Radio Script #1221

Little Talks on Common Things
December 16, 1979

Today our subject is Religion in Maine when the United States of America was born.

Like all other American colonies, Massachusetts, including its District of Maine, ceased to be subject to the British Crown with the end of the Revolution. But for a long time before that, Maine had felt little influence from Britain’s established religion, the Church of England. Ferdinando Gorges, the man who had held the King’s grant to a large part of Maine and, was indeed a devout Episcopalian and he tried to establish that faith within his dominion, but without much success. The influence of anti-Episcopalian, Puritan Massachusetts Bay was too strong. Shortly before the Revolution, in 1749, there had been formed the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase, commonly called the New Plymouth Company, for they purchased the area in Central Maine, along both sides of the Kennebec, that had once belonged to the Plymouth Company through a grant from the King in 1629. The head of that company was Dr. Sylvester Gardiner who was a strong Episcopalian and he established in what is now the City of Gardiner an Episcopal Church that is still there today.

But Dr. Gardiner was one of a few Episcopalians in the company. Most of the other proprietors, like James Bowdoin, John Hancock and James Pitts were among those Boston independents known as Congregationalists. Not only along the Kennebec, but all the way from the Piscataqua to the Penobscot, wherever there were churches at the close of the Revolution, they were likely to be of Congregational faith.

By this time, another sect also had a foothold in Maine. The Scotch-Irish from Protestant Ulster had begun to come into Nova Scotia in large numbers, and they spread across the Bay of Fundy into Maine. Not all of them came by that route because many of them arrived in Boston directly from Scotland, and some of those, too, came to Maine.

One such Scotsman was an early Waterville pioneer, John McKechnie. He was the man who surveyed this part of the Kennebec area for the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase, and he built Waterville’s first saw and grist mills. It was, therefore, two religions – Congregationalism from Boston, and Presbyterianism from Scotland – that accounted for most Maine churches in 1783, when the Treaty of Paris recognized the new nation across the Atlantic.

At that time in Massachusetts, District of Maine had 41 incorporated offices and in them were 31 settled ministers of the Congregational and Presbyterian denominations. There was an Episcopalian rector at Gardiner, a German Lutheran at Waldoboro, but no Catholic priest in any Maine town. As one would suspect, the 31 Congregational and Presbyterian ministers in 1783 were largely located in Western Maine, and predominantly along the coast from Kittery to Bath. Inland there were ministers at Buxton, Lebanon, Fryeburg, New Gloucester and Windham. There was a church at Woohvich, across the Kennebec, Bath, and one at Wiscasset, but east of that river only one minister was settled in all the rest of Maine. He was James Lyon at Machias.

As early as 1783 several towns had more than one minister – Kittery boasted three, and Portland and York each had two. At that time the Quakers were by no means unknown in Maine. Although there were no Quaker ministers – at that time the division of Quakers who accepted pastoral leaders had not been founded – there were several organized Quaker Meetings including the one at Vassalboro under the leadership of Remington Hobby.

As early as 1740, a Society of Friends was so strong in Falmouth that the Congregationalists became concerned. That splendid source of information about early Maine, the Diary of Parson Smith of Portland recorded on July 30, 1740: “Today the church kept a day of fasting and prayer on account of the alarming spread of Quakerism. Mr. Jefferds and myself prayed,and Mr. Jefferds preached a strong sermon against them. There are many strange Quakers in town.” Even as late as 1780 the same Parson Smith wrote: “The people are in much turmoil about Quaker meetings.”

At the close of the Revolution there were six well established Quaker or Friends Societies in Maine. By 1783 Baptists had become more numerous than Quakers. They had first appeared in Kittery in the 17th century, when the Province of Massachusetts Bay had just purchased from the heirs of Ferdinando Gorges that nobleman’s vested interest in Maine lands. In 1687 they appeared in Kittery under Elder William Scriven, but were so persecuted that the Elder and his flock fled to North Carolina, where they set up the first Baptist Church in the South. Baptists were then absent from Maine for three-quarters of a century. In 1767 they were back, with a church at Berwick, Maine’s first permanent Baptist church. Soon they had spread allover York County, then into other parts of Maine. But in 1783 they had only seven churches: Berwick, Sanford, Wells, Shapleigh, Lyman, Thomaston and Bowdoinham.

