<\/p>\n
I want to tell you today how some of our Maine towns got their names. Let us begin right here at home with Waterville. When this side of the river at Ticonic Falls was a part of the town of Winslow, the village that grew up on this side at the foot of the falls was called Ticonic Village. When separate incorporation was planned at the turn into the nineteenth century, the new town came very near being called Williamsburg. One of its most prominent pioneers was Dr. Obadiah Williams, who at that time owned the big McKechnie-surveyed Lot 104 that controlled part of the water power of the Kennebec. In fact Williams and the McKechnie heirs, who owned Lot 103, originally controlled all the power at the falls. But by 1800 other men, including Ebenezer Bacon and the builders of the first dam, Nehemiah Getchell and Asa Redington, had gained shares in the power rights.<\/p>\n
Exactly what prevented naming the town Williamsburg we do not know, but when the petition reached the Massachusetts legislature in the fall of 1801, the name Williamsburg had been crossed out and the name Waterville written in its place. It is quite possible that business jealousies played their part in the decision. None of the prominent citizens would let the place be named for any other of them. A perfectly safe, uncontroversial name was Waterville, the town on the water.<\/p>\n
Fairfield is another story. It was the name given at once to the plantation laid out by the Nye-Dimick survey, when those men from Sandwich, Mass. were granted a township next north of Winslow on the Kennebec’s west side. What soon became its principal village, at the Kennebec islands across which a bridge was later built, took the name of its leading citizen and business promoter, William Kendall, and until late in the 19th century was called Kendalls Mills. When, however, the town itself was incorporated in 1788, it kept the old plantation name, Fairfield. That the fields were indeed fair in that region is attested by an early traveler writing to an Augusta paper. He wrote: “Above Ticonic Falls are the verdant slopes and fertile vales of Fairfield. The scenery is beautiful.”<\/p>\n
No one seems to know how Oakland got its name. In the days of its first white settlements, just before the Revolution, it was unofficially called Kingfield, then in 1771 it was incorporated into the new town of Winslow, which then was a town of very large territory on both sides of the Kennebec, and included parts of what are now the towns of Sidney and Oakland. A man who lived at the foot of Messalonskee Lake (old Snow Pond), where it has its outlet into the Messalonskee Stream, would in 1770 have said he lived in Kingfield, in 1780 in Winslow, in 1805 in Waterville, when part of Winslow west of the river had taken that name. In 1875 a man living in the same place would be in West Waterville; then in 1885 he would be in Oakland. Perhaps, just as happened when Waterville was named, the folks in Oakland wanted a good, safe name that didn’t honor any one person rather than another.<\/p>\n
Winslow itself was named for a man. Somehow the town escaped being called Halifax, which would have been logical. When Governor Shirley of the Province of Massachusetts ordered forts to be erected at two Kennebec points in the province’s Maine lands, he selected the northernmost fort, the one at Ticonic Falls, (or more accurately, below the falls, at the junction of the Kennebec and the Sebasticook) to be named for his distinguished friend and patron, the Earl of Halifax, and the settlement that sprang up around the protection of Fort Halifax was itself called for many years Fort Halifax, or more often simply the Fort. The first commander of Fort Halifax was John Winslow, a descendant of the more famous John Winslow of the original Plymouth colony, and it is well to recall that the Plymouth Colony long owned the land on which Fort Halifax stood. In fact the new company that had been organized in 1749 to develop the region and encourage settlers — the Company that acquired the vast area from Cobbossee Stream to Norridgewock Falls and a width of 15 miles each side of the river, was popularly called the New Plymouth Company; although its official title was the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase. The fort’s first commander, John Winslow, was a popular man with a well known and much honored New England name. It was appropriate that, when the town was incorporated in 1771, it should be called Winslow.<\/p>\n
Why the town of Sidney should be named for a man who had died two hundred years before the town was incorporated it is difficult to guess. Some important resident of that side of the river, that for 21 years was a part of the town of Vassalboro, must have been well versed in British military history, for in 1586 Sir Philip Sidney had died a hero’s death in the British attempt to free the Netherlands from the yoke of Spain. So Sidney, Maine became one of the state’s towns taken directly from English history.<\/p>\n
Most people who have read anything about the Kennebec Valley know that three of our river towns were named for prominent proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase Sylvester Gardiner, Benjamin Hallowell and Florentius Vassall – who gave their names respectively to Gardiner, Hallowell and Vassalboro. Pittston was named, not for one of the proprietors, but for a Boston lawyer, John Pitt, who helped the Kennebec proprietors secure their act of incorporation.<\/p>\n
