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Radio Script #1159

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Little Talks on Common Things
April 2, 1978

Several times during the 30 years that this program has been on the air, it has made reference to a distinguished family of this part of the Kennebec Valley, the Drummonds. Many of their descendants are among us today. From the time of the Revolution there were Drummonds in Winslow, Waterville, Vassalboro and Sidney. Today I want to tell you more about that family.

John Drummond, the first of the family to settle in Winslow was the great-grandson of the first Drummond to come to America, Alexander Drumnlond, who came from Ulster in Northern Ireland in 1729, bringing two sons with him. They settled in Georgetown at the mouth of the Kennebec, and were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. The grandson, John, was a son of Alexander’s oldest son, Patrick Drummond. He was born in Georgetown in 1744, and had two sons, John and Rutherford” both of whom came to this part of the Kennebec – John settling in Winslow and Rutherford in Sidney. Most of the present Drummonds in this area are descended from one or the other.

John, great-grandson of the original immigrant, settling in Winslow in the last quarter of the 19th century, married Damaris Hayden, daughter of Josiah and Silence Howard Hayden. Thus were linked three of the important families of Winslow – the Drummonds, the Haydens and the Howards. The eldest son of John and Damaris Drummond was named Clark. He became a leading citizen of Winslow, holding at various times many different town offices, and was a leader in community enterprises. He died on the same Winslow farm where he and all of his children had been born. He married Cynthia Blackwell an aunt of Temperance Blackwell who, years later, became the wife of Charles F. Hathaway, the shirt maker. The older son of Clark and Cynthia Drummond was Josiah Hayden Drummond, born in 1827. Another son was Everett Drummond, born in 1834.

Everett Drummond became a Waterville attorney, admitted to the Maine bar in 1858, after studying law in the office of another son of Clark Drummond, Everett’s older brother Josiah, who became the most renowned of the family. Josiah took Everett into partnership,and when the older brother left Waterville to practice law in Portland, Everett became sole owner of the Waterville firm, but he soon formed a partnership with E. F.Webb.

In 1874 Everett Drummond became the owner of the five year old Waterville Savings Bank. In that office he was succeeded by his son, Albert F. Drummond, a man who many present Waterville people knew well, for he lived almost a full century, dying only a few years ago. The Albert Drummond home at the corner of Burleigh Street and Morrill Avenue was often the scene of social gatherings presided over by the gracious hostess, Mrs. Josephine Prince Drummond.

Several of Winslow’s early settlers came from Bridgewater, Mass. That was true of both the Haydens and the Howards. Josiah Hayden, born in Braintree in 1734, had married Silence Howard of Bridgewater in 1763 and went into business in his wife’s town. In the late 1780s they arrived in Winslow, where Josiah purchased a lot from the Proprietors for whom Ezekiel Pattee was the local agent. They later moved across the river to the western side of Winslow that in 1802 became the separate town of Waterville. Before that he had become clerk and treasurer of the Winslow Proprietors, and he had presided over the drawing and assignment of the 96 50-acre lots left of the Proprietors’ holdings in 1787.

Josiah Hayden was a colonel of militia, and he must have also been musically inclined for the Waterville Centennial History tells us: “The monotony of the winter of 1796 was relieved by an occasional ball at Fairfield and by the regular singing school kept at Col. Hayden’s house.”

As all Waterville DAR ladies know with pride, their chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution was named for Josiah’s wife, Silence Howard Hayden and one of the oldest living members of that chapter is a descendant of John Drummond and Damaris Hayden, Mrs. Katherine Drummond Taylor. In the summer,of 1910 the Drummond family held a reunion at Oak Grove Seminary. A newspaper account of that reunion said: “From the children of John Drummond have come numerous progeny. Families have intertwined. If you throw a stone across the river in either direction, you are likely to hit a Drummond. Actually the Drummonds, Garlands, Cushmans, Keiths, Haydens and Howards are now all one large family.”

The descendants of John Drummond had formed the Drummond Family Association, of which in 1900 Waterville’s Everett Drummond was president, and the secretary was his son Albert, the “Bert” Drummond to whom we referred a few moments ago. Besides the family names already mentioned as connected with the descendants of John Drummond, there were present at the 1910 reunion Langs, Robinsons, Lows, Burleighs, Taylors, Blackwells and Reynoldses. The descendants of John Drummond were indeed prolific.

