\nDid you know that Paul Revere of the famous midnight ride was once arrested and tried for an episode in which he participated in Maine? The episode was the ill-fated expedition against Castine in 1779 when the Revolution was at its height. The attempt was a dismal failure. So much had been expected of it and so much money expended that there was angry resentment in the Massachusetts Legislature, and that body ordered an official investigation headed by General Artemus Ward, the officer who had gathered the first companies at Cambridge after the fighting at Lexington and Concord in 1775.<\/p>\n
Among the officers arrested and tried was Lt. Col. Paul Revere, who was in charge of the expedition’s artillery. The complaint against Revere was issued by Capt. Carnes, commander of one of the expedition’s ships. He charged Revere with refusal to obey orders and cowardly desertion of his men at Castine. It was true that, after the situation was regarded as hopeless, Revere and about 100 others left Castine, and after a long, weary trek through the woods, finally reached Fort Halifax in Winslow, and from there went by water back to Boston.<\/p>\n
Revere’s written reply to the charge is preserved in the trial reports. He wrote: “After I received orders to go to Penobscot, I heard that Capt. Todd, a sworn enemy of the artillery, was going as a brigade major. Some of my officers said they would protest Todd’s going by firm statements to Gen. Lowell. They were told that Todd was not to go; but when the expedition started, he was in command of one of the brigades. I was in a very unfavorable situation with such an enemy inside the General’s official family. Todd now says that I did not land in time, that I deliberately delayed, and that I did not go up the river in retreat as ordered by the general. This is all false. I did go up the river 20 miles and did not leave until I was assured our ships would be burned to prevent their capture by the enemy. General Lowell swears he did not know of my disobeying any order. That I returned to Boston without the general’s order is true. Where, after the retreat, could I find the general? He went up the Penobscot 100 miles, while I crossed the woods to the Kennebec. When the expedition ended, when all shipping was burned, when our artillery and ordnance was destroyed, I was certainly free to do what I thought right. Accordingly I ordered my men to Boston by the shortest route and gave them certificates for their subsistence on the road.”<\/p>\n
The court of inquiry decreed that Col. Revere was indeed culpable for part of his conduct at Castine, in that he refused to obey Gen. Wadsworth respecting the boat, and declared that only Gen. Lowell could command him. His conduct in leaving Castine and returning to Boston the court found not wholly justifiable.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless the records show that no action was taken against Paul Revere. He returned to his colonelcy and enjoyed public confidence until his death in 1818.<\/p>\n
A prominent historian and careful keeper of old records was William Allen, whose best known work is the History of Norridgewock. On this program I have also referred to his account of Fort Halifax. Now I want to share