Radio Script #926

Little Talks on Common Things
March 26, 1972

Last week on this program I mentioned an early lottery of Maine lands. Among thousands of records now being assembled, sorted and catalogued in the State Archives at Augusta are hundreds of items concerned with Maine lands since their earliest consideration by the original Massachusetts owners. Those lands of course, long before their sale or grant to any individuals or organizations, were known as Public Lands and were the property of the Commonwealth.

A document I recently saw at the State Archives was an act of the Massachusetts Legislature, passed on Nov. 9, 1786, the very year of the adoption of the Massachusetts State Constitution, and one year earlier than the Constitution of the United States. The document is entitled: “An act to bring into the Public Treasury the sum of 163,200 pounds, by sale of a part of the Eastern Lands, and to establish a lottery for that purpose.”

In our Maine histories there are numerous references to that old land lottery, but until I found this old Massachusetts document, I never knew just how that lottery worked.

In 1786, Massachusetts’ District of Maine had only three counties, York, Cumberland, and Lincoln. Lincoln covered all of Maine east of the Androscoggin River. For lottery distribution the Mass. government set up 50 townships, each six miles square, in Lincoln County on the Penobscot and Schoodic rivers, and each township was divided into lots of 320 acres each. The act provided that, in each township, there should be reserved one lot for a public grammar school, (that is, what was more commonly called an academy), one for the use of the ministry (that is, its income to support preaching), one to be given to the first settled minister, and one for the benefit of public education in general. When those lots were subtracted all the remaining land in the 50 townships was divided up into lottery prizes. There were printed 2720 lottery tickets. Unlike most modern lotteries, in this one every ticket holder was to get some of the land. He ought to, for each ticket cost 60 pounds, a lot of money for those days, equivalent to at least $1,000 today.

The lottery feature of the plan consisted in the size of a ticket holder’s award. The first ticket number drawn entitled its holder to an entire township of land, or more than 43,000 acres. The next two numbers got their holders each a half township; the next four, a quarter of a township; the next six a tract three miles by two miles; the next twenty, tracts two miles by two; the next 40 got three miles by one; the next 120 two miles by one; the next 400 received pieces a mile square. Then 760 got tracts a mile long and half a mile wide, and 1366 people got pieces half a mile square. Thus a piece of land varying in size from half a mile square to six miles square went to every ticket holder.

Five men were appointed managers of the lottery. They were authorized to procure the tickets, printed on good paper, and number them, then publish the plan in all the newspapers in the commonwealth. After the tickets were sold, they would superintend the drawing and assign the prizes. The law said: “The lottery shall commence drawing in the town of Boston on the first Wednesday of March, 1787.”

How were the tickets to be paid for? The act said: “The tickets shall be sold for the consolidated notes of the commonwealth (that is, the state’s own paper money), or for the public securities of the United States, for any securities issued by the commonwealth, or for silver and gold.”

The act took cognizance of possible forgery. It said: “If any person shall forge, counterfeit, or alter any lottery ticket, or Shall pass any forged ticket, knowing it to be such, or shall commit any other illegal act to deprive a lawful ticket holder of his beneficial result of this lottery, he shall be fined not exceeding 1000 pounds, or imprisoned for twelve months, or publicly whipped not exceeding 39 stripes, or set on the gallows with a rope around his .neck for the space of one hour, or be branded, or sentenced to hard labor, or to suffer any or all of these punishments, according to the discretion of the Justices of the Supreme Judicial Court and the nature and aggravation of the Offense.”

Governor John Hancock, in his first message to the Legislature in 1783, had introduced the subject of sale of the Eastern Lands in the District of Maine, and the Legislature set up a committee to study the subject. When that committee reported in 1184, the Legislature authorized the sale of lands at such prices as could be obtained prior to November, 1786. Meeting with little encouragement at ordinary sale, the 1786 Legislature decided on the lottery.

It is popularly believed that public lotteries 175 years ago, and even as late as the 1830′ s when, for instance the Oxfordland lottery was held in Maine, were grand successes. Such is far from the case. More lotteries failed than succeeded. That 1786 attempt for a great land lottery of Maine lands was a flop. After a year had elapsed only 437 of the 2160 tickets had been sold. The Massachusetts Senate Report on the Eastern Lands, made much later, said in reference to this lottery: “The poor success of this project was a striking instance of the high moral feeling of the community in regard to lotteries as gambling institutions and this rebuke of the plan of sale, prevented the renewal of a project at once fascinating and demoralizing.”

