Radio Script #1148

Little Talks on Common Things
January 15, 1978

Inquirers into Kennebec history have often asked why the Episcopal church did not get a stronger hold in the Kennebec Vailey after settlements were started by the proprietors soon after 1750. It was well known that the leader of those proprietors, Dr. Sylvester Gardiner was a staunch supporter of the Church of England, and the church he established in his new town of Gardiner on the Cobbossee Stream was of that faith. Sylvester Gardiner also saw to it that the first minister to serve on their Maine lands was aprelate of the Church of England, Rev. Thomas Bailey. The proprietors secured his settlement at their German colony of Frankfort, later Pownalborough and now the town of Dresden. There still stands Maine’s oldest courthouse.

Of course Dr. Gardiner and his fellow Episcopalian’s had to contest with the firmly established state church of Massachusetts Bay, the Congregational, but by 1750 the earlier tight control by that church had been released. After much intolerance and even persecution, Episcopals, Baptists, Presbyterians and people of other faiths had not only been granted freedom of worship, but in many instances had been freed from tax by which the state church was supported.

The Episcopalian element also had to face the fact that, after a few years, they did not constitute a majority of the Kennebec Proprietors. Powerful in the company were such supporters of the established church as the Bowdoin brothers, the Winslow family, and John Hancock who would be the first signer of the Declaration of Independence.

It is interesting to note, therefore, what the Episcopalians did accomplish despite their handicaps. As early as 1629, the region that encompassed what is now Greater Boston had among its citizenry several prominent members of the Church of England. Samuel Maverick, an early settler soon after the Winthrop landing, was a strong churchman, and an even earlier comer was William Baxter. Less belligerent than Maverick, Baxter for a time got along peaceably with the Congregationalist majority, but eventually he found conditions so intolerant that he sold his Boston land and went to Rhode Island so that, as he put it, “I could be near Master Roger Williams though I am far from his religious opinions.”

In 1629 a Congregational church had been established at Salem, but an early settler there, John Samuel Brown, would have no part in it, and persuaded a number of his neighbors to join him in holding meetings by themselves, using the Book of Common Prayer. But the majority would countenance no such competing faith, and in disgust Brown returned with his family to England.

That was the situation for nearly a hundred years in the province of Massachusetts Bay. Episcopalians stood a poor chance to exercise their religious conviction without opposition. In 1622, two staunch members of the Church of England obtained from the Council of Plymouth a huge grant of land in America covering the territory between the Merrimac and the Kennebec rivers. Those two men were Ferdinando Gorges and George Mason. To Mason went the land between the Merrimac and the Piscataqua, the territory called New Hampshire, while to Gorges went the vast tract between Piscataqua and Kennebec, to be known as Maine. In Mason’s grant, early settlements were made at Portsmouth and Dover. An Episcopal clergyman was installed in each place, and Mason personally provided communion plate and prayer books for both churches. Gorges meanwhile had established government in his part of the grant, and provided that in every settlement made in it the recognized, church should be the Church of England.

In 1648 Robert Jordan, a prelate of the Church of England, came to Portsmouth, but soon moved to Casco Bay. So in the latter part of the 17th century Maine was considered Episcopal territory, in distinct conflict with the rule of Massachusetts Bay.

All that was changed in 1678,when Massachusetts purchased from the heirs of Ferdinando Gorges all the Gorges lands in Maine. Jordan stayed in Falmouth, now Portland for 30 years, preaching and administering the sacraments of the Church of England, but after his death in 1679, only a year after Massachusetts gained control of Maine he died. After his death there is no record of any Episcopal clergyman in Maille for nearly a hundred years. In fact, outside the immediate vicinity of Boston, no other place in New England had a resident Episcopal minister until well into the 18th century.

