Radio Script #1196

Little Talks on Common Things
March 25, 1979

During the thirty years of these broadcasts there have been numerous references to different persons who all their lives were known by some military title such as captain, colonel, or even general, so such cases were father and son in the town of Fairfield – General William Kendall and Captain William Kendall, Jr. In the case of both Kendalls, as in that of many other Maine men, the title was not received by fighting in the nation’s wars, but by offices they held in the militia. Even before Maine became a state, every town of any considerable size had a militia company, and several small towns usually banded together to form one. After the separation from Massachusetts in 1820, the practice was continued for many years.

The annual musters of militia were gala events 150 years ago. In Waterville the militia field was on Main Street above its junction with College Avenue and covered the area between Main and Pleasant streets east to west, and between Center and North streets south to north. Hucksters sold big sheets of gingerbread, which the militiamen washed down with New England rum.

It was interesting to me to note the conspicuous part taken by my native town of Bridgton,over in Cumberland County, in the militia of 1820. There was, of course, a commander of the whole militia body of the state, just as there is today. But in 1820 it was also divided into county groups, with as many brigades in each county as the population would warrant.

York and Cumberland, the largest counties, had four brigades, and every brigade had four regiments; and every regiment four companies of approximately 100 men each. Cumberland County’s first brigade was commanded by Brigadier General John Perley of Bridgton, whose son Thomas Perley was the brigade major. Each regiment, as was the case later in the Civil War, was headed by a Colonel, and the second regiment of Cumberland’s first brigade was commanded by Col. John Kellow of Bridgton, and its adjutant was Samuel Farwell of the same town. The brigades’ had a unit called the light infantry which seems to have been a single company, because its commander was Captain Cie.o.¥~e W. Cushman of Bridgton, with other officers being two Bridgton men – Lt. Aaron Beeman and Ensign Samuel Fisher.

In our part of Central Maine, Kennebec and Somerset counties were grouped into a single division, and in the Waterville area was centered the Second Brigade commanded by Bridadier General Joel Wellington of Fairfax, the old name for Albion. That brigade’s first regiment was led by Col. Ephraim Getchell of Waterville, assisted by Lt. Col. Stephen Longley of Sidney and Major Richard Smith of the same town. The rest of the state had militia organized in the same way, and this tells the reason why men, as long as they lived, came to be called by some title they had held in the militia.

While we are speaking of the year 1820, it may be of interest to note what churches were active in the Waterville area in that year when Maine gained its independence from Massachusetts. In Waterville itself there was then only one denominational, organized church – the Baptist, and even they did not have a meetinghouse. Long before, the town of Winslow, which then included Waterville, had secured the Reverend Joshua Cushman as the town minister, paid by taxation, as was required by the laws of Massachusetts.

At first he preached part of the time in the meeting house owned and built by the town on the site of Waterville’s present City Hall, and part of the time in the meeting house on Winslow’s Lithgow Street, likewise built by the town. Cushman had retired from the ministry and was the area’s representative to the Massachusetts legislature when Rev. Jeremiah Chaplin arrived here in 1818 to start classes at the new Maine Theological and Literary Institute that later became Colby College. The town was not without preaching, for nearly every Sunday an itinerant preacher from one or another of the denominations held forth in the meetinghouse on the corner, and on his very first Sunday in Waterville the newcomer, Rev. Jeremiah Chaplin, was the preacher.

Within two months of his arrival in Waterville, Chaplin discovered that there resided in the vicinity enough persons of the Baptist faith to warrant the organizing of a church. In his rented house, that stood at the junction of Main Street and College Avenue, where the Elmwood Hotel later was built, he officially organized the First Baptist Church of Waterville in August 1818. It was not until eight years later in 1826, that the church opened its building on Elm Street, a building that still stands – the oldest public edifice in Waterville.