As I have said, most renowned of the Drummond family was Josiah Drummond, the Waterville attorney in the middle of the 19th century. Born in Winslow in 1827, son of Clark Drummond, he graduated from Colby in 1846 and become so distinguished that in 1871 the college conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. In 1851, two years after the discovery of gold in California, Josiah made the overland journey to that distant coast, in the same year that Solyman Heath and his son William made the same venturesome trip – a story I have told before on this program and have published in DOWNEAST Magazine.

While in college, Josiah became a member of the anti-slavery society, and five years after his admission to the bar, in 1855, he left the Democratic Party of Jefferson and Jackson in disgust at their support of or indifference toward slavery and joined the new Republican party that had been founded only the year before in 1854. Josiah was elected to the Maine House of Representatives in 1857, and the following year was chosen its speaker. He then was elevated to the State Senate. After that he served for three years as Attorney General of Maine. In 1860 he moved to Portland. For several years he was chairman of the Trustees of Colby College and was an influential factor in the growth of that institution. He served as attorney for important corporations and was long the clerk of the Maine Central Railroad Co.

In the 1850’s Josiah Drummond became an adviser and supporter of Hannibal Hamlin. It was Hamlin’s joining the Republicans that speeded Josiah’s decision to do the same. Josiah became recognized as the Hamlin leader in Maine. When he was chosen a delegate to the Republican national convention in 1864, he was determined that his idol should be renominated for the vice-presidency, and he put up a gallant fight in the convention. But exigency of the war dictated otherwise.

The candidacy of General McLellan as the Democratic candidate to oppose Abraham Lincoln appeared so strong that whatever may have been Lincoln’s own private opinion, he was persuaded that a kind of fusion ticket that would unite Republicans and strong Union Democrats was the only way he could win. So he agreed to the replacement of Hamlin by Andrew Johnson, a strong Union supporter in a secessionist Tennessee.

The convention of 1864 was not Josiah Drummond’s first. Four years earlier he had attended the hectic convention in Chicago that ended in the choice of Abraham Lincoln over William Seward as the Republican candidate. There he joined the forces of Horace Greeley that swung the convention from Seward to Lincoln, and Drummond joined Greeley’s group on the latter’s promise to support Hannibal Hamlin of Maine for the vice-presidency. So Josiah Drummond left that Chicago convention assured that his friend Hamlin would be the next vice-president, because the Democratic party was so hopelessly divided into three factions that election of the Republican candidate was virtually assured long before the November voting.

But in 1864 the situation was quite different. The war was still on. To assure Lincoln’s reelection, that power behind the throne, Horace Greeley, powerful editor of the New York Tribune, this timedeserted and supported for vice-president Andrew Johnson, the military governor of Tennessee. Lincoln was won over by Greeley, and Maine thus lost the opportunity of having its favorite son succeed to the presidency when Lincoln died in 1865.

Josiah Drummond continued his active work for the Republican Party. He was, a member of the convention of 1876 that nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, and again in 1884, when he led the Maine delegation in the convention that nominated James G. Blaine, who was narrowly beaten in the November election by Grover Cleveland.

Josiah Drummond ,was, during his lifetime, Maine’s most prominent Mason. By 1890 he had filled more Masonic offices than any other American then living. He wrote numerous articles on Masonry, and was a recognized, historian of the order. He had joined the Waterville Lodge F.&A.M. in 1849, was its Master in 1858. Two years later he was elected Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Maine. Then he, became head of the Grand Chapter of the Grand Commandery, head of the Grand Council, then of the Grand Chapter of U.S., the Provincial Grand Master of the Royal Order of Scotland. In 1862 he became one of that distinguished group, the 33rd degree Masons of the Scottish rite. Just after the Civil War he became Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of U.S.

Josiah Drummond’s work for Maine’s growing railroad system was significant. He was a director of both the Maine Central and the Boston and Maine. When the Eastern Railroad, one of the competing lines between Boston and Portland, obtained control of the rival Portland, Saco & Portsmouth from Berwick Junction to Portland, and proceeded to run trains through the junction without stopping, Drummond procured an injunction, securing Boston and Maine connection for all trains. Not a train on either line was thereafter permitted to pass through Berwick Junction without stopping.

Josiah Drummond’s son, Josiah, .Jr., was also a graduate of Colby and a prominent Maine lawyer. A large number of Josiah’s relatives have also been Colby graduates, and his grand nephew, Richard Drummond of Bangor was for many years Chairman of Colby’s committee on investments.

This is a family of which Waterville may well be proud, the descendants of John Drummond of Winslow.

Year: 1978

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