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Among many hitherto unknown items that I have picked up during my investigations into the hundred and fifty year history of Colby College is a letter written in 1821 by Marcia Chaplin, wife of Jeremiah Chaplin, Colby’s first president. It was addressed in the strange way of many such letters of the early 19th century.<\/p>\n
There was, of course, no envelope, but the letter was left blank on its fourth page, then folded in that clever way of the period, so that it would go through the mail without opening. But in addition there are the faint red marks of what was once a wax seal, but I assure you the clever folding would have kept the letter closed without any seal. The address reads: “Mr. John C. Welch, Braintree, Mass. To be left at the Post Office in Weymouth.”<\/p>\n
Because this letter concerns a family that had lived only three years in Waterville since Mr. Chaplin had come to start the college in 1818, it may interest some of us who live in Waterville today. Mrs. Chaplin wrote to Mr. Welch: “As Mr. Chaplin has an engagement this evening which he cannot dispense with, he has requested me to answer your letter. We are pleased to learn that our young friend desires to be a preacher. Mr. Chaplin would be gratified to see you in Waterville as soon as you can come. The winter vacation commences the last Saturday in December and continues eight weeks. Several of the students expect to pass the vacation here. and you could pursue your studies with them. You can be accommodated with a room in the College. Seventeen rooms are finished and three more will soon be completed. The expense of board, including washing, mending and bedding, is eight shillings per week, when paid in advance.” (Eight shillings, by the way. was $1.50.) “Should you bring your bed and bedding, it will probably lessen the expense twelve cents a week, as one of the students might sleep with you.<\/p>\n
“I believe I have now written what Mr. Chaplin requested and shall now spend a few minutes writing for myself. Although Waterville College has succeeded thus far beyond the expectations of its friends, yet much remains to be done. Are there no rich or generous people in Braintree of whom you could solicit a donation?<\/p>\n
“The house which adjoins the College is yet unfinished, and my particular object now is to request assistance for the completion of that building. Could I but collect 15 or 20 dollars, it would greatly assist. Perhaps some ladies in Braintree may like to contribute to this object and may feel disposed to send their generous donation by you. Should this be the case, we should be very grateful to them for their kindness.<\/p>\n
“If convenient before you set out for Waterville, you will please to call at Deacon Farwell’s in Cambridge, that we may have the pleasure of hearing from them. Say to Mrs. Farwell that I have a letter begun to her, which I shall send by the first private conveyance, but do not think it worth sending by mail. If you should be in Boston, please call at the store of Messrs. Lincoln and Edwards and pick up any letters that may be left there for us. You will also please inquire whether there has been any recent intelligence from the Burma mission.<\/p>\n
“Mr. Chaplin joins me in respects to your father and mother.<\/p>\n
“Marcia O. Chaplin”<\/p>\n
Now several points in this letter call for clarifying comment nearly 140 years after it was written. What Mrs. Chaplin calls the College, where she tells young Welch he can have a room, was the first, and in 1821 the only, college building, South College. Not until the next year, 1822, was its companion, North College, erected. The nearby house to which Mrs. Chaplin refers, was actually the first building erected on the college lot after it was cleared of trees. That was the President’s house, built largely with the voluntary help of the towns people in 1819. When Mrs. Chaplin wrote this letter, the house had been standing for two years. Yet she says, “it is unfinished and my particular object now is to request assistance for the completion of the building.” How pitifully poor the young college then was, and in what stringent circumstances its president himself was placed, is shown by Mrs. Chaplin’s statement that, if she could raise 15 or 20 dollars, it would help a lot.<\/p>\n
Then there is the point about the method by which Mrs. Chaplin intended to send a letter to her friend Mrs. Farwell in Cambridge. In those days when postage was paid by the receiver, not the sender, many a writer to a friend was careful to make a letter worth while. The writer didn’t want the receiver to think he was cheated by a trifling missive. Mrs. Jeremiah Chaplin wasn’t accustomed to write trifling letters, but she was taking no chances. She told young Welch to tell Mrs. Farwell she did not think the letter she was writing to the Cambridge woman was worth sending through the mail. She would entrust that letter to personal delivery by the first acquaintance she found going to Boston.<\/p>\n
Then there is the point about the cost of board. In 1821 a student at Waterville College could get 21 meals a week, have his washing regularly done, and be furnished a bed and bedding, all for a dollar and a half a week. My! My! the good old days!<\/p>\n
That sending letters by way of persons traveling from one place to another on private business was common in 1821 is again shown by the close of Mrs. Chaplin’s letter. She asks that Welch call at a Boston store and bring to Waterville any letters that may have been left there for the Chaplin family.<\/p>\n
