<\/p>\n
From time to time I have referred to maps of Kennebec and Somerset Counties, especially those in the series of atlases of all the Maine counties, published between 1875 and 1882. Mr. James Patterson of Benton has recently shown me a map of Kennebec and Somerset counties published a quarter of a century later, about 1900, which shows many interesting details.<\/p>\n
On the Kennebec map, for instance, are designated all the major ice houses on the river between Richmond and Hallowell. The northernmost was the huge plant of Glazier and Bodwell at Hallowell where also were located houses of the Knickerbocker Ice Company and the Page Ice Company. The Knickerbocker was indeed a large firm, with other big houses on the east side of the river in Pittston and Dresden. The B. Johnson Ice Company stored several thousand tons at Randolph, and down the eastern shore in Pittston were plants of the Centennial Ice Company, the Great Falls Ice Company, Powers and Company, The Independent Ice Company, the Garland Ice Company, the Kennebec Ice Company, and the Consumers Ice House. On the west side of the river were the Rich Ice House and the McCausland Ice House in Farmingdale, and in Richmond were the spacious houses of Haynes and DeW~~tl Morse and Connor, Russell Brothers, and the Kennebec Company. Altogether the map shows twenty-four ice houses, and that number includes only the largest plants. Numerous smaller places for storage and sale of ice are not shown. As I have often said on this program, the ice industry was a major item in Kennebec Valley economy half a century ago.<\/p>\n
A mere glance at these sixty year old maps of the two counties reveals a contrast between them that still prevails. Compared to Somerset, Kennebec is a well settled county. With a single exception, the entire territory is occupied by incorporated towns. That one exception is Unity Plantation, between the Kennebec town of Benton and the Waldo town of Unity. Somerset County with more than half of its territory in either plantations or unorganized townships, is quite different. The larger towns are of course in the southern part of the county. Except for Jackman, there are only scattered hamlets between The Forks and the Canadian border, and the county has vast areas where there are no inhabitants at all. It was, of course, the river that made possible the development of many Somerset towns.<\/p>\n
Going north from Waterville, the Somerset towns on the river are Fairfield, Skowhegan, Norridgewock; then the river divides towns. On the east side are Madison, Solon, Bingham, Moscow, Caratunk and The Forks plantation. On the west side are Smithfield, Anson, Embden, Concord and the plantations of Pleasant Ridge, Carrying Place and Bowdoin. Farther west are the towns of Mercer, Starks, New Portland and Lexington, while on the east toward Penobscot County is the large, industrial town of Pittsfield, and ten other towns, Detroit, Palmyra, St. Albans, Ripley, Cambridge, Canaan, Hartland, Harmony, Cornville and Athens.<\/p>\n
In 1900 Somerset County had fifteen plantations, the most prominent of which were Bigelow, Dead River, Flagstaff, Lexington, Brighton, Mayfield, The Forks and West Forks. Although most of the unorganized townships, which included almost all of the county north of The Forks, was designated by range and township number, several of them had been named, though they were neither towns nor plantations. Mr. Patterson’s Somerset map shows such township names as Squaretown, Sapling, Misery. Brassua, Seeboomook, Hobbstown and Holeb. Readers of Kennebec Yesterdays may recall that Sapling was the township on the western shore of Moosehead Lake. to which the lumber operator of Fairfield, William Connor. took his numerous ox-teams and his timber crews every winter in the 1840’s and 1850’s.<\/p>\n
Just north of Brassua, and about ten miles west of the north bay of Moosehead Lake, was a six mile square township marked on the map “Revolutionary Soldiers”. I wonder what ever became of that tract, for there is no evidence that any soldier of the Revolution ever settled on any part of it. Scattered through these wild lands of Somerset were grants that had been made to schools by the old Commonwealth of Massachusetts before Maine became a separate state. Among them were the Sandwich Academy grant, the Taunton Academy grant and the Dean Academy grant. All of this whole vast territory of northern Somerset had once been part of the vast Bingham purchase of half a million acres.<\/p>\n
Somerset was one of the Maine counties which steadily lost population after the Civil War. In 1860 the county had 36,000 people. By 1870 the number had dropped to 34,000, and by 1880 to 32,000, and it held to about that number, largely because of the growth of such towns as Skowhegan, Fairfield and Pittsfield, while most of the rural towns continued to lose population.<\/p>\n
Like Somerset County, Kennebec lost population between 1860 and 1880, as indeed did most of Maine. The Civil War, and the movement of people into the West during the fifteen years after its close, steadily depleted the Maine population. Kennebec County, that had numbered 56,000 people in 1860, was reduced to 53,000 in 1870 and to 52,000 in 1880. Then began a growth that has continued ever since. In 1890 the county had 57,000 people, and in 1900 over 60,000.<\/p>\n
It is interesting to note how many people once lived in what are now very small Somerset County communities. In 1850 Smithfield had nearly a thousand inhabitants; St. Albans had almost two thousand; Starks had 1,500; Mercer had 1,200; Cornville had 1,300; and Athens 1,600. One of the towns that lost most in population was Embden, which had a thousand people in 1850 and only 500 in 1900.<\/p>\n
Although much of Somerset County land has always been uninhabited wilderness, we must remember that it has meant considerable wealth to the county, for it has always been covered with dense forest, and, from the days of the long pine logs to the modern times of pulpwood, millions upon millions of cords have come from those Somerset lands.<\/p>\n
Mr. Patterson has graciously shown me another item which is much more rare than his two maps. It is a sheet containing various announcements and proclamations concerning a call for enlistments in the Civil War. On the back of the sheet is written the name of Mr. Patterson’s grandfather, John Simpson.<\/p>\n