Meanwhile, the Legislature hit upon a new method of using the vast Maine lands. The Commonwealth was in desperate need of education, especially above the level of the common school. That meant academies and colleges. The Commonwealth had little money, but it did have abundant land. So the practice began of granting townships to the trustees of academies and colleges. That is why to this day, certain townships in still uninhabited parts of Maine are known as the Bowdoin College Grant, the Williams College Grant, and grants in the name of numerous academies. Of this practice one historian has written: “Speculators eager for timber land often stood ready to pay cash for a grant as soon as a college or academy got it, because they could usually make better bargains with those trustees than they could directly with the land agent. Some of the most clever of those speculators got themselves elected as trustees of our institutions for the purpose of eventually getting personal control of the land.”

When Maine became a separate state in 1820, all of the unsold public lands were held in common by the two states of Massachusetts and Maine. In 1821, the Maine Legislature passed the following resolution: “Whereas Massachusetts now has a valuable interest in the lands within the State of Maine, and whereas this state has considerable other property in the possession of that Commonwealth, and whereas the only way by which equal division can be made is one attended with much delay and great expense, it is obvious that an exchange may be effected which would be mutually beneficial. Be it therefore resolved that to prevent collision and contention about the respective claims, this committee or its successor be empowered to negotiate with a similar committee of Massachusetts, with a view to presenting a specific plan of exchange of claims to their respective legislatures.

Nothing immediately came of that obviously reasonable attempt. Many years later Maine finally purchased the Massachusetts interest in half the remaining public lands. The title of Land Agent continued for many years. In 1891, an act was passed that said, “The State Land Agent is hereby made Forest Commissioner of the State of Maine, and in addition to the salary that he now receives as Land Agent, he shall receive as compensation for his services as Forest Commissioner $200 per year.” The act made it the Commissioner’s duty to “collect and publish statistics relating to the forests, inquire to what extent they were being destroyed by fire and by wasteful cutting, to ascertain the effect of cutting on water sheds of lakes, rivers, and water powers, and the effect on normal conditions of this climate.”

For 32 years after that additional assignment to the Land Agent was made, the title continued, though as agent the man had little to do. Finally in 1923, the office of Land Agent was abolished and the incumbent has ever since been known as the Forest Commissioner.

Another precious document in the Maine Archives is the roster of officers on Benedict Arnold’s Expedition to Quebec in 1775. Arnold himself had the rank of Colonel on that expedition. His two lieutenant colonels were Roger Evans from Windsor, Conn., and Christopher Greene from Warwick, R.I. Majors were Return Jonathan Meigs of Middletown, Conn., and Timothy Bigelow of Worcester. His adjutant was Dave Christian Fabigir of Copenhagen. The Chaplain was Samuel Sprigs of Newburyport, the surgeon Isaac Center of Newport, R. I., and his assistant, called surgeon’s mate was Isaac Greene. Arnold’s army had ten company captains, the best known of whom were three men who left records of the expedition: Henry Deardon of Falmouth, now Portland; Samuel Ward of Cambridge, and Simeon Thayer of Gloucester. The army was divided into two battalions, one commanded by Evans, the other by Greene. It was Evans’ decision to turn back, at the crossing from the Kennebec to the Dead River, that made an already risky adventure even more likely to fail.

Scattered about Waterville are many old, brick houses. Where did the bricks come from? Evidence about very old brick yards is very scanty, but I can tell you about the local brickyards of a hundred years ago and even more recently, though all of them have now disappeared. In 1872, just 100 years ago, Wallace Carter operated a small brickyard on the Winslow side of the river, just south of the end of the bridge on Bay Street. When construction of the Lockwood Mills was assured in 1875, Amos Norton and Horace Purington bought the Carter yard and enlarged it. There they produced all the bricks to build the big No.1 and No.2 mills of Lockwood.

In 1885, they opened a larger yard near the Fairfield line on College Ave. When Norton retired in 1889, Purington became the sole proprietor. In 1893, he abandoned the Winslow yard, but further enlarged the one on College Ave. In 1890 that yard produced 4 million bricks. In 1891 another yard, near the brook that crosses College Ave. just south of the Pillsbury farm machinery business was opened by Proctor and Flood. After Flood’s death in 1895, Proctor reopened the old Winslow brickyard and in 1900 turned out 2 million bricks. The place later became the property of Proctor and Bowie.

Year: 1972