Radio Script #828

Little Talks on Common Thing
January 11, 1970

Did you know that a city was once planned to be built down the Kennebec River below Bath? It was to be at what has long been known as Jones’ Eddy. That was where Charles Vaughan,a leading early settler of Hallowell, planned to establish the great commercial port of the Kennebec.

Jones’ Eddy was named for the 18th century surveyor for the Plymouth Company called Black Jones, because of his swarthy complexion. He lived for several years at old Pownalborough, now Dresden. When the Revolution broke out, Jones stayed loyal to the king, was jailed in Boston, and escaped to Quebec in 1780. After the war he acquired part of the island of Grand Manan, and in 1784 he surveyed lands along the St. Croix. Finally he returned to the Kennebec and resided at Augusta where he died.

In 1793 the only place of any size and importance east of Portland was Wiscasset, then considered the seaport of the Kennebec, though it was actually on the Sheepscot. Wiscasset was at that time the shipping point for all of Maine that is now included in the counties of Lincoln, Somerset, Androscoggin, Franklin, Kennebec and Sagadahoc. From that vast area all shipments went down the Androscoggin and Kennebec to Bath, then into the Cross River to the Sheepscot, and thence to Wiscasset.

Among the proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase of 1749 were members of the Vaughan family of-Boston. Their share of the distributed lands included all of what is now Hallowell and Augusta. Charles Vaughan became personally interested in settling the lands and himself came to Hallowell. He planned for Hallowell to be the great town at the head of Kennebec navigation, and indeed he made it so, for all through the first half of the 19th century Hallowell was our largest river town.

Vaughan also decided that at Jones’ Eddy should be built the great town of the river’s mouth, a town to rival and surpass Wiscasset, diverting from that town the great bulk of the river traffic. The new town would be the one great seaport of the Kennebec, where all products of the Androscoggin and Kennebec watersheds would be assembled for shipment to the great ports of Boston, New York and Philadelphia.

At Hallowell Vaughan built a distillery and a brewery capable of turning out more malt liquor annually than was then consumed in all New England. He also built a large grist mill and installed the latest machinery, and put up wharves, stores and dwellings. In 1793 he started development at the Eddy. He sent an agent to live there and carry on the business of the many ships Vaughan expected to load at his intended city. He built wharves there and had a chart distributed to sea captains and shippers.

It was simply impossible for a non-resident proprietor to build a thriving commercial town. Jones’ Eddy never attracted business people, while Wiscasset continued to flourish. But early in the 19th century Wiscasset was itself prostrated by the Embargo Act and the War of 1812. When peace was restored and Kennebec river traffic was resumed, a port on the Kennebec itself became clearly necessary. Jones’ Eddy had then passed out of possession of the Vaughan family, and there was no one to revive the old plan. Although the place had the natural advantage of being below the treacherous waters of Fiddler’s Reach, it was not Jones’ Eddy, but- Bath, that became the great port of the Kennebec.

Now let us turn our attention to another part of Maine, as I tell you about two men who established what has become one of Maine’s best known private schools, Hebron Academy. The two men were William Barrows and John Tripp.

At the close of the Revolution, large tracts of Maine land were granted to former soldiers in compensation for military service. Hundreds of such men left their Massachusetts homes to settle parts of Maine. Several towns in the western part of Oxford County — notably Fryeburg, Brownfield, Hiram and Lovell — had been settled before the Revolution, but the county’s eastern section was wilderness. On the south, New Gloucester had been settled in 1740, and Bakerstown (now Poland) in 1768.

No white man had come north of Poland until 1774, when a trail was blazed from New Gloucester through Poland to Hebron, then called Number 4 in the town of Paris. The Massachusetts proprietors of No.4 cut that road to facilitate settlement. The road ran from New Gloucester to Minot Lower Corner, thence over Woodman Hill to West Minot, then called Brigham’s Mills, and on over Greenwood Mountain to Paris. In 1779 the road was widened and people began to come to the region in 1780.

Alexander Shepard of Newton, Mass. had received a grant in 1777 that comprised a large part of what is now Hebron and Oxford, and he named it Shepardsfield. Shepard never occupied the land, but after his death his widow, whose maiden name was Greenwood, took residence on what she called Greenwood Hill. There she died in 1801.

An early settler in Hebron was William Barrows. Born in Carver, Mass. in 1756, he had served as an artilleryman under General Henry Knox in the Revolution. He had first visited Hebron in 1779 when he was 23 years old. In 1780 he returned and cleared a lot for his home. The next February, in the midst of an unusually harsh winter, he brought his wife to West Minot, while he and his brother erected a cabin on his lot. To make a floor, they carried boards four miles on their backs from the West Minot sawmill. Barrows was about to take his wife to the cabin when it burned to the ground. But within three days neighbors helped him put up another. About the same time John Greenwood and Asa Bearce made clearings on Greenwood Hill, which rose so high that it was already being called Greenwood Mountain.