In England, the leaders of the New England colonies had of course belonged to the state church, the Church of England, and they firmly believed in union of church and state. When they became reformers or Puritans, their aim was not to set up a new church, but to rid the Church of England of practices to which they objected as being too Romanish. But after they got to America their antipathy previously directed toward Rome and the Pope, turned against the church they had left in the old country. They consequently set up in Massachusetts a new church order, under which each separate church was an independent unit, free from pope or bishop. Each church was free to select its own minister. However, their belief in union of church and state was so strong that they made their new church order the state church of the colony, intolerant of all others.

The old Church of England got no hold at all in Massachusetts until 1686, when the Crown compelled the Province of Massachusetts Bay to surrender its original charter and become a royal province. Three years later, in 1689, the Episcopal King’s Chapel was established. Another Episcopal parish was organized in 1723, and this became the Old North Church, in whose belfry were hung the lanterns of Paul Revere. In 1735 came Trinity Church, and in 1759 Christ Church in Cambridge. In 1701 the Church of England, in a conference at Lambeth Palace, started the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which would later exert strong influence in Maine. Everywhere in Massachusetts, including its large expanse in Maine, Episcopal extension languished except in the Boston area. When the Revolution started in 1775, there were only four active Episcopal clergymen in Massachusetts, and only six in all New England.

As for Maine, in the first half of the 18th century there was a modest start at Pemaquid, where the resident commissioner, acting for the British proprietors, appointed a person to read prayers and holy scriptures in a small log chapel. Then in 1759, through the help of the Society for Propagation of the Gospel, the Kennebec Proprietors placed Thomas Bailey at Pownalborough. On his arrival, Bailey reported to London that he found an area 100 miles long and 60 miles wide where there were about a thousand inhabitants with not a single clergyman of any denomination.

At Gardinertown, Dr. Sylvester Gardiner built an Episcopal church, and set aside glebe land for support of its clergyman. Even before that Parson Bailey, travelling by boat in summer and by sleigh on the Kennebec ice in the winter, covered the whole area from Pownalboro to Fort Halifax at Winslow. Just before the Revolution in 1774, Bailey wrote: “Nothing can be more dismal than the situation of an Episcopal minister here. He is insulted and threatened and can scarcely procure the necessities of life.”

Only nine years before Maine became a state, in 1811, St. Paul’s in Portland was the only Episcopal church in Maine. The Gardiner church had then closed, though it soon reopened and remains active today. During the 19th century other Episcopal churches were opened in the state, and several missions that have since become churches, like that in Waterville, were established.

When Maine became a vacation state, as early as 1870 so many persons of Episcopal faith were spending the summer here that Episcopal churches sprung up all along the coast and in some inland communities, and some then led to full-fledged churches.

That, in brief, is the story of one highly respected Protestant denomination in Maine.

Now for another subject. Few people now living remember when Maine used to observe Fast Day. Annually Maine governors issued proclamations for that day just as they did for Thanksgiving. In the spring of 1860, just a year before the start of the Civil War, Governor Lot Morrill issued this solemnly worded proclamation: “With the advice of the Executive Council, I hereby designate Thursday, the fifth day of April, 1860 as a day of public humiliation, fasting and prayer, hallowed by time-honored usage. Let the day, by universal adoption, be a season, the ordinary avocations suspended, when the thoughts shall be turned to the designs of being as a sacred trust; when everywhere throughout our borders dependent and penitent man shall offer his tribute of adoration to his Maker and Benefactor, and seeking favor, be pervaded by that Charity which inclines him to his fellow man to do him good and moreover to offer supplications to that Providence, the dependence of all, for the continuance of life and health, of domestic happiness, and social tranquility and for preservation from public calamities.

“Let us beseech the Divine Providence to inspire our national and state councils with wisdom and a high sense of public obligation, and impress all our citizens with a high regard for national honor. At this critical time, let us pray that the Almighty will confound the enemies of the union of these states, and increase both the number and zeal of the friends of liberty and vouchsafe to all the precious boon of civil and religious rights as the hope offered by Christianity.”

Now in 1978 let those who would divorce all functions of state from any religious ceremony or observance, ponder those words of the Maine governor 118 years ago.

Year: 1978