Radio Script #1216

Little Talks on Common Things
November 11,1979

It is time for us to pay attention to some of Kennebec County’s smaller towns for they are surely deserving of mention on this program along with larger communities. So let us begin today’s broadcast with a salute to the town of Rome situated at the head of the largest of the Belgrade Lakes, the one old timers always call Great Pond.

To begin with the town’s very name is significant. It reveals that the people who decided on the town’s name when it was incorporated in 1804 had some educated knowledge of the ancient world. In the early years of the 18th century Maine towns were not named for places of importance 2000 years earlier unless their inhabitants had regard for classical history and the Latin and Greek language. Besides Rome, we have in Maine the towns of Athens, Carthage, Corinth, Naples and Troy and such post offices as Egypt and Sparta.

When the farms and woodlands at the head of Great Pond were first settled, the plantation was called West Pond. The plantation had more than fifty hills, seven times as many as the eternal city’s seven hills of Italian fame. Great Pond is not its only body of water. About a fourth of the town’s entire surface area is taken up by water. Like many other of Maine’s inland towns, Rome received its influx of settlers shortly after the close of the American Revolution. In that war John Rogers, one of Rome’s first settlers had been sergeant of the guard that marched to the gallows Major Andre, the British officer who had collaborated with the traitor Benedict Arnold. When Rogers cleared the land for his Rome farm the trees were part of virgin forest.

Geographically, Rome is interesting. Twenty thousand years ago, when the last great glacier to cover Maine melted away. it dumped its load of rocks in streaks, leaving between those streaks stretches of valley nearly free of rocks. So Rome, from its earliest settlement, had a number of farms quite different from those of other regions of which Cyrus Hamlin, the Paris Hill father of Abraham Lincoln’s vice president had said, “they have to sharpen the sheep’s noses so they can graze between the rocks.” So Rome has some excellent farms lying between windrows of stones.

Rome attained its largest population in 1860, just as the Civil War was about to open. It then had 864 people. By the dawn of the 20th century it had dropped below 500. Today its population is nearly doubled during the summer season because it has become a very popular summer resort, its lakes lined with cottages, some of them being luxurious estates, having within its borders also many camps for both children and adults.

Early in the 19th century, when a stage route was started between Hallowell and Farmington, Stephen Morrell opened a tavern near the junction where two highways meet in Rome, just a short distance beyond Belgrade Lakes Village. At that tavern were once located the Rome post office and several stores. The first industry set up in any Maine town was a sawmill or a grist mill, or a mill that combined both operations. Rome had a grist mill as early as 1820, which continued in operation until about 1880. In 1840 a sawmill was built at the outlet of Allen Pond, and six years later, near the same site, was erected a shingle mill.

During the 19th century small general stores did business in various parts ‘of the large area occupied by the town of Rome. The first store was operated by Simon Robbins in a corner of his grist mill; then in 1840 Charles Whittier built a store at the corner where the town house is now located. What grand old names some of those traders had long ago. Among the first names of Rome merchants were Amaziel, Eleazer and Hezekiah.

The first church in Rome, organized in 1832, was not one of the conventional sects at the time, but was started by a branch of the Free Baptists known as Buzzelites. After it was abandoned, the regular Free Baptists organized in Rome in 1858, and it was they who put up the building that still stands on the road from Oakland to Rome Corner. In 1890, Rome had as many as fifteen well-kept small cemeteries, but many of them have since been abandoned.

When the town was incorporated in 1804 , David McGaffey was the first selectman. John Locke was town clerk, and McGaffey was also town treasurer.

Now let us turn to another Kennebec town, Fayette. It is now the home of Arnold Sturtevant, head of the Livermore Falls Trust Co., and author of the very entertaining book, “Josiah Volunteered,” an account of his Civil War ancestor.

As with the case of Rome and most other Maine towns the place began with a different name – Sterling Plantation. Like many other towns, it was laid out in a six-mile square- that is, six miles on each side and thus containing 36 square miles. Not far from its principal village is the lofty eminence known as Kents Hill, where for more than a century and a half has flourished one of Maine’s best known private schools, Kents Hill Seminary. Thus the little town of Fayette was very early famed by having easy access to schooling above the level of the common school.

Fayette has its own scenic hills, though Kents Hill is in the adjoining town of Readfield. The views from Watson Hill and Baldwin Hill in Fayette are magnificent.

