Radio Script #522

Little Talks on Common Things

January 21, 1962

New evidence indicated that I was right in locating the original road across the Nye-Dimmock tract in Fairfield at approximately the line of the present road that is Fairfield’s. Western Avenue from Main Street on westward to Fairfield Center. Mr. Philip Foster, custodian at the Waterville Historical Society, tells me that in the court house at Wiscasset, among the old Lincoln County records, is a map of the Nye- Dimmock survey, showing an east-west line marked for a road very near where Western Avenue now runs. I have not seen the old map, but I hope to go to Wiscasset and take a look at it this spring.

Someone may ask, “Why should that map be among the records of Lincoln County, since Fairfield is in Somerset County?” The answer is that when the Nye-Dimmock survey was made in 1782, the place was in Lincoln County. In that year Maine had only three counties: York, Cumberland and Lincoln. In territory Lincoln was a huge county, for at that time it included all of Maine east of the Androscoggin.

In the recent broadcast about Fairfield I mentioned the house that General William Kendall built there in 1785. When that old house was torn down in 1870, the Waterville Mail contained an interesting account. This is what the newspaper said: “One of the ancient landmarks of the village of Kendalls Mills has been removed. The original frame dwelling erected by General Kendall about the year 1785, and which for the past forty years has been occupied by John Woodman on Main Street, has been taken down to make room for a more modern mansion. This old house is supposed to have been the first frame house erected in what is now Kendalls Mills. As we look upon the old timbers, our minds are carried back to the times when the forests covered this region, and we can imagine the founder of the village handling these very timbers from the woods with his own hands. What a merry session it must have been when the “rum poleu was put on this house.

If the custom of the time was followed, as it probably was, four men sat astride the ridge pole at that climactic moment, one at each end, the two others between them. The one at the south end would shout, “Here is a fine frame. It deserves a good name. What shall it be?” Then the fellow at the north end would reply, usually in verse, giving the building its name. Then he at the south end would ask, “Shall it be so?” The other would answer, “Oh, yes”, thrice repeated. Then the bottle was passed around and the work WaS declared properly finished. Merry chaps were our forefathers.”

The writer of that account in the Waterville Mail more than 90 years ago may have let his imagination run away. There is no evidence that, when General Kendall put up nis frame house, the old house-raising ritual was observed. At that time settlers were so few and so widely separated that it might not have been possible to gather a house-raising crew, as was easily done in Waterville 35 years later, when a grand, house-raising bee was held to put up the first building on the college lot, a home for President Jeremiah Chaplin. On that occasion we do know that some sort of ridge pole ceremony was observed and that rum passed freely, for the charges for that rum against the Trustees of the Maine Literary and Theological Institution are still preserved in the account book of Waterville’s old Simeon Mathews store.

Although I have often referred to one or another of the Waterville churches, 1 may not have given on anyone program the order and dates of erection of this city’s church buildings. A short time ago I received a request to do just that. So here it is.

The first meeting house erected in Waterville in 1796 no longer stands. It was a public building for the use of any denomination and was called the East Meeting House, because another was about the same time put up in the west part of the town, now Oakland. That first Waterville meeting house set up on the town common, was moved back to face Front street when the Waterville City Hall was built. For many years it was used as an armory and was torn down about ten years ago to make room for the municipal parking lot behind City Hall. It Was in that old meeting house in 1818 that Jeremiah Chaplin, first president of Colby College, preached a sermon on the Sunday after his arrival in Waterville.

Afterward he frequently preached there until a church building was erected by his own denomination in 1826. Only six years later in 1832 the Universalists put up their church building. Originally, though on the same site as now, it faced Silver Street, but after a few years was fortunately turned to face the triangle between the junction of Elm and Silver Streets, thus affording an open view of the church, across the spacious triangular park, to every traveller coming up Silver Street. Waterville’s third church building was that of the Congregationalists, put up in 1835, where it now stands on Temple Street. Thus before 1840 Waterville had three spacious churches: Baptist, Universalist and Congregationalist. Those were the town’s only church buildings before the Civil War.

Immediately after the war, in 1866, the Unitarians erected their imposing church on Main Street, a building most unfortunately torn down when the business structure that now houses Penney’s and Cottle’s was built. That church, with its later constructed ware parlors, was pointed out with pride to all visitors to Waterville.

