Radio Script #842

Little Talks on Common Things
March 1, 1970

At various times on this program I have had something to say about Waterville churches, but one of those churches that has an interesting history I have sadly neglected. It is the Second Baptist Church that still conducts its services every Sunday on Water Street.

How the church of a single Protestant denomination could thrive in a predominant Catholic community needs explanation. Of course it is true today that few members of the Second Baptist Church have their homes in the area where their church building is located. Families associated with the church gradually moved to other parts of the city and even into adjoining towns.

For nearly a century the group of worshippers that came to be the Second Baptist Church was a mission of the strong First Baptist Church, the oldest organized religious body in Waterville.

What is not generally recognized is that there were many French Protestants in America. They had originally come as Hugenot refugees after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in the last quarter of the 17th century. I am myself descended from one of those refugees, John Marriner, who came to Boston from France via Holland in 1680.

Evangelistic work among French Protestants in America began in 1834, when Henri Oliver and his wife came from Switzerland to be missionaries among the Indians in Canada. In 1835 the Rev. Louis Roussey and Madame Henrietta Feller founded in Canada Grande Ligne, sometimes called the Feller Institute. From the institute were graduated several thousand French Protestants, two of whom later preached in Waterville, Rev. J.N.Williams and Rev. Eusebe Leger.

In 1835 there was enrolled at Waterville College (now Colby), a student who became interested in both the economic and the spiritual welfare of the small French Canadian colony in Waterville, and his interest was by no means restricted to the Protestant minority in that group. His purpose was to help those deprived people regardless of their religious affiliation.

At that time Waterville’s largest French settlement was not on the Plains, the name later given to the Water Street area, but at the Head of the Falls. It was there that young Furbush concentrated his work, and there he started Bible classes and ministered to the needy. The devoted student had hardly got his project under way when he died in 1836. He was buried in the old cemetery that later became Monument Park. When bodies were removed to the new Pine Grove Cemetery in the 1850’s, the college bought a lot there, and on that lot are the graves of several Colby students, including Jonathan Furbush.

The women of the First Baptist Church took up Furbush’s uncompleted work. One of the most active was Rebecca Drinkwater, who went among the French people, carrying her Bible and distributing tracts. She was quick to learn that those fine people, speaking a foreign tongue and having very little money, needed much more than religion. They needed material help, especially in times of sudden misfortune and to that cause she persuaded the Baptist ladies to devote themselves.

In the 1850’s Charles Hathaway, founder of the Hathaway Shirt Co., made the French mission of the Baptists his personal concern. Every Sunday morning he distributed Sunday School papers from house to house, and he organized a regular Sunday School that met first in a hall on Main Street and later in one on Water Street.

Not until 1875 did the mission have its own settled pastor. For some time the dynamic minister of the First Baptist Church, Rev. Samuel Merrill, had felt that the growing number of persons served by the mission deserved full-time pastoral leadership. From the more affluent members of his own church Merrill raised the money for a mission pastor. He appealed to a graduate of the Feller Institute, Rev. G.N. Williams, then located at Providence, R.I. Williams came to Waterville, made a thorough study of the situation, and recommended as pastor a fellow graduate of the Institute, Rev. Eusabe Leger.

Leger had no easy time with the French community then predominantly assembled on the Plains. It was natural that he should meet with strong opposition from the people of another faith. The ecumenical movement that today has brought an era of good feeling among people of different faiths was unknown in the 1870’s. The majority group quite naturally felt that Leger had come among them to proselyte and lead people away. But Leger had strong supporters, among them members of the Bolduc family, and in time Eusebe Leger won the respect of people of different beliefs.

Two prominent ladies of the First Baptist Church, Mrs. Adam Wilson and Mrs. Elizabeth Foster, started a sewing circle in Leger’s mission. For several years the mission services had been held in a hall on Water Street. Suddenly the owner informed the mission that it must either buy the building or get out. A well known, philanthropic Waterville lady, Miss Florence Plaisted, came to the rescue. She almost single handed raised the money to buy the building, which became the property of the Ladies Social Union of the First Baptist Church. In 1885 there was started a financial campaign to raise the money for a church building for the mission. It reached success in 1887 and in that year the edifice on Water Street still occupied by the Second Baptist Church was erected and dedicated.

