Radio Script #854
Little Talks on Common Things
May 24, 1970
How much do you know about the oldest town in Maine? Although it is more than a hundred miles from Waterville, we ought to know more about it, especially in this Sesquicentennial year of Maine statehood.
Maine’s oldest town is York, near the New Hampshire border. It is true that what we today know as official organization made York Maine’s second town, for Kittery was organized as a town in 1647, while York’s town organization did not come until five years later in 1652. However, York has claim to even earlier formal recognition as a governmental unit, because in 1624, only four years after the Pilgrims had landed at Plymouth, settlement had been made at York, and in 1641 Ferdinanda Gorges endowed that settlement with a charter creating the City of Gorgeana, the first English city on the American continent. The British knight’s nephew, Thomas Gorges, was the first mayor. From 1716 to 1735, York was the shire town or county seat of York County, Massachusetts, which then included the entire province of Maine.
Ferdinanda Gorges, distantly related to Queen Elizabeth and closer kin of Sir Walter Raleigh, was a true product of the adventurous Elizabethan age of discovery and expansion. His financial interest in Weymouth’s voyage of exploration to the mouth of the Kennebec in 1605 had brought Ferdinanda rights to certain lands in the new world. He and a fellow British investor, John Mason, secured from the crown a grant of land between the Merrimac and Kennebec Rivers. The territory was divided, Mason taking the part between the Merrimac and the Piscataqua and Gorges taking that between the Piscataqua and the Kennebec. To his part Gorges gave the name New Somersetshire.
As time went by, the first settled area near the Piscataqua, especially that on the Maine side, had various names. One was Agamenticus, for the nearby hill (hardly a mountain, because it rises only 690 feet from the sea, but it dominates the area as the highest point of land on the coast immediately east of Portsmouth).
Ferdinando Gorges never saw his American possessions, but he saw to it that two of his nephews were in active management over his new city of Gorgeana. Ferdinando, as Lord Palatine, thus incorporated in 1641 a territory of 21 square miles and decreed that the City of Gorgeana “shall extend from the beginning of the entrance of the river commonly called and known by the name of Agamenticus, and so up the said river seven English miles, and along the east and northeast side of the seashore three English miles in breadth.”
Gorges set up to govern his city a mayor, twelve aldermen and 24 common councilmen, all to be elected annually by the freeholders who held real estate under the Gorges royal charter. Noteworthy is the fact that Gorges set the annual meeting for voters in March, the month which to this day has continued to be town meeting time in Maine.
The English Civil War put an end to Gorges’ grandiose plans for his City of Gorgeana. The execution of Charles I in 1649 and the rise of the Cromwell Commonwealth hit hard all British noblemen close to the crown. In 1652 when the Bay Colony took over the Province of Maine. Gorges’ government of Gorgeana had to be relinquished, and it had to accept new incorporation as the Bay Colony town of York. All the land between the Piscataqua and North Yarmouth on Casco Bay was then called Yorkshire, and in 1691 York County was officially set up.
York boasts what has been called the oldest still standing public building in America. Originally called the King’s Prison, the old York gaol is annually visited and photographed by thousands of tourists. Built in 1653, it served continuously as a jail for more than 200 years, until 1860. Built of stone and sturdy oak, it seems today as strong and secure as when it was erected 317 years ago.
York also has the oldest religious society in Maine, organized in 1673. In passing, we may note that the town had a jail twenty years before it had a church. The first organized church group was naturally of the Massachusetts established state church, the Congregationalist. The present meeting house of the society, though since remodeled several times, was erected in 1747 after plans drawn nearly a century earlier by Sir Christopher Wren.
York has one of the few Maine cemeteries in which are graves dating earlier than 1700. In 1692 the town of York suffered its most fearful attack in all the Indian wars. Eighty people were massacred, and a hundred women and children were taken as captives to Canada. It is no wonder that York, during its early history, had as many as four garrison houses or small forts. In one of those old York cemeteries is a monument to victims of the 1692 massacre. The inscription reads: “Near this spot are interred the remains of one of the worst massacres of colonial days. On Candlemas Day, 1692, in the dawn of a January morning, Indians attacked the settlement of York, burning the houses and killing or capturing 300 of its inhabitants. About 40 were killed, the rest marched to Canada, many dying on the way. Erected to the memory of those hardy pioneers by the Society for the Preservation of Historic Landmarks.”