Our Kennebec town of China and the Penobscot town of Bangor both got their names in the same way. China has nothing to do with the great oriental country, and Bangor has no relation to the old British town of that name. The great Quaker philosopher and China native, Rufus Jones, tells us: “Our China was named for an old and doleful hymn tune which the pioneers loved to sing.” Bangor likewise got its name from a hymn with that title, a favorite of the Reverend Seth Noble, a leading figure in the incorporation of the town.<\/p>\n
Most of the early settlers of Maine were staunch Puritans and constant readers of the Bible. It was natural, therefore, that in Maine, as well as in the other New England states, a number of towns should be given biblical names. In our part of Maine Canaan is such a town, although one early writer tells us that, in pioneer days, it was a land flowing with rum and molasses, rather than with milk and honey. Carmel, reminiscent of the mountain in Israel, is another biblical town. Corinth took its name from Paul’s letters, rather than from Greek history. Gilead is remindful of the balm of that biblical land. You may be sure that those valiant Baptist pioneers, Reverend John Tripp and Deacon William Barrows, insisted that their new town in the Oxford hills have a good Bible name, and they called it Hebron. Of course other Bible names come to mind when one examines the list of Maine towns — Hermon, Hiram, Lebanon, New Sharon, Palmyra and Smyrna.<\/p>\n
Another town in this part of Maine that has gone by several names during its existence is Albion, the town that gained fame as the birthplace of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, martyr to the cause of freedom of the press. When it was settled at the turn of the century after the Revolution, it was called Freetown. Incorporated in 1804, it took the name of a British nobleman. Just as Fort Halifax was named for the Earl of Halifax, so was what is now Albion originally named for Lord Fairfax, British head of the family that had become famous in Virginia. The town was next called Lygonia, a name used in one of the ancient land grants, named for the woman who is said to have been the mother of Sir Ferdinando Gorges. Since many settlers of the region had come directly from England, they could find no more appropriate name in 1824 than the ancient name by which all England was once known, the name Albion.<\/p>\n
Why a nearby town should select a name from the island of Sicily is a mystery, but there seems no other explanation for the town of Palermo. There wasn’t an Italian within miles of the place. Every early resident was an Anglo-Saxon. Yet, when incorporation came in 1804, the name chosen was that of the Sicilian city that had been famous since the 13th century as a center of art and culture.<\/p>\n
Palermo’s neighboring town of Alna is named for a tree. As a plantation in the precinct of old Pownalborough, it had first been called New Milford, because of mills on the Sheepscot River. When the inhabitants sought incorporation in 1811, they remembered the handsome alders that lined both banks of that stream, and named the town after the Latin word “alnus”, the word for alder.<\/p>\n
Why should a town take such a broad, generic name as Industry? It would seem it might as well be called Trade. But it really is a proud name. Tradition has it that, when the town was about to be incorporated, the Rev. Joseph Thompson asked his wife, Betty Winslow Thompson, as he was leaving for the meeting, “What shall we call the new town?” Betty replied, “Name it for the character of the people. Call it Industry.”<\/p>\n
There are various reasons why several of our Maine towns bear names taken from the European continent, not from the British Isles. I think at once of the four towns that surround my native town of Bridgton in Cumberland County. Three of them are named for Scandinavian countries — Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The fourth bears the name of an Italian city, Naples. In our central part of Maine is the town of Rome; over near Waldoboro is the town of Bremen and up near the Wyman Dam is the town of Moscow. Why did people take those foreign names for their towns?<\/p>\n
Norway is actually not named for the Scandinavian country at all. It is more probable that the people intended to give it the same name as the Connecticut town of Norwich. The story is that the petition for incorporation carried the name Norage. an attempt to write Noridge, which was the common pronunciation of Norwich in England. But the writing was so bad that the legislative clerk mistook it for Norway, and Norway the town became. Sweden and Denmark, however, were named out of admiration for the struggle of those countries to gain independence in Napoleonic times. Early settlers saw in the Maine town of Rome seven prominent hills like the seven hills of the Eternal City, and Rome became the name of the Kennebec town. When Moscow was incorporated in 1816, memories were still fresh of Napoleon’s winter retreat from the famous city. It is said that one settler had bought in Boston a copy of the famous painting depicting that retreat, and that its display in his home caused the people to name the town Moscow.<\/p>\n
It is altogether an interesting story — the how and why of the names of Maine towns. But this is all we have time for today. So we must say goodbye until next week.<\/p>\n
Year: 1967<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #722, Broadcast on March 19, 1967<\/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":[752,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8697"}],"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=8697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8697\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}