Finally, note that Mrs. Chaplin makes it clear that young Welch was not coming to enter Waterville College. She says he can have a room in the college building, but it is plain he was coming to the old theological department of what had been the Maine Literary and Theological Institute, not to get a college degree, but to study theology with Chaplin. For several years the theological course was conducted quite separately from the college course, and within ten years had been given up entirely. After 1830 young men coming to Waterville to prepare for the ministry (and there were many of them) took the regular college course for the Bachelor of Arts degree.<\/p>\n
According to a little book called the Winslow Register, published in 1904, the first mills in what is now the town of Winslow were built, not near Fort Halifax, but on the Outlet Stream, that flows from China Lake at East Vassalboro through North Vassalboro and into the Sebasticook above Winslow Village. No one seems to know exactly when the first mill was built on that stream, but it was probably before 1770, since the whole area was sufficiently populated to secure incorporation as a town in 1771. It is supposed that, some time in the 1760’s, Benjamin Runnels, a Revolutionary soldier, came to Winslow from Pownalborough, now the town of Dresden, and then the capital of Lincoln County, which comprised all of Maine east of the Androscoggin. It was Runnels who built the first mill, which was either a combined saw mill and grist mill under one roof, or two closely adjacent buildings. As late as 1820 the foundations still stood. Runnals gained some fame in the Revolution, because he was one of the blacksmiths who forged the chain across the Hudson River at West Point. In 1790 the Norcross family built a mill a few rods farther up the stream. It was still in use in 1880. Three quarters of a mile farther up was a mill built by Josiah Hayden in 1808. Fourteen years later he bought a grist mill and moved it to a site close to his saw mill.<\/p>\n
One of Winslow’s early industries was a clay pottery, also located on Outlet Stream near the Hayden Mills, where there was a fine bed of clay. It is said that after William Hussey and Ambrose Bruce started that pottery in 1830, most of the milk pans used in Winslow were earthenware dishes of Hussey design. The 1904 Register says of Hussey: “He would make up a hundred dollars worth of pots and pans and have a good time on the proceeds before making more. Too fond of convivial enjoyments, he let his business decline and finally collapse.”<\/p>\n
At what is now North Vassalboro there had been on the Outlet Stream some sort of mill as early as 1791. In 1825 Joseph Southwind built a hemp mill there and distributed seed to farmers. The venture did not pay, and Church and Bassett turned it into a mill for shingles and barrel staves, and later into a small woolen mill. In 1857 a company headed by John Lang built a grist mill and changed the old woolen mill into a shoe peg factory. Charles Priest, a partner of Lang’s, invented a machine for cutting shoe pegs. It made him independent of a patent that had monopolized that industry, and the North Vassalboro factory soon had customers as far away as Liverpool, where in 1860 they shipped 1,000 barrels of pegs. After fire destroyed that mill in 1865, John Lang built the big woolen mill that became Vassalboro’s major industry.<\/p>\n
Seventy years ago there were at least a dozen big saw mills on both sides of the Kennebec at Waterville and Winslow. One of the biggest stood on the historic grounds of Fort Point in Winslow. Built in 1890 by Edward Ware on land leased from the Lockwood Company — yes, that company owned land on both sides of the river — the site of Ware’s mill occupied a large part of what had been the pallisade enclosure of old Fort Halifax. Ware’s main building, more than 300 feet long, had the most modern machinery for cutting lumber into desired shapes. A steam engine of 300 horse power made it independent of the waters of either the Sebasticook or the Kennebec. It employed 65 men and turned out a million board feet of lumber a month for eight months of the year, and just on the side it had a monthly production of three million shingles and as many laths.<\/p>\n
Some of our older Winslow citizens must remember the brick yard near the river bank about two miles above Ticonic Falls. Reuben Simpson is said to have been the first to make brick at that place in 1800. Later operators of kilns were Stephen Abbott and William Bassett. Soon after the Civil War, Norton and Leavitt operated a kiln down the river from the old site, at a spot not far from the Ticonic Bridge. It was at the Norton and Leavitt kiln that bricks were made for the construction of the Lockwood Mills.<\/p>\n
I have recently been asked where are buried the first Josiah Hayden and his wife, Silence Howard Hayden, for whom the local DAR chapter is named. The answer is that they lie in the Howard Cemetery in Winslow, on the Augusta Road. The two stones are inscribed: “Col. Josiah Hayden, died Sept. 2, 1818, aged 84 years; Silence Howard Hayden, died August 2, 1803, aged 63 years.”<\/p>\n
Year: 1960<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #455, Broadcast on April 10, 1960<\/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":[766,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8078"}],"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=8078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8078\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}