Radio Script #520

Little Talks on Common Things

January 7, 1962

As frequently as this program has referred to the town of Fairfield, I do not recall that I have ever discussed the origins of the town. In “Kennebec Yesterdays” I included’ a chapter on William Bryant, who was a prominent farmer and town officer in Fairfield during the first half of the 19th century, and in another chapter I have told about the town’s early settler, Elihu Bowerman, whose grave one can find plainly marked in the carefully kept old Quaker cemetery at North Fairfield. But how did the town happen to be settled at all?

Unfortunately we have no complete, published history of Fairfield, and in fact we have none of Somerset County. There is a good history of Waterville, two book-length histories of Norridgewock, a short paper-bound history of Benton, and Louise Coburn’s excellent two-volume history of Skowhegan. But of Fairfield I have found only a few short accounts. We must therefore rely on very brief records for information about the town’s early days.

In 1909 there was published a Town Register of Benton, Clinton and Fairfield, which consists chiefly of statistics, a list of officers in each town since its incorporation, and for each town a long section called “Census”, giving the name of every person living in the town in 1904. It is true that, for each of the three towns, the book contains a very short historical sketch,which refers to early settlers, but gives no hint as to why they came.

Fortunately, before his death, Mr. Stephen Wing wrote a brief historical sketch of the town, a typed copy of which is now in the Lawrence Public Library. From Mr. Wing’s account, from the 1909 Register, and from a few other sources, comes the information I now want to give you. It is very incomplete and I shall welcome gladly anything further any listener can tell me.

Like all the rest of this part of Maine, along the Kennebec River from the mouth of the Cobbossee to Caratunk Falls, the town of Fairfield was part of the original grant to the old Plymouth Colony of 1620, which the Colony sold in 1661 to four men, one of whom was John Winslow, and which in 1750 was sold by the heirs of those men to a group of land speculators called the New Plymouth Company.

Even before the building of Fort Halifax in 1754, there were a few scattered settlers between Ticonic Falls and Norridgewock, but they could scarcely be called permanent. Most of them were seasonal trappers, unmarried men, or men who for the trapping season left their wives and families in a more settled region. It is possible that, just before the Revolution, settlement rights had been granted to a few men along that part of the river that is now Fairfield, but it is equally possible that those earliest settlers were actually squatters whose rights came to be recognized later by negotiation with the legal proprietors.

At any rate, from the account of Arnold’s Expedition in 1775, we learn that David Emery enlisted in Arnold’s army, and left his farm on the Kennebec, a short distance above the island at what is now Fairfield Village, to follow Arnold on the dreadful march to Quebec. It is also said that the first white child born in the town was David Emery’s son Samuel, born in June, 1773, two years before Arnold’s Expedition passed up the river.

In 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, the first cabin was built in what is now Fairfield Village. Beside the river, on a plot near where Western Avenue now leaves the Skowhegan Road, a log cabin was put up by a man who called himself Peter Pushard. His family later changed the name to Fishon, and when one of his descendants built a frame house in what is now Hinckley, there was started the transportation across the Kennebec that was for many years known as Fishon’s Ferry, near the site of the present Hinckley Bridge. The Emerys, the Pishons, and probably several other settlers, had cabins along the river bank before the famous Nye-Dirmriock survey of 1782. On October 11, 1781 the New Plymouth ”

Company sold to two Massachusetts men, Joseph Nye of Sandwich and Joseph Dimmock. of Sandwich, a tract of land on the west side of the Kennebec above Winslow. The tract comprised 11,700 acres and included nearly all of what is now the town of Fairfield.

The next year they surveyed the tract into 60 lots of 195 acres each and began to secure settlers. What terms Nye and Dimmock made with the Emerys, the Pishons and other people already on the land is unknown. But the terms must have been satisfactory because the older settlers kept their land. Even before the survey had been made, one prospective settler had picked a site. Elihu Bowerman had come down from Massachusetts in the late autumn of 1781 and had staked out a lot in what is now North Fairfield. The following summer he completed his log cabin and took his wife to that lonely home, with the nearest neighbor six miles away. Other settlers secured lots along the old trail to Norridgewock, especially in the section between Fish Brook in Fairfield Center and Martin Stream in North Fairfield, and on those two streams saw mills were built before 1800. Here are a few family names of the first settlers, both in that inland area and along the river from Waterville to Hinckley: Atwood, Bowerman, Blackwell, Emery, Gifford, Holway, Hoxie, Kendall, Lawrence, Nye, Shepard, Tobey and Wing.

