Radio Script #996

Little Talks on Common Things
January 13, 1974

One Kennebec town that has had only occasional mention on this program is Winthrop. It deserves a lot more attention, and today we shall consider some of the facts of that town down on the lakes.

Winthrop Village lies between Lakes Maranacook and Annabessacook, and on one side of the town is Lake Cobbosseecontee. All are Indian names. Cobbosseecontee means “place of many sturgeon”. Annabessacook is “fish-water place”. Because the Abnakis were largely a nomad people, living in one place for only a short time, they had no names for settlements, even their camp sites, but only names for natural objects, like mountains, rivers, falls, shoals, points, and narrows. Ticonic was, for instance, the Abnaki name for the falls of the Kennebec at what is now Waterville.

On the shore of Lake Annabessacook there was clearly observable 100 years ago an ancient Indian cornfield, reminiscent of a time when the Abnakis had settled down in their villages long enough to plant corn and wait for it to grow. By the beginning of the 18th century, the Maine Indians had developed several sizable villages, often with the help of Jesuit priests. Two such villages on the Kennebec were at Swan Island near Richmond and at Old Point in Norridgewock. Near that Winthrop cornfield is a huge boulder known as Indian Rock. It is marked by some kind of ancient inscription, in the form of geometric figures, such as circles and triangles, but a few pictographs in the shape of fish. They are thought to have been directional signs made by the Indians to point the way to camp sites and fishing areas.

During the early 1750’s after the Proprietors of Kennebec Purchase gained possession of the lands that now include the town of Winthrop, there were no white inhabitants. In 1759 the company employed Nathan Weston to survey the area where Winthrop is now located. He laid out three ranges of lots a mile deep and 80 rods wide, with space left for 8 rod roads between the ranges. A further survey was made in 1762 by John McKechnie, the same man who surveyed the lots in Waterville between Sidney and Fairfield. To this day, in Waterville, we have evidence of what was meant by ranges and rangeways. The Waterville highways still known as First Rangeway and Second Rangeway marked the end of the mile-deep lots of the McKechnie survey, and long before those roads were built, the McKechnie maps showed eight rods reserved for each rangeway road to be eventually constructed. The First Rangeway from the extension of Gilman Street to the Oakland Road (now Kennedy Drive) was built about 1840, but the Second Rangeway was not built until about 1870. So, like Waterville, Winthrcp originally had surveyed plans for rangeway roads.

The Plymouth Company agent seeking settlers for the Winthrop area was Samuel Scott of Pownalborough, which in 1760 was the county seat of the then huge Lincoln County, comprising all of Maine east of the Androscoggin River. Pownalborough was the present town of Dresden, where, near the east bank of the Kennebec, still stands the old Lincoln County Court House, built in 1765. Scott, the Plymouth Company agent, built a cabin on the shore of Cobbosseecontee Lake in what is now East Winthrop. He never occupied it, preferring his own residence in Pownalborough. In 1765 he sold the cabin to Timothy Foster of Attleboro, who became Winthrop’s first settler. As other settlers soon arrived, the original name of Scotts town was soon changed to Pond Town, and by that name the place was known until its incorporation as Winthrop in 1771.

Timothy Foster died a tragic death in 1785. When trying to fell a tree, it suddenly dropped the wrong way, striking Foster on the head and fracturing his skull. Foster’s son walked on snowshoes all the way to Portland to get a doctor. The doctor could not leave at once but sent the boy back with a trepan and instructions how to use it. The fractured skull was raised and Foster was able to speak. But the next day he died.

When the Revolution broke out, Timothy Foster was too old for the army, but he sent five sons, all of whom saw battle service. From the beginning of our Maine settlements, the settlers had to give attention to transportation. Even when the first cash crop was only ashes from the trees felled to make room for a crop – ashes carried miles to the nearest potash kiln – there had to be a way to get the first products – ashes, lumber, grain or potatoes – to the market. From earliest times at Winthrop the nearest market was Hallowell, which by 1800 had become Maine’s largest town except for Portland. Hallowell was the market place for all goods that reached the interior towns of Central Maine, such as Winthrop, Monmouth, Readfield, Belgrade, and Mount Vernon.