Fairfield then had no church at Kendalls Mills, now Fairfield Village. In fact that community in 1820 was not even the largest settlement in the town. The town’s only church was the Methodist at Fairfield Center, which was then much larger than Kendalls Hills. There was a single church in Sidney, the Baptist on the River Road. Vassalboro, which in 1820 was actually larger than Waterville, had 2 churches – the Congregational at Getchell’s Corner whose pastor was later to found the Congregational Church in Waterville – Thomas Adams; and a Baptist church at North Vassalboro. China likewise had two organized religious societies, both of which had meeting houses. One was the Baptist at China Village, where its Colonial, white frame building still faces the lake; and the Friends meetinghouse on the road from China Village to South China, where indeed the red, simple building still stands, with the newer Friends’ conference center behind it.

In 1820 there was no town of Skowhegan. What was later to form that town was then two different towns: Milburn on the east side of the Kennebec, where most of Skowhegan’s populace now lives, and Bloomfield on the west side. In 1820 Bloomfield was considerably larger than Milburn, and unlike its across the river neighbor, it had both an academy and a church. The church was Congregational, though within a few years Bloomfield also had a building occupied by the Baptists.

When one takes a look at the list of ministers allover Maine in 1820, one discovers names that became prominent, not only in our state, but with even wider renown. Perhaps best known of all was Elijah Kellogg who had then not moved to his long pastorate in Bristol, but was the Congregational minister in Portland. He, of course, was the famous author of books about old time Maine written for boys. At the Brunswick Baptist Church was Benjamin Titcomb, founder of Maine’s first newspaper, the Falmouth Gazette, first published at a time when Falmouth was the old name for what is now Portland. Titcomb was also one of the founders of Colby College. Presiding over the Hebron Baptist Church was Rev. Jonathan Tripp who had been George Washington’s chaplain at Valley Forge and who, in 1804, had been one of the founders of Hebron Academy. He too, for many years was a Colby trustee.

One of the most influential ministers of the Congregationalists – successor to the old established state church of Massachusetts Bay – was Benjamin Tappan of Augusta, who later served four terms in the U.S. Congress. At Blue Hill was a minister of many talents – writer, artist, agricultural, as well as preacher – Jonathan Fisher, who became known to later generations not only in Maine, but allover the nation, through the writings of Mary Ellen Chase. In Albion the minister in 1820 was Daniel Lovejoy, father of Colby’s most famous graduate, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, who in 1837 gave his life for the cause of freedom of the press. In 1820 there were only two Episcopal clergymen in all of Maine: Petries Stuyvesant Ten Broek at St. Paul’s in Portland and Gideon Olney at Christ’s Church in Gardiner. In the whole area from Kittery to Eastport there was not a single organized Catholic parish.

This program is largely devoted to places, people and events of long ago, but it is occasionally appropriate to mention some contemporary subject. We well know that the number of students who attend college today is much larger than it was, not only in my own college days of 70 years ago, but considerably larger than even ten years ago. It may be that the number has for a time reached a peak, because we are told that men and women of college age are actually fewer than they were in 1970. But last year there were indeed a lot of them in our colleges and universities. How were they distributed?

The largest group, 343,000, were in the New York State University System; 144,00 were in the University of Wisconsin; and 128,000 on the various campuses that make up the University of California. In the ten state universities with largest enrollment there were altogether 1,531,000 students. The smallest of the state universities, Alaska, had 3,421 and the smallest in the continental United States, Wyoming had 8,713. The several campuses of the University of Maine system enrolled 26,750 making it larger than Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana. Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming – that is, larger than the university systems of 18 other states.

What about private universities? In size none of them can compare with the giant state universities. The largest is Syracuse with 49, 000 students. Purdue has 41,000. New York University (which is a private, not a public institute) has 40,000. The University of Southern California at Los Angeles (not a part of the state university system but a private school) has 28,000. In the Ivy League, Columbia enrolls 18,000, Harvard 21,000, Yale 10,000, and Princeton 6,000. One of the nation’s largest private colleges is Miami University in Ohio with 18,000 students.

And with that bow to college enrollment, we say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1979