eaton Grant Plantation. Van Buren is also marked as a plantation. Coming farther south, however, we find that in 1868 the now almost deserted lands of Brighton and Mayfield, north of Athens, were prosperous towns.
In 1860, just before the Civi I War broke out, Maine had in its population 1,327 Negroes, but al I of them were freed men. Maine had not a single slave. The largest number of Negroes, as you might suppose, were in Portland and nearby towns in Cumberland County, but there were 174 of them in Washington County and 144 in Kennebec. Only Piscataquis was entirely without Negroes in its population, although Oxford had on Iy two.
During the past half century we have seen so many states jump far ahead of Maine in popu I ati on, it is hard to rea I i ze what those states were like in 1860. Ma i ne then had 627,000 people. Kansas, which only six years earlier had seen the bitter confl ict that gave it the name of “Bloody Kansas”, had 107,000 people only one-sixth the population of Maine. Iowa, on the contrary, had already exceeded Maine, with 675,000 inhabitants. Minnesota was only slightly larger than Kansas, with 172,000, whi Ie the whole vast state of Texas had fewer people than Maine — just under 600,000.
California, which now has a single city with four times the population of the whole state of Maine, had only 380,000 in 1860, half as many as Maine. Oregon had 52,000.
By 1868 most of the country west of the Mississippi had not achieved statehood. The western territories were then Colorado, Dakota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Washington and Indian Territory. All together they had a population of less than 240,000.
The old atlas shows Canada divided into six sections: Upper Canada, Lower Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward and Newfoundland. The modern student of South America would hardly recognize some of the national names in the 1868 atlas. For instance, the Confederation of New Granada included Panama, Magdalena, Santander, .Antiaquia, Cundinanoca and Cauca. While Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay and Ch i Ie are listed as rep ub I i cs, the great regi on of the Amazon is designated the Empire of Brazi I, and in addition to the Argentine Republic, South America had in 1868 the separate Republic of Buenos Aires.
The map of Europe contained then some designations utterly unfami liar to the modern American schoolboy. Germany was then sp lit up far worse than it was by World War II. Separate and independent German states were Brunswick, Hanover, Baden, Nassau, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg and Waldeck. Completely independent cities, subject to no German state, were Hamburg, Bremen and LUbeck.
Italy too was broken up into independent principalities such as Lombardy, Piedmont, The Marches, Umbria, Tuscany and Naples; whi Ie five districts, including Rome, made up the Papal States under the jurisdiction of the Vatican.
In 1868 North Africa, which is such a seething bed of revolt today, was called the Barbary States, consisting of Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria and Morocco. The atlas cal Is another part the Region of the Ni Ie, including Egypt, Nubia, Sennar and Abyssinia. Central Africa was al I cal led the Soudan or Negroland. South Africa, where today racial discrimination is at its worst, was divided into Cape Colony and Natal, both British, the Orange River Free State and the Transvaal Republic, settled by the Dutch, and wi Id native territory called Zulu Country and Hottentot Country.
When the 1868 atlas was published, the famous pony express was at its height in the west. So it is appropriate here to refer to an advertisement which appeared in the San Francisco newspapers in March, 1860. It read: “Wanted — young, skinny, wiry fellows not over 18. Must be expert riders wi Iling to risk death dai Iy. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 per week. Apply to Central Overland Express, San Franci sco.”
I really thought we had done with Thomas Flint and his relatives, but here are a few more i nteresti ng i terns about them. Sarah Bi xby, daughter of L lewe llyn Bi xby, was the person who collected most of the information about the members of the fami Iy who went to California. She was born on the San Justo Ranch, near San Juan Bautista, an old mission town near Monterey, about a hundred miles south of San Francisco.
Because her father was born in Maine and because she attended Wellesley College, Sarah Bixby called herself a daughter of California, granddaughter of Maine, and foster chi Id of Massachusetts. Her father Llewlelyn Bixby was one of exactly a hundred grandchi Idren of Benjamin and Anna Weston. In 1851 Llewellyn had graduated from Bloomfield Academy and was studying engineering in Watervi I Ie. It would be interesting to know where and with whom he started that study, for his name does not appear on the rol Is of Colby Col lege. Probably he was some sort of apprentice because, as Sarah Bi xby te II s it, one day L lewe llyn’s father ca lied at the Watervi lie shop where the young man was working and suggested that he join his brother Amasa and his cousin Thomas Flint on a trip to California, where Flint’s brother Benjamin had already gone in 1849.
As we have previously seen, the three arrived in California in July, 1851. The next year Llewellyn’s two brothers, Marcellus and Jotham, joined the group, making the trip from Maine to California, not across the Isthmus, but around Cape Horn. Ultimately all of Llewellyn’s brothers and sisters fol lowed him to the west, as wei I as many cousins and friends. Sarah Bixby tells us that, in the presidential election of 1860, all the men in Paso Pueblo who voted for Lincoln came from Somerset County, Maine.
Sarah tells us about the big San Justo ranch house. ‘~he house was reminiscent of Maine, with white paint, green blinds, and sharp gables edged with wooden lace looking like icicles. Mamma would keep saying ‘When I was a little girl in Maine’, unti I to me Maine meant paradise. Life in California was very tame compared with the imagined joys in Maine.”