The first access from the little village that sprang up between the two lakes at Winthrop was a rough tote road to Hallowell. In the 1820’s, when the canal fever hit Maine, Robert Hallowell Gardiner, the wealthy owner of thousands of Maine acres, planned a canal from Wayne on Androscoggin Lake, then by ponds and streams to Annabessacook, across a narrow stretch of land to Cobbosseecontee, and down its outlet stream to Gardiner. Like many other canals projected for Maine, that one was never built. Except for short canals within the larger towns, like Bangor and Lewiston, no major canal was ever constructed in Maine, during the canal fever days, with one exception. That was the Cumberland and Oxford Canal connecting Sebago Lake with the ocean, using so far as possible the Presumpscot River, but building along side it a canal with numerous locks.

An even more elaborate project proposed a canal from Readfield to Winthrop and via Lake Cobbosseecontee eventually to the Kennebec. Gradually transportation improved as the Indian trails became bridle paths, then tote roads, then wagon roads, and finally fit for carriages and stagecoaches. But it was not until 1848 that modern transportation reached Winthrop. In that year the Androscoggin and Kennebec R.R. reached the town, to be built on to Waterville via Belgrade during the following year. That railroad enabled Winthrop farmers and lumbermen to get their produce not only to Portland, but on to Boston, and likewise enabled them to procure hitherto unknown luxuries from the Boston market.

At the turn of the century in 1800, people in rural Maine regarded winter as the best time for travel. Sleds and sleighs moved much easier than wheeled vehicles, and good horses could make their way through quite deep snow. As is still true, winter was especially the time for lumber operations in the woods. As for Maine winters, there was some truth in the saying, “Maine has nine months of winter and three months of poor sledding.”

The first government mail reached Winthrop by post rider in 1794. The rider on horseback picked up the mail at Portland and distributed it through Gray, New Gloucester, Lewiston Falls, Greene and Monmouth and finally arrived at the Winthrop P.O. in the home of Benjamin Allen. The rider’s arrival was heralded by loud blasts of his horn. By 1807 Winthrop was a stage stop for the coach between Portland and Augusta, but the Post Office remained in houses or small stores for more than a century. Not until 1910 did Winthrop have a post office building.

Winthrop long ago became prominent in Maine agriculture. Not only did its farms become productive and prosperous, and its orchards deservedly famous, it also had one of the earliest agricultural societies in the entire nation, organized in 1818.

Dr. Ezekiel Holmes, called the Father of Maine Agriculture, was a Winthrop man. He edited and published a farm journal, lectured allover the state, promoted the fairs, and was a successful farm lobbyist in the legislature. Waterville shared in Holmes’s talents, for during the 1840’s he came weekly to Waterville College to give lectures on the then little known science of chemistry.

It was in 1818 that Winthrop saw in town the first of its long line of race horses, a stallion named Winthrop Messenger, sire of numerous trotters bearing the Messenger name. For many years Winthrop led the Kennebec Valley towns, including Vassalboro, Waterville, and Fairfield, in the breeding of race horses for the nation’s tracks, making Central Maine as famous in that respect as the Blue Grass country of Kentucky has become in our own day.

Along with other inventive geniuses who tried to make farming less laborious and more productive were two brothers, John and Hiram Potts, who perfected a threshing machine for oats and wheat. It was the beginning of machinery on Winthrop farms.

As in all Maine towns, early industries in Winthrop were small; a carding and fulling mill, sawmills and grist mills, a little iron foundry, and early attempts at textiles. No plant employed more than half a dozen men.

Winthrop Village was peculiarly blessed for developing industry. The short stream from Lake Maranacook to Annabessacook had a drop of 41 feet, supplying excellent power. As early as 1767 the Plymouth Company had made a grant to John Chandler to build a sawmill and gristmill on that stream.

Textiles reached Winthrop as early as 1813, when the Winthrop Woolen and Cotton Manufacturing opened on the stream. Finding local wool not sufficiently available, the company decided to import cotton from the south, as Massachusetts towns were doing. So for a time they turned out cotton cloth. After 160 years, the main structure of that old mill still stands in Winthrop Village. By 1882 the Winthrop Mills were turning out not cotton, but woolen goods. In that year alone they made 125,000 blankets and had 150 employees.

It was not cloth, but linoleum for which Winthrop became especially famous. In 1830 Alden Pope opened a small factory to make table oilcloth. One of his workmen was Daniel Bailey, who with his sons soon set up his own oilcloth plant on the Bailey farm in the eastern part of town. It was Charles Bailey, youngest of Daniel’s sons, who made Winthrop oilcloth nationally renowned. He saw a much larger opportunity than that provided by table oilcloth. Experimenting with heavier material he produced the first satisfactory oilcloth carpeting, which we now call linoleum.

Our time is up, and further information about Winthrop must be left for some later broadcast. So now we must say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1974