Radio Script #821

Little Talks on Common Things
November 23, 1969

I suppose one should not be surprised at how many Maine people have never seen some of our historic sites. After all, plenty of Bostonians have never visited Bunker Hill, and numerous residents of Buffalo and Toronto have never seen Niagara Falls. Yet I find it disappointing that many Maine folks know nothing about Montpelier, and fewer still have ever seen the place.

Montpelier is the modern, exact duplication of the 18th century mansion built at Thomaston by General Henry Knox. Almost everybody in Maine knows that Thomaston is the location of our state prison, but nationally it is famous for just one thing — the home of George Washington’s artillery commander and first Secretary of War.

Knox was a Massachusetts man who came to Maine because of his marriage. He was a fat, jovial, Boston bookseller when he met Lucy Flucker, heiress of the fortune of Samuel Waldo, owner of the huge acreage in Maine known as the Waldo Grant. Because late in life General Knox had financial difficulty and because his dissipating children squandered what was left of the estate after the General’s death, it was easy for Thomaston people to forget what a truly great man Henry Knox had been. Of all military leaders in the Revolution, he was closest to Washington and in many ways the great commander’s most useful and most skillful assistant.

After the fighting at Lexington and Concord, Knox closed his bookshop, managed to slip through the tight British blockade of Boston, and offered his services as a civilian to General Artemas Ward, who was assembling the patriot forces at Cambridge. He helped Ward layout the defenses at Bunker Hill and on Boston Neck. A few weeks later, when Washington arrived in Cambridge and took command, Knox was introduced to him, and there began a friendship that lasted the rest of Washington’s life. From that moment until the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, Knox was almost constantly with Washington. He endured with the commander the terrible winter at Valley Forge, fought through the New York and New Jersey campaigns and it was Knox who accompanied Washington to West Point after the treason of Benedict Arnold.

Washington’s first test of Henry Knox made clear the bookseller’s qualities of military genius. Naming Knox Colonel of Artillery, Washington ordered him to Ticonderoga to bring the guns seized by Ethan Allen to Boston. No one thought Knox could do that job. He made a speedy march to Ticonderoga, dismantled the guns, floated them down to Lake George, then as winter set in, hauled them 300 miles across Massachusetts on a train of 42 sledges pulled by 80 oxen and hundreds of man.

It was well into January when the guns reached Boston. Within two months they were mounted on Dorchester Heights and had forced the British to evacuate Boston. It was Knox who suggested to Washington that Marblehead fishermen were just the fellows to get the general and his little army across the Delaware through the Christmas ice; and it was he who carried Washington’s orders to attack the sleeping Hessians at Trenton.

When the war ended, it was Henry Knox who led the troops into New York as the British sailed for home. It was Knox, too, who tearfully stood beside Washington when the great general said farewell to his officers. Knox was in fact Secretary of War before the nation had a president. The Continental Congress appointed him to that position in 1784, more than four years before Washington’s inauguration as our first president. Reluctantly Washington accepted Knox’s resignation in 1794, on Knox’s insistence that he must go to Maine to attend to the tangled affairs of the Waldo estate. So for the next twelve years, until his death in 1806, Knox lived in Thomaston, where he carried on extensive business in land and shipping, and built the colonial mansion Montpelier.

It is fitting now that we see just how the Waldo fortune was amassed and what was its condition when Henry Knox took over in 1794. In 1750 Hannah Waldo married Thomas Flucker, a resident of Charlestown, across the river from Boston. Hannah was the daughter of Brigadier General Samuel Waldo. By that time the Waldos were well established in America for their wealth and social position.

The first American Waldo, Cornelius, had come in 1654 to Ipswich as a merchant. His son Jonathan set up business in Boston. When he died in 1731 the Boston Gazette said: “On the 26th past died here Mr. Jonathan Waldo, in the 63rd year of his age, who sometime since was one of the most considerable shop keepers in this place. He was always justly accounted a man of integrity, a fair dealer, and a liberal benefactor of the poor. He has left large donations to pious uses.” Those donations included $200 to Christ Church, k 800 to each of its two ministers, and $300 to the poor of Boston.