When summer came in 1862, the war was not going well for the North. At Shiloh in April the Union had lost 13,000 men; at Fair Oaks 6,000; at what was called the Seven Days’ Battle 9,000. During the seven days occurred the battle of Gaines’ Hill, where fell the Waterville officer, William S. Heath, for whom the local G.A.R. post was later named. It had become necessary for President Lincoln to call for more troops and that call had reached the several states about the first of July in 1862.<\/p>\n
Those of us who remember how men were inducted into military service in both World War I and World War II find it a bit hard to understand how the process took place during the Civil War. We have been accustomed to see men enlist in the Army, go to some regional induction center, and then be assigned to a unit that has in it men from twenty or more states. In the Civil War unification of the service was hampered by the very thing against which the war was fought – excessive states’ rights. Every state raised its own regiments and tried by replacement to keep them intact. A Maine man belonged to the First Maine or the Tenth Maine, or to that famous regiment whose story has been so magnificently told by my friend John Pullen, the Twentieth Maine, or to some other of the Maine regiments of infantry or artillery.<\/p>\n
When President Lincoln issued this order to the several states of the Union, it was not for a certain number of individual recruits from each state, but rather for a certain number of regiments, already organized for incorporation into one or another of the armies, such as the Army of the Potomac. What usually happened was that some individual raised a company of which he himself became captain; just as Francis Heath had done in Waterville when the first call came in 1861. Then that company went to an appointed mustering place, such as Camp Coburn at Augusta, and from there was sent by rail or ship to the central organization post at Annapolis, Maryland.<\/p>\n
Like every other state, Maine of course had an organized militia with an Adjutant General in headquarters command and with the Governor as ex-officio commander-in-chief. The Maine militia was divided into several divisions, each headed by a major general. By long-standing agreement with the Federal government, the Maine statutes provided that, whenever the President of the United States should declare that insurrection, war or invasion caused an emergency, he could require the Governor of the State to call the militia into Federal service. In June, 1862 President Lincoln so notified Governor Israel Washburn of Maine.<\/p>\n
The State had already set up a system of bounty payments for volunteers that could apply to the regiments the state must raise. A citizen who volunteered for one of the new regiments would receive an immediate pension of ten dollars and one month’s pay, plus $25 when his company should be accepted into a regiment, and another $25 when his regiment was mustered into Federal service. The situation was this then: a man who was not in the militia could get a total bounty of $64 by enlisting, while a member of a militia company going to the front with his called-up company would get no bounty at all.<\/p>\n
Governor Washburn and Adjutant General Hodsdon got busy, and the collection of orders shown me by Mr. Patterson reveal what was done to bring fairness into such a situation. One of these orders was addressed to all the militia companies in Maine. It said: “All the members of the militia will be relieved from service upon their enlisting in either of the new regiments to be formed in response to the President’s order, the Seventeenth and the Eighteenth Maine Regiments, or enlisting as replacement of losses in any of the Maine regiments already in the field, and each shall receive the same bounty as that paid to volunteers enlisting directly without militia service and, in addition, upon discharge from the service such men shall each receive a further bounty of $75, and in event of his death, the payment of $75 shall be made to his family.”<\/p>\n
That was General Order No. 16. General Order No. 17, from the Adjutant General to the Major Generals of the Maine Militia divisions, told those commanders to urge the enlistment of their men in the new regiments. It said: “As members of the militia will be called into actual service as militia for a period which is certain to be quite as long as that for which they would be held as volunteers, the advantages to be desired by volunteering, especially in respect to premiums, advance pay and bounty, are so obvious that militia members are likely to have little hesitation in enlisting as volunteers rather than to serve as militia, in which capacity they will receive nothing but monthly wages, rations and clothing.”<\/p>\n
The Governor and Adjutant General were wise enough to see that the two regiments of volunteers, the Seventeenth Maine, mustered at Portland, and the Eighteenth Maine, mustered at Bangor, would not be enough to meet the President’s call, because there would be left no whole militia regiment to send off at once. So they immediately declared for a third regiment, the Nineteenth Maine, to be mustered at Bath. Meanwhile the Governor issued a general order for the rounding up of all soldiers of Maine regiments already in the field, who were home on leave, to apply to certain named officers in various parts of the state for railroad passes supplying their transportation to Augusta, whence they would be sent back to their regiments.<\/p>\n
The longest order was addressed to the Patriotic Citizen Soldiery of Maine, and was in the form of a poster to be put up in public places all over the state. Its most memorable paragraph referred to the system of substitutes, used throughout the Civil War — a system that so favored the well-to-do and was so flagrantly abused that it was never again used in an American war. It provided that any man called up for active duty with the militia could get out of it by hiring a substitute. When in 1863 the Civil War draft went into effect, men could still avoid the draft by supplying a substitute.<\/p>\n
And now since there is no substitute for the ticking of the clock that uses up our time tonight, we must say Good Night for Old Times’ Sake.<\/p>\n
Year: 1959<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #417, Broadcast on April 19, 1959<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[800,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7959"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7959\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}