It is interesting to note that the first minister to officiate in that Unitarian church in 1866 had once been a pastor of the Waterville Baptist Church. The Methodists had been organized in Waterville as early as 1843, but they had no church building until 1868, when they built near the corner of Pleasant :and Center Streets. Although Roman Catholic services had been held regularly in Waterville since the formation of the St. Francis parish in 1857, and priests had irregularly said masses here many years before that, Waterville’s first of its now four Catholic churches was not built until 1871, at the corner of Elm and Winter Streets, where in the late 1790’s Zebulon Sawyer had put up a stately mansion, which in 1857 had been purchased by John Ware, when be first came to Waterville as President of the Androscoggin and Kennebec Railroad. After Mr. Ware returned to Athens in 1865, he sold the property to St. Francis parish.

I regret that 1 do not have at hand the dates when the other Catholic churches were built. Many Waterville citizens recall that for several years the now beautiful edifice of the Sacred Heart Church at Pleasant and Gilman Streets was only a roofed-over basement, and that it was within a very few years that the Maronite Church of our Syrian people was erected on Appleton Street. But I believe earlier than either was the Notre Dame churct in the South End, off Water Street. If anyone can tell me the dates when Sacred Heart, St. Joseph’s Maronite, and Notre Dame churches were opened, I shall be glad to give those dates publicity on a later program.

Six years after the erection of St. Francis de Sales came the building in 1878 of the Episcopal chapel on Center Street, which after many years as a mission grew into the influential Episcopal Church that it is today.

The Baptists had begun mission work on the Plains, as the section along Water Street was then called, as early as 1834, but it was not until 1887 that a Baptist church building was erected there. For a long time it was considered a mission of Waterville’s First Baptist Church, but about twenty years ago it became a separate and self-supporting organization known as the Second Baptist Church.

The coming of the twentieth century soon saw the erection of the Advent Church in 1902, followed by the building in 1905 on Getchell Street of a church by what was then the Free Baptists.

Since that time the older Baptist denomination and the Free Baptists have merged into the United Baptist Convention of Maine.

Other dates that I lack tonight, besides those for Sacred Heart, St. Joseph’s and Notre Dame, are the dates when the Christian Science church was erected on School Street, and when the Church of God was opened on Abbott Street. Can anyone supply those dates?

For about forty years the JeWish community of Waterville had maintained synogogue quarters on Kelsey Street. Then in 1959 they opened their beautiful new building on upper Main Street.

At the present time fifteen church edifices are in use in Watervil1e: four of them Catholic, three Baptist, and one each for Advent, Assembly of God, Chri.stian Science, Congregationalist, Episcopa1, JeWish Community, Methodist and Universalist.

Because the one church that no longer stands was the Unitarian, it seems appropriate to say a word about that church, ~~ it was described in the Waterville Sentinel when the building was torn down in 1939. Here is what the Sentinel said: “The First Unitarian Church, which stood in the midst of a steadily growing business district, will soon disappear to make way for the further advance of commerce. The eventual removal was indicated several years ago by the merging of the Unitarian and Universalist parishes. The father of Unitarianism in Waterville was the Rev. David Sheldon, formerly President of Waterville College and pastor of the First Baptist Church. Built at a cost of §17,000, the church was dedicated on September 4, 1866, with a sermon by Edward Everett Hale. Pews were sold at auction, bringing i.n §2,664. Alben Emery gave the church bell and J. M. Crocker presented the clock. A beautiful pulpit Bible was the gift of Col. R. H. Green. The Ware parlors, gift of Mme. Ware, widow of the first John Ware to come to Waterville and president of our first railroad, the Androscoggin and Kennebec, made a splendid addition to the church facilities in 1890.”

Now for one last item tOnight. Not long ago I ran across an old photograph, shOwing vehicles lined up at the platform of the Maine Central Railroad station about 1910. Among the ten vehicles there is not a single automobile. One is a horse-drawn wagon of the Express Company. One is the old, long familiar Elmwood Hotel coach, looking something like a houseboat on wheels. The other eight are the public carriages we used to call “Ten Cent Teams” the hacks that drove the arriving train passenger to his destination in town. And with that salute to the all but forgotten Ten Cent Teams, we must say Good Night for Old Times’ Sake.

Year: 1962