The steep drop in streams issuing from its several lakes and ponds enabled early industries to spring up in Fayette soon after its first settlement following the American Revolution. Saw mills, grist mills, shingle mills, a clapboard mill, and a tannery were in operation before 1850, and three years before the Civil War started, the edge tool industry, for which the region became famous, entered the town with a scythe factory. That was taken over by the Dunns, who ran similar factories in Wayne and later in Oakland, and was for some time a part of the expanding operation of the Dunn Edge Tool Co.

The first settler of Fayette was Chase Elkins in 1781, who built a crude hut near Fayette Corner. His son was the first child born in the new settlement.

When mills began to spring up, an early one was erected on the line between Fayette and East Livermore, the saw standing right on the line. A creditor got the sheriff to serve a process on the mill operator for debt. When the sheriff of Androscoggin County appeared on one end of the log, the mill owner was at the other end in Kennebec County, so the sheriff had no authority to serve the paper.

There were resolute women as well as men in those days. Elnathan Wing, ane early resident, was captain of a coasting vessel. When he was once away on a voyage, his wife heard that the proprietors of Sterling Plantation were to have a meeting to dispose of some lots of land. With her child in her arms she walked ten miles from – East Readfield along a crude trail marked by spotted trees. At the meeting she bought a 150 acre lot of new land, paying for it later with a cow and a feather bed. Her husband, home from the sea, was later killed on the new lot by a falling tree. That farm had the first brick chimney and the first stone-lined well in Fayette.

The main highway through the town was the route for various lumber products, especially shingles and clapboards, going from the mills in Fayette to the ships loading at wharves in Hallowell.

Religious groups early vied for attention in Fayette. In 1822 the Bowdoinham Baptist Association, composed of more than a dozen churches and active in the founding of Colby College, met in Fayette Lining the roadside were booths dispensing rum and gingerbread for the conventioners. Those pious Baptists, clergy and laity alike, patronized those booths for generous servings between sessions of the convention.

A lot of business was being done in Fayette by the middle of the 19th century. The largest trader was Joseph Underwood, who not only conducted a general store but also ran factories for wool carding and tanning. His business became so extensive that by the time of the Civil War, his books showed accounts with more than 800 persons. His business extended from Andover at the northern end of Oxford County to Edgecomb, near Wiscasset, in Lincoln County. He was said to have been the first extensive introducer of Hereford cattle into Maine.

Witchcraft once invaded Fayette. The wife of John Kimball got the reputation of being a witch, having the awful omen of the evil eye. When butter was too long in forming in the churn, housewives said Old Lady Kimball had bewitched the cream. So they then threw a red-hot horseshow into the churn. They then heard an unearthly scream – or so they claimed – and they said the witch was so badly burned she stayed in the house for a week.

People went to a lot of trouble to attend church in pioneer Maine. In a remote part of Fayette lived the David Walton family. Every Sunday, with one child in her arms and two on the horse behind her, his wife would ride in winter to church at Fayette Corner. In summer she often made the journey on foot, still with one child in her arms. She was so careful of her shoes that she often went barefoot, stopping to put the shoes on only when she neared the church.

People didn’t often see their neighbors in those pioneer days. One woman in a remote part of Fayette had not seen another white woman for six months when, one day, three women came to visit her. She apologized that she
had no rum in the house and could only give them cider for refreshment.

Fayette’s fine cemetery, near the mills, was the site of an ancient Indian burying ground.

Under its present name, the town of Fayette was incorporated in 1795. At the first town meeting it was voted that swine should be permitted to run at large if they were yoked according to Massachusetts law. They appropriated 150 pounds for repair of highways. The men who thus worked out their taxes received four shillings a day. That was equivalent to 67 cents. They thought it was generous when they appropriated 30 pounds for schooling.

Despite that small school appropriation in 1795, the people of Fayette were by no means uninterested in education. A town brochure in 1900 boasted that no town in Maine had sent out more teachers for Maine schools than had the town of Fayette. Word went around that the town was noted for two things: its big oxen and its schoolmarms.

The first society to gain a foothold in Fayette was a temperance group that tried to put a stop to the wide use of rum to which we have already referred. It later became a unit of the nation-wide Sons of Temperance. The first truly social organization in town was one for women – the Martha Washington Society. As for the rum, by 1900 Fayette was said to be one of the driest towns in Maine.

That is the story of two of Kennebec County’s small, but by no means unimportant towns: Rome and Fayette.

Year: 1979