Those were all Calvinist Baptists, believers in John Calvin’s doctrine of predestination – when you’re born you’re done for. Just before the end of the Revolution in 1780, there were set up in Woolwich, Georgetown, Edgecomb, New Gloucester and Pemaquid, churches of the Free Will Baptist faith. Frequently the most obvious difference between the Baptist and the Congregational minister was education. More than half of the Congregational preachers were graduates of Harvard, and others had been educated at Dartmouth. Of the 15 settled Baptist ministers in 1783, only two had attended college. Maine’s first recognized historian, Joseph Williamson, wrote: “At the end of the Revolution the public mind was undergoing memorable change as to ministerial qualifications. Inherent gifts, fervent feeling, and solemn piety were more highly regarded than study. Community opinion that the minister must be the best educated man in town as well as the most spiritual, had been replaced by a sort of contempt for education as being a stumbling block to piety.

“This was accompanied by a spreading belief that ministers should not have salaries lest that make them hirelings, giving more regard to the fleece than to the flock. Thus many early Baptist preachers received no salaries.”

Since many of the ministers were highly educated. they usually preached without notes. Though it caused a lot of rambling and tedious repetition, a lot of people liked it better than the even more tedious reading of sermons by other clergy.

After the founding of Brown University, then of Waterville College (now Colby) respect for education returned and soon the Baptists had their own highly respectable seminaries. As a separate denomination, the Methodists did not appear in Maine until a decade after the signing of peace with England. In 1784, John Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism appointed two of his followers in America, Thomas Cooke and Francis Asbury, to be “supervisors over our brethren in America.” In two years the Methodist Episcopal Church was set up in Baltimore.

In the District of Maine the best known Methodist missionary and spreader of that faith in the last quarter of the 18th century was Jesse Lee. There was scarcely a hamlet in the whole area from Virginia to Maine that he did not visit. In 1790 he first came to Maine and preached all through the District from Saco to Bangor. He established a church at Readfield. which he called a “vinegar from which the wine of the gospel will flow.” Soon there was a Portland circuit of Methodist churches. By 1800 Methodism had a firm foothold in Maine.

One of the places where Presbyterianism got a start was the town we now know as Skowhegan. When the area was first settled it was a large tract called Canaan and a hundred years later people were still talking of “old Canaan.” That was not the Canaan Village near the larger community at Skowhegan Falls but was the first tiny village on the west bank of the Kennebec several miles below The Falls, about halfway from there to the present village of Hinckley. Travelers on the main highway from Waterville to Skowhegan can still see between the highway and the river the cemetery of old Canaan, where lie the bodies of Skowhegan’s pioneers. It was that community whic got Skowhegan’s first church – Presbyterian.

Louise Coburn, the Skowhegan historian, gives this explanation. “The Sagadahoc territory, east of the Kennebec, had been settled largely by Scotch- Irish from Ulster who were of the Presbyterian faith, the predominant denomination in Scotland. A considerable number of Old Canaan settlers came from the Maine coastal towns of Georgetown, Woolrich and Boothbay and they were Presbyterians.”

In 1783, distress caused by the Revolution caused the closing of the Presbyterian church at Georgetown, and the minister moved to Norridgewock where he served as an itinerant preacher over the whole region including Old Canaan. Although he returned to Georgetown when conditions became more settled, his influence was strong. Nearly a permanent minister, the people turned to him for advice. The result was that, in 1785, Dr. Nathaniel Whittaker came from Solon, Maine to be the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Canaan. It was not long before Dr. Whittaker found himself in a hot bed of Congregationalism. In the community were too many people who had come not from Sagadahoc, but from the Boston area, where the Congregationalists were firmly established.

What was the difference? It was the difference between bureaucracy and independence. In Scotland the church had repudiated the whole concept of bishops, but declared church polity to require the session to govern the local church, the presbytery to control groups of churches, the synod to have certain powers over groups of presbyteries, and the General Assembly to enact national church law.

On the other hand the Congregationalists had broken with all kinds of overhead government. Every Congregational church was an independent unit, with complete authority to conduct its own affairs. Neither bishop nor presbytery could tell it what to do. Congregational independence proved too strong for the Presbyterians in old Canaan. By 1860 they had discharged their Presbyterian minister and had put a Congregationalist in his place.

In Maine the Baptists did not encounter the same resistance as did the Presbyterians and the Episcopalians. The Baptists, like the Congregationalists, believed in the independence of the local church. Their difference from the Congregationalists was chiefly in respect to baptism. They opposed infant baptism, insisting it was a rite only for persons old enough to know its meaning, and they also insisted so strongly on baptism by immersion that the records of the First Baptist Church of Waterville tell us that on December 12, 1838, the pastor of that church, who was then Samuel Francis Smith, author of the hymn “America”, baptized 18 persons in the Messalonskee Stream. That was indeed a cold dunking.

Well, anyhow, this broadcast does record that when the American colonies won their independence, there were already churches of several denominations in Maine.

Year: 1979