Not only her mother, but her father, also regaled Sarah Bixby’s chi Idhood with stories about Maine. He told her he had been born in a brick farmhouse on the banks of the Kennebec River in Norridgewock. There was no kitchen stove and no matches. His mother spun and wove wool from the farm sheep, and dyed it in a big indigo pot. Once a year a trave ling shoemaker came to the farmhouse and made shoes from a hi de saved from a slaughtered cow.
Sarah remembered wei I her father’s description of his boyhood best Sunday clothes: trousers half way between knee and ankle, a short round jacket, collar so high he could not turn his head, although he could rest his neck during the long sermon by using his ears as hooks over the top of the collar. A stovepipe hat completed the outfit.
When Llewellyn Bixby went to Bloomfield Academy, where the study of French had just been fashionably introduced, he spurned the language, and took instead a course in astronomy. He said the science stood him in much better stead in his career thaR would a whole dictionary of French words.
Sarah Bixby says that, when the three young men drove that big flock of sheep across the country in 1853, their route from Great Salt Lake to San Bernardino in Southern California fol lowed the Fremont Trai I, and that all the way from Illinois they used Horne’s Guidebook, which mapped the western routes in considerable detai I. Dr. Thomas Flint returned to Maine to get a wife, marrying Mary Mitchel I of Anson. His brother Ben married Caroline Getchel I of the same town. Llewellyn Bixby also returned to Somerset County for his wife, who was Sarah Hathaway of Bloomfield.
With their brides all three hastened back to California.
Sarah Bixby gives an interesting account of her father’s marriage. She says he went to a church party at the home of Rev. Hathaway in Bloomfield. He had been told that the parson’s second daughter Margaret was especially beautiful. But when he saw both of the parson’s daughters, it was not Margaret, but her older sister Sarah, who appealed to Llewellyn. He speedi Iy asked her to marry him, just as speedi Iy won her consent, and within a few weeks they were off to California by way of the Isthmus of Panama.
Later Llewellyn’s brother Jotham returned to Norridgewock for a visit. He called at the Rev. Hathaway’s to bring greetings from Sarah. He was met at the gate by Margaret and was completely smitten. She would not consent to go to California with him when he returned, but within a year had relented, joined Jotham in California, and married him there. When he was 80 years old, Jotham Bixby told his niece Sarah that his wife not only had been the most beautiful woman in California, but she sti I I was.
I suppose many people suppose that Lincoln County in Maine was named for Abraham Lincoln, but that county was named half a century. before Abraham Lincoln was born. Unti I 1760 the whole of Maine had been a single county of York. Then two additional counties, Cumberland and Lincoln, were established. Cumberland extended from the Saco River to the Androscoggin; Lincoln comprised the rest of Maine to the St. Croix River. Pownalborough, now Dresden, became the seat of Lincoln County.
It was named for Thomas Pownall,then governor of the Province of Massachusetts, and it was in honor of Pownall also that the county got its name, for he had been a native of Lincoln, England.
In 1760 the county had only five substantial towns: Pownalborough, Georgetown, Newcastle, Woolwich and Topsham.
On several occasions I have mentioned the squatters whose plight became pitiful in many parts of Maine in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Almost as soon as Lincoln County was established in 1760, trouble began. By far the most troublesome of al I questions confronting the inhabitants related to land titles.
The old English system of absentee landlords with rent paying tenants had become I itt Ie more than unp leasant memory. As a resu It the pioneer sett lers in Li nco I n County had acquired a high sense of freedom. But obtaining exclusive title to the land was hemmed around by difficulties so great as to make such titles almost impossible. Whole communities were without legal title to the homes they had established. Individual ownership of land by a commoner was unknown in English law. That right was distinctly an American innovation.
The chief problem in Lincoln County arose over what were known as the crown lands. Under the royal charters the land had not been given outright to the grantees, but only the right to rule over it. When the province, with its capital at Boston, began to incorporate towns and plantations in Western Maine, the argument was presented by those townsmen that Ferdinando’Gorges_had title to the soil under his charter, and that when Massachusetts bought the Gorges rights, the province . became owners of the land. But in Eastern Maine the territory ~as unquestionably crown land. So when towns were incorporated east of the Saco, they were given landed rights subject to approval by the King.
When the successful Revolutionary War and the subsequent adoption of the federal constitution ushered in the new republic of the United States, it was assumed that Massachusetts owned al I lands which had not otherwise been conveyed. But there was the joker. Exactly what lands had been otherwise conveyed? Numerous grants and concessions had been bestowed upon different and disagreeing parties.
Some had been transferred, others had been abandoned. None had been defi ned by surveys. Lincoln County especially, with its undefined aggregation of townships, plantations, crown lands, wi Id lands and private holdings, had a turmoil of titles.
In 1810 the Governor of Massachusetts cal led attention of the legislature to the “unhappy disputes affecting territorial claims in Lincoln County”. As a result a commission was established, which reported in 1813.
confus i ng that they recommended the conveyance of a II by the sett lers, with the clear understandi ng that the They found the situation so rights to the Commonwealth state would then make fair and reasonable allotment of the disputed lands. The proposal was accepted and gradua I I y the seri es of so-ca lied squatter wars came to an end.
Year: 1956