William Barrows soon became a community leader. He represented the settlers by going to Boston on behalf of their land titles. In 1816 he was a member of the Massachusetts Legislature and a staunch Federalist. Long before that, in 1798, Barrows persuaded his boyhood friend, the Rev. John Tripp, to come to Hebron as the first settled pastor of the church which had been formed in 1791. Barrows became deacon of the church in 1792.

About his early life John Tripp wrote: “The Revolution began when I was 14 and I entered military service very young. Before that, because we lived so far from any school, I had little education. After my military service, when I was 17, I yearned for more schooling. I wanted to learn English grammar and be able to read the New Testament in Greek. There were no schools near by where grammar was taught, and no one with education enough to teach it. Learning that Elder William Nelson, 20 miles away in Norton, could instruct me, I arranged for him to let me work. for my board and his instruction. Because I was needed at home, I stayed only a few weeks and learned little. Then in 1782 I heard of a school where the master could teach English grammar. He agreed to teach me, but I had no book. I was told that Rev. Samuel West in New Bedford had a copy of Lowe’s English Grammar. He was willing to lend me the book, but he doubted the ability of the master to teach me. He said if I would work for him he would board me and teach me at no further expense. In his spare time, for three months, he taught me enough so that I could continue the study without an instructor. The Rev. West had graduated from Harvard in 1754 and was a good teacher.”

While subsequently teaching school on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Tripp bought a copy of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, several Latin books, Watts’ Logic, a Greek lexicon, and a Greek grammar, as well as the New Testament in Greek. During those years, without a teacher, he gained elementary mastery of Greek, Latin, Rhetoric and Mathematics.

When he accepted William Barrows’ invitation to the pastorate at Hebron, Tripp was already convinced of the value of education. In 1786, when the old Province of Massachusetts became a state of the new United States of America, the legislature had enacted a law requiring every town of one hundred families to establish a grammar school to teach subjects above the level of the common schools, especially Latin and Greek. Many of those schools, especially toward the end of the 18th century, were called academies, rather than by the older name of Latin Grammar Schools. By 1804 there were seven such academies in Massachusetts’ District of Maine: Berwick, Hallowell, Fryeburg, Portland, Newcastle, Blue Hill and Machias.

Enlisting his friend Barrows in the venture. John Tripp had, as early as 1801, started a movement for an academy in Hebron, though that town alone had fewer than the 100 families that required such a school. So Barrows and Tripp sought cooperation from surrounding towns. The result was a charter granted by the Massachusetts Legislature on February 10, 1804, establishing Hebron Academy.

The original incorporators were by no means all residents of Hebron. Besides Tripp, Barrows, Samuel Parris and John Greenwood of that town, others were James Hooper of Paris, Ezekiel Whitman of New Gloucester, Luther Cary of Turner, James Rice of Minot, and Cyrus Hamlin of Paris Hill, father of the more famous Hannibal Hamlin.

Tripp could furnish information and energy but no money for the school. Barrows was better off financially. He gave the land for the academy building and paid for much of its cost though actually the largest single contributor was Andrew Cragie, whom Barrows persuaded to give $800. When the original building burned in 1819 and the expense of replacement was divided into 70 shares. Barrows took 21 of them. At the same time he contributed $275 for other academy purposes, and his son William, Jr. gave $50. When the legislature refused a grant unless the local people raised $3,000 of endowment, Barrows undertook that task. When in 1806, there was $1,000 still lacking, he became personally responsible for the balance. That persuaded the legislature to grant Hebron Academy 17,500 acres of public land in what is now the town of Monson.

So it is that William Barrows, rather than John Tripp, is called the father of Hebron Academy. Long after he died in 1837, a bronze plaque was placed on a large boulder near the site of the first academy building. Memorializing Deacon Barrows, it carried a quotation long attributed to him: “I fear God and know no other fear.” Because he referred to the academy as his precious ewe lamb, one of the stained glass windows in the Hebron Church carries the design of a lamb. Barrows was a trustee of the school from its foundation in 1804 until his death in 1837.

John Tripp survived William Barrows by ten years, dying in 1847, and he too had been a trustee of the academy since 1804. He was also one of the original trustees of Waterville College. He lived to the ripe age of 86. For nearly half a century he served as the Hebron pastor. Among his baptisms was that of Cyrus Hamlin, for which he journeyed to Paris Hill. His son, Ephraim Tripp, was in the first class to graduate from Waterville College, now Colby. That Class of 1822 had only two graduates. Besides Ephraim Tripp, the other was George Dana Boardman, Colby’s first missionary, who joined the famous Adoniram Judson in Burma.

And with that tribute to the two men who, 165 years ago, started one of Maine’s oldest and best known academies, we must say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1970