Radio Script #377

Little Talks on Common Things

April 20, 1958

At the time of the Revolution all of Maine was divided into only three counties, York, Cumberland and Lincoln. Since Waterville was then a part of Winslow, and Winslow was then in Lincoln County, it is interesting to recall some facts gleaned from the Lincoln County records of long ago.

One date is familiar to all citizens of this region who have any interest at all in local history. That date is 1754, the year when Fort Halifax was built. As many of you know, the reason why that fort was erected was because of pressure brought on the Massachusetts colonial government by the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase. The ownership of the Kennebec lands, which had passed through several hands since the King 1 s original grant to the Plymouth Colony, had in 1750 come into possession of a group of men, centered in Boston, who formed a corporation called the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase, popularly known as the New Plymouth Company. In order to make their lands safer for settlement, that company persuaded the Massachusetts government to erect Fort Halifax at Winslow and Fort Western at Augusta.

Before 1760 there had not been even the three counties that Maine had during the Revolution. The whole extent of what is now the state of Maine consisted of a single county, York, or as it was called in the legal documents, Yorkshire.

As settlements had gradually increased to the eastward and it became more and more inconvenient for people to track all the way to the shire town of York to attend court or file legal papers, a sort of secondary county seat was established at Georgetown near the mouth of the Kennebec. Courts were held there for several years, but they were still subject to jurisdiction from York. So it was not long after the building of Fort Halifax that agitation began for the formation of a separate county.

In 1760 that agitation bore fruit. The General Court of Massachusetts organized a new county named Lincoln, and at the same time grouped the settlements at Wiscasset Point, New Milford and Dresden into a single incorporated town called Pownalborough. It was made the shire town of the new county, and as such demanded a court house. Therefore in 1762 there was built the structure which still stands on the east bank of the Kennebec, not far from the village of Dresden Mills – the structure we usually call the old Pownalborough  Court House.- There on June 1, 1762 the new county’s first court of general sessions was held. One of its first acts was to adopt an official seal, concerning which the old record says: “Ordered, that a seal presented by Samuel Dewey, the mount whereof being a cup and three mullets, the lawful arms of the Dewey family, with said Dewey’s name in the verge thereof, be accepted as the common seal of this court.”

r have told you this background of history to bring out the point that in the 37 years between 1762 and 1799, when Kennebec County was established, the center for all legal actions in what is now greater Waterville was that Lincoln County Court House’ at Powna1.borough. Whether it be actual litigation or the registering of a deed, or the probate of a will by any citizen of the communities that are now Waterville, Winslow, Fairfield, Oakland, Vassalboro and Sidney, the legal procedures took place and the legal records were made and kept at the Pownalboro Court House r tis in those Pownal borough re~ords ,- therefore” . that we -glean some interesting facts concerning the early inhabitants of this region. For instance, there is the will of John McKechnie, the man who surveyed the lots of Waterville, built the first frame house in this town, used his medical skill to attend sick soldiers of Benedict Arnold’s army when they stopped at Fort Halifax in 1775, and perhaps most important of all, when he made his survey, had the shrewdness to reserve for himself Lot 103, controlling the water power of Ticonic Falls.

One factor that always intrigues me is the way many important families in the early days were closely related. What John McKechnie was to Waterville, John North was to Augusta. Both men were the leaders in giving their towns firm foundations. Well, John McKechnie married Mary, the daughter of John North, and when North himself died, this is one item that was found in his will: “I give to my daughter Mary, now called Mary McKechnie, the sum of l: 10 sterling, to be paid equally by my wife and two sons out of what I have before in this will given to them.”

John McKechnie died in 1783. The foremost early settler of Winslow, Ezekiel Pattee, with two other Winslow men, took inventory of McKechnie’s estate and valued it at l: 1,049.11, a respectable amount for a settler in a pioneer wilderness. The wife was appointed administratrix and was also made legal guardian of the six minor children.

Into the alliance of the McKechnies and the Norths now came the Pattees, for in 1794 Mary North McKechnie became the wife of David, the son of Ezekiel Pattee. The law took cognizance of that fact by setting aside for Mary her widow’s dower rights and dividing the rest of the estate among McKechnie’s twelve children. And in the names of his daughters by the court record we get another glimpse of interrelated families. McKechnie’s daughter Mary was the wife of James Stackpole, Jr., one of Waterville’s most prominent citizens in the first half of the nineteenth century, and for many years Treasurer of Waterville College. Rebecca was the wife of Simeon Tozier;Sarah the wife of Abraham Stewart, and Elizabeth the wife of Samuel McFarland. l.£ we set about tracing them we would find a goodly number of people in this Kennebec Valley who can claim some sort of relationship to that remarkable pioneer citizen of Waterville, John McKechnie.