There were many houses and other structures built in York in the 17th century, but only one of those buildings still stands. Called the McIntire Garrison House, it was built about the middle of the 17th century on the north side of the York River in the part of the town called Scotland. That very old building somehow escaped the Indian destruction of 1692, when so many settlers’ homes were burned. By way of explanation, the river called Agamenticus, to which Gorges referred is now the York River.
A school was established in York long before such education reached other parts of Maine. In 1745 the people engaged the services of a schoolmaster of whom a historian later wrote: “He did service thrashing husky boys and teaching eight hours a day at a salary of 30 pounds a year, only two-thirds of which was in money, the rest being produce.”
A tavern was opened in York as early as 1640. Still standing is the Wilcox Tavern, put up a century later in 1740, on land leased for 999 years. Used successively as tavern, post office, and private home, the building and its antique furnishings are now open to the public.
I have no doubt that many people of the Waterville area have enjoyed tours of colonial Williamsburg, of Sturbridge Village, and of the great sites of historic Europe. But how many have seen the rich historic sites nearer home, right inside the State of Maine? I recommend that you travelers take a look at the town of York next summer.
One wide-spread relic of the old days in Maine that is rapidly disappearing is the stone wall. We older folks remember that, as we rode in a buggy on almost any Maine road, we passed mile after mile of stone walls. Most of them have now become prey of the stone crusher and have been used to build our modern, highspeed highways.
The nature of the Maine landscape made the stone wall inevitable. Cyrus Hamlin of Paris Hill, father of Hannibal Hamlin, once declared: “In Maine the land is so rocky we have to sharpen the sheep’s noses so they can graze between the rocks.” The great ice age, the last of the sweeping glacial inundations from the Arctic, deposited millions of rocks on Maine land. Those rocks were a confounded nuisance to settlers who cleared the land. Those settlers also needed fences to enclose their cattle and mark the bounds of their property. With their well known Yankee ingenuity, those settlers got the rocks off their hay and corn fields, and at the same time piled them up to make the needed fences. It was back-breaking work, performed with the simplest of tools. To help him a bit the farmer often used another Yankee invention, the stone boat or stone drag, which oxen easily pulled over the grass to the edge of the field. Some of the stones were just too big even to be dragged on the stone boat. Those monsters were pried loose and left in the field until winter. Then they could more easily be slid over the ice and snow.
Do you remember how the older folk, not so nimble as youngsters, to climb over a stone wall looked for an opening to squeeze through? I have since been told the name for such an opening is a grike, but we kids simply called them holes in the wall. They were indeed purposely left for a human being to squeeze through, but not large enough for farm animals to escape. One trouble was, however, that an opening large enough to admit a man or woman was often too big to prevent the escape of a sheep. That is why many farmers built stiles, a series of steps on each side of the wall to facilitate easy crossing.
Even in 1970 our Maine stone walls are not entirely gone. We must usually get away from the major highways and on to lesser traveled roads to see them, but in many places they still stand, silent reminders of the days when hand work from dawn to dusk transferred those field nuisances into fences for a man’s land.
Occasionally on this program I like to introduce some old time cooking recipes. Here is one from 80 years ago for a delicacy called niggers: “One cup of sugar, 1 cup of butter, 1 of molasses, 2 eggs, 1 cup sour cream, 1 teaspoon soda, 3 cups flour, 1 teaspoon each of ground cloves and cassia, one cup of raisins and a little citron, and one teaspoon of vanilla or any nice wine. Bake in an iron muffin pan.”
Here’s another for boiled cider pie: “1 cup of boiled cider, 1 cup sugar, 2 eggs, and water to fill the plate. Flavor with vanilla or lemon, and bake in two crusts.”
If you don’t care for either of those, try porcupine pudding: “One cup molasses, one of sour milk, one cup butter, one of raisins stoned and chopped, 3 cups flour, one teaspoon soda, and spice to taste. Steam for two hours.”
Many of us remember the old wooden sidewalks of long ago. Because my native town never had a concrete sidewalk until well into this century, I had not known that they had appeared in Maine much earlier. Now an issue of the Lewiston Journal in January, 1870 reveals that concrete walks were known in our state a century ago. The item said: “We have seen enough of plank sidewalks. They are dangerous and expensive. Of all materials for sidewalks, concrete is the best. In Bangor extensive use is being made of that material, and in Augusta it has been introduced. The concrete is laid on a bed of coal ashes not easily frozen. Before the ashes are put on, the soil is removed to a depth of two or three inches.”
As we in 1970 read that old item, we can only remark, “Where today would one get coal ashes?”
Year: 1970