It was Jonathan’s son Samuel who became proprietor of the Waldo patent in Maine. In the division of his father’s estate he was favored above the other heirs, receiving full ownership of more than half a million acres of land in the District of Maine.

When General Waldo died in 1759 the great patent was so divided that two fifths went to his eldest son, also named Samuel, and one-fifth to each of three other children, Francis, Lucy and Hannah. The last was the already mentioned wife of Thomas Flucker.

When the young Boston bookseller began courting Thomas Flucker’s daughter Lucy, the father did not approve. His daughter deserved a husband from the mercantile aristocracy of Boston, was Flucker’s proud claim. But he finally gave in, and in June, 1774 the Boston Gazette said: “Thursday evening last was married by the Rev. Dr. Carver, Mr. Henry Knox, bookseller, to Miss Lucy Flucker, daughter of the Honorable Thomas Flucker, Secretary of the Province.

That is how Henry Knox came to have interest in the expansive Waldo lands. The story of the great Waldo Patent began in 1630, when the Council of Plymouth in England granted to Beauchamp and Leverett what was at first called the Muscongus Patent, a territory of nearly a thousand square miles between the rivers Muscongus and Penobscot. The grantees were given the exclusive right of trade with the Indians within their territory. Agents of the proprietors arrived from England in the summer of 1630 and set up a trading post on the east bank of the St. Georges River, in what is now Thomaston.

By 1730, a full century after the original grant, Samuel Waldo of Boston had acquired a sizable interest in the patent, and as agent of all the then known proprietors, went to London, and so forcefully presented their claim that their possession was confirmed. On his return to Boston, Waldo purchased the rights of other proprietors and thus gained possession of one-half the original patent. In 1733 Waldo managed, by purchase and legal claims, to secure five-sixths of the whole patent. He was thus in a position to begin settlement in earnest. He built mills and opened the first lime quarry in the area.

Settlement was slow, despite Waldo’s success in bringing a few families from Northern Ireland, as well as from Massachusetts, until, in 1740, he succeeded in settling forty families from Brunswick and Saxony in Germany. To accomplish this, Waldo had personally gone to Europe, engaged a recruiting agent, and had offered attractive terms to any Germans who would settle on his land. Thus began the famous German settlement at Broad Bay, now Waldoboro. There to this day may be seen, in excellent preservation, the old German Church with its box pews, and beside it the cemetery, whose stones bear scores of German names.

In what was once the Waldo Patent are now the cities of Rockland and Belfast, the towns of Waldoboro, Warren, Union, Thomaston, Friendship, St. George, Hope, Rockport, Camden and several others. For a long time the most prominent places were Thomaston and Waldoboro, and it was at the latter place that the early 19th century saw one of Maine’s most active custom houses.

Any of you who remember your high school study of American History will recall something about the Bank of the United States. It was the great federal banking institution that Andrew Jackson was determined to destroy, and for a time he did prevent renewal of its charter. After Jackson’s presidency, however, the bank was re-established. Recently there came into my possession one of the old bank notes of that historic bank. It is numbered 8894 and is for $1,000. Until I saw this note, I did not realize that notes of the nation’s federal banks were true, definitely dated, promissory notes, made out to individual persons. What one reads on this old note is the following: “Seventeen months after date The Bank of the United States promises to pay to G.W. Farmer on order One Thousand Dollars at New York. A.K. Gardiner, Cashier; F. Dunlap, President; Philadelphia, Dec. 15, 1840.” On the face are printed six pictures of directors of the bank. The reverse side is entirely blank.

Here’s another interesting subject. Everyone knows that cattle were once driven over the roads from Maine to the central Boston market in Brighton. Now my friend Miles Carpenter, well known insurance man of Skowhegan, comes up with information that is a bit more unusual. Mr. Carpenter tells me that in the 1880’s a family named Harlow in Smithfield drove turkeys over the road to the Boston market.

Starting with a small flock from their own farm, the Harlows would pick up other turkeys from place to place through Maine and New Hampshire. They drove them over the roads by day, and at night the turkeys would roost in trees beside the road. Accompanying the trek was a covered wagon with food for the men and grain for the turkeys. The journey took about three weeks. Naturally the trip was made only once a year, timed to arrive in Boston for the Thanksgiving trade.

And with that story of turkeys over the road to Boston, we must say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1969