You have heard me tell about Aunt Hannah Cool, the woman whom our people of 150 years ago called a witch, although she was a kindly Good Samaritan to all the neighborhood. Aunt Hannah got that reputation largely because she so long outlived her husband and because she lived alone in a little house on Silver Street.

It was on September 26, 1773, nearly two years before the outbreak of the Revolution, when Hannah was named administratrix of the estate of her departed husband, John Peter Cool. The chief taker of that estate’s inventory was none other than John McKechnie, and they found that Cool had left his wife property worth h 95. 10. No big sum indeed, but it was a competence for those days, and Aunt Hannah was by no means in poverty.

One of this region’s first wills to contain a public bequest was that of Sherebiah Towne of Winslow in 1790. After leaving 40 shillings lawful money of Massachusetts to his father, five shillings each to his brother Ephraim and his sister Betty, and 10 shillings to his sister Hannah, Towne decreed: “I give and bequeath the remainder of my estate, lands, goods and chattels, for the support of a school in a plantation lying eastward of Winslow, known by the name of Freetown at this time, and I constitute the selectmen of Vassalboro and Winslow to be the trustees of the estate that is left for schooling.”

Many of the old wills went into great detail in distributing the testator’s possessions. The will of Benjamin Gardiner, filed at the old Pownalboro Court House in 1788 said: “To my son Abdiah my best suit of wearing apparel; to my other three sons the rest of my wearing apparel; to my daughter Mary my silver cup; to my daughter Hannah my looking glass; to my daughter Sabrina my clock.”

An interesting anti-climax closes the will of Dennis Getchell of Vassalboro, filed in 1790: “To my son Dennis the whole lot of land I now live on, being the front division of Lot No. 85, east side of the Kennebec River in Vassalboro; also the remainder of my estate, both real and personal; he on his part paying all my joint debts and agreeing to support in a comfortable manner my wife Margaret during her state of widowhood; also to support and educate, according to reasonable expectations,’ my six children – Margaret, David, Constance, Lydia, Fanny and Mary, until the girls shall come to the age of 18 and my son David to 21, at which time my son Dennis shall give to each of my daughters one cow.”

One of the largest estates probated at the old court house in the years before the Kennebec Company was formed was that of John Gardiner of Pownalboro, a relative of the region’s great patron, Dr. Sylvester Gardiner. The administrator was John Sylvester Gardiner of Boston, and the bondsmen were Robert Hallowell of Boston, the proprietor for whom the town of Hallowell was named, and William Gardiner of Pownalboro, another of the great Gardiner clan. The appraisers listed that estate as worth k 2,501. 13.7t, a sum that equals about $40,000 in modern purchasing power.

So much for the wills from the Pownalboro Court House. Now let me tell you a bit more about Drummond Farnsworth of Norridgewock, the man whom last week we traced on two long journeys early in the nineteenth century. Farnsworth was an adventurous soul, and as a youth had encountered an adventurous career at sea. In fact he had beaten so much about the world that when he came to settle down he actually had to prove his American citizenship. That he did so is shown by an interesting old document preserved by Farnsworth’s great-granddaughter, Miss Meroe Morse of Waterville. That document says: “I, Joshua Wingate, Collector of the Port of Boston, Mass., do hereby certify that Drummond Farnsworth, an American seaman, age 17 years or thereabouts, of the height of 5 ft. 8 ins., light complexion, brown hair, hazel eyes, and two scars on his right foot, claiming to be a native of Norridgewock in the State of Maine, has this day produced to me proof, in the manner directed by the act entitled ‘An Act for the” Relief and Protection of American Seamen, and pursuant to said act I do hereby certify that Drummond Farnsworth is a citizen of the United States in Boston, August 5, 1807.”

Drummond Farnsworth was an important man in Somerset County. His commission as 2nd Lieutenant in the War of 1812 was signed by President James Madison. He was long a justice of the peace, getting his original appointment from Maine’s first governor, William King, in 1821. Gov. John Fairfield — he of Aroostook War fame — commissioned Farnsworth a major in the state militia. for some twenty years he was Judge of Probate of Somerset County, was Postmaster of Norridgewock, and several times its Representative in the Legislature. In the years during the Civil War he was claim agent for soldier’s claims for payor pensions.

Born in Norridgewock in 1789, Drummond Farnsworth died in the same town in 1866, having lived a rich and useful life for two-thirds of a century.

Readers of old newspapers are aware that the editors of rival papers never tired of needling each other. One of the old papers lasted well up into this century, namely the Portland Advertiser. In 1870 the Advertiser took a dig at one of the religious journals published in Portland, the Watchman and Reflector. This is what the Advertiser said: “Some of the religious papers which like to distinguish carefully between their religious and secular news go pretty far in their distinction. The Watchman and Reflector is so scrupulous to keep the worldly separate from the divine that it prints death notices in its religious department, while it banishes marriages to its secular portion. Apparently to die is a religious act, but to get married is a worldly fling.”

Year: 1958