The church on Water Street remained a mission of the First Baptist Church until 1938. Every member of the mission church was technically a member of First Church, and every person becoming a new member of the mission had first to be received by baptism or by letter into First Church. By the second quarter of the 20th century that situation had become absurd. For some time the mission had been self-supporting, and not a cent had been contributed to it by First Church for several years. At its annual meeting in 1938 the First Baptist Church voted to set the mission free and make it an independent church. It then became the Second Baptist Church of Waterville.

Well remembered among pastors of that church is Rev. Isaac LaFleur, for whose son, Robert LaFleur, the Waterville airport is named. Another pastor, who in retirement became a well known local interior decorator, was Rev. Auguste Bocquel.

Noting the creation of Second Baptist as an independent church in 1938, the Waterville Sentinel mentioned several of its long devoted families including Bolducs, Parents, Perrys, Estys and many others. The Sentinel article said: “Two men now living in Waterville were among the first youths to attend the mission when it got its first settled pastor in 1875. One is Fred Perry of the C. F. Hathaway Co., who has been a deacon for fifty years; the other is Frank Smith, son of the Rev. Francis Xavier Smith, a native of Canada educated at the Feller Institute. He too works at the Hathaway factory.”

Perhaps no one now living remembers that first settled pastor, Eusebe Leger. He was truly a remarkable man. He could read at sight four languages French, English, Latin and Greek. An artist of considerable talent, some of his landscapes were exhibited in Boston, New York and Philadelphia.

Until 1943 the Second Baptist Church had pastors who could speak French. In the early years all services were held in French. Like most Waterville Protestant churches, it had two services each Sunday, morning and evening. For some time one of those services was in French, the other in English. By 1943 the members of Second Church had become so predominantly English-speaking that William Kershaw, a young man with no French background, was installed as pastor and since that time all services have been conducted in English.

Today Second Baptist still holds an honored place among the churches of Waterville.

We have now just time for another subject. Maine’s Lincoln County now covers so small an area, having within its borders not a single Maine city, that we ought to be reminded that Lincoln was once Maine’s largest county. Until 1760 Maine had only one county, York. Then were established the counties of Cumberland and Lincoln. Cumberland ended at the Androscoggin River. All the rest of Maine was in Lincoln County, with its first county seat at Old Pownalborough, on the east side of the Kennebec opposite Richmond, now the town of Dresden. The county seat was later moved to Wiscasset which is still the present Lincoln County’s largest town.

The huge size of Lincoln County continued for 29 years. Then in 1789 there was taken from it the area to set up two new counties, Hancock and Washington. Ten years later the formation of Kennebec County took four-fifths of what remained of Lincoln. Still later in 1827 the creation of Waldo County took away more Lincoln towns, and in 1854 the County of Sagadahoc was made up entirely from Lincoln County towns. Lincoln lost nine more towns in 1860, when Knox County was formed, leaving the once immense County of Lincoln with only 17 towns and plantations.

I suppose there are many people who think that Lincoln County has something to do with Abraham Lincoln. The fact is that the county got its name 49 years before Abraham Lincoln was born. In 1665 that part of Maine that became Lincoln County was called the County of Cornwall by its British owner, the Duke of York. Although Sir William Phipps built within that territory Fort William Henry at Pemaquid in 1692, repeated Indian wars prevented extensive settlement, and permanent settlers did not come until 1730 when the Pemaquid fort was repaired and renamed Fort Frederick. The settlers were English and Scotch Protestants. When in 1760 the area was incorporated by the Province of Massachuestts into a new county and a permanent settlement was established at Pownalborough, that town got its name in honor of the then Governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Pownall, and the county got the name Lincoln because Lincoln, England was the birthplace of Governor Pownall.

Year: 1970