In 1781, when Nye and Dimmock secured their purchase, no one knew how soon the Revolutionary War would be over, but many suspected it was drawing to a close. The two proprietors were anxious to secure settlers because their conditions of purchase stated that they must have a settler on each of their 60 lots “within one year after the present war with Great Britain shall be terminated”. Naturally Nye and Dimmock turned to people in their own communi ties of Falmou th, Sandwich and other towns of Barnstable County, Mass. The Diaunocks never came to Fairfield, but the Nyes did — so many of them that in a few years a dozen different cabins were occupied by families named Nye.

The proprietors did such a fine job securing settlers that in seven short years their tract of 11,000 acres had enough inhabitants to incorporate as a town. In 1788 the Massachusetts Legislature incorporated the Town of Fairfield with the following boundaries: “From the Proprietors’ Mill Lot marked I on the northerly line of Winslow on the west side of the Kennebec, thence west northwest along the course of the north line of Winslow six miles; thence north, 8-1/2 degrees west, about 6-1/2 miles to the line running an east course and striking the southeast corner of Lot 34 in the town of Canaan on the Kennebec River, thence to the river; then down the river to the starting point.”

l!·our years after Peter Pishon built his cabin near the eastern end of what is now Fairfield’s Western Avenue, there came to the place the man who was to be the town’s most famous figure during its first half century. General William Kendall, a veteran of the revolution, arrived in 1780 and took the lot next south of Pishon’s, where he built a log cabin, which he occupied until he built a substantial frame house farther south near the present Lawrence Avenue. Immediately, in 1781, the very year when Nye and Dimmock were purchasing the whole tract, General Kendall built a saw and grist mill on the Mill Pond, just above the island at Fairfield Village, and for nearly a century afterward the village Was called Kendalls Mills. The General became the wealthiest and most influential man in the community.

One of the provisions of the Nye-Dimmock purchase had been that, within five years, a road must be built through the tract. An old record says: “Required to layout a road 8 rods wide within five years, the Proprietors built such a road across the tract, through its center.” The date is not given, but, since the Proprietors’ rights were not later contested it must have been before 1787.

The question that intrigues us today is “Where was that road located?1I Does 1 t still exist? That is a question I want help in answering. My best guess at present is that it ias approximately the line of the present Western Avenue from Fair- field Village to Fairfield Center. I admit that road is quite a bit south of the center of the Nye-Dimmock tract, but is there any other road — even one now abandoned — that meets the purpose anywhere between Western Avenue and Hinckley? The Ohio Hill Road, from Nye’s Corner to Fairfield Center, is much too far north to be in the center of the tract. Well, who can come up with the correct answer? What was the road that Nye and Dimmock built from east to west across the middle of their 11,700 acres some time between 1782 and 1787?”

Another intriguing question is: “Why, in spite of the river and its transportation opportunities, did Fairfield Center at first grow faster than Fairfield Village?” In 1800 the Center not only had more people, it also had the first church and the first school. In 1788, at the first town meeting, the Center got two of the three selectmen.

Again, I want some help in answering this question correctly. I can only arrive at a conclusion that seems logical from the known facts. It is therefore somewhat better than a guess, but it is still a reasoned deduction, not the assured truth. What I conclude is this: When Nye and Dimmock: began to secure their settlers in 1781, the two largest settlements on this part of the river were Winslow and Norridgewock, and very early land communication was established between the two places. That was necessary because the river was not navigable for that journey. Even if a small boat could manage the rapids above Ticonic Falls, it had to be carried around the falls at Skowhegan. So, even before the Revolution, a trail had been blazed through the woods from Waterville to Norridgewock, going througn the area now known as Fairfield Center, though it probably did not follow exactly the present course of the road. But, because there was communication along that trail, there was inducement for settlers to take up lots along it. An interesting conjecture, isn’t it, that before 1800 there was more overland traffic between Waterville and Norridgewock than there was traffic on the river above Waterville?

It may not be true, but there is some impressive evidence for the conjecture. Anyhow, that is my story of old Fairfield for tonight. I now wait for interested listeners to set me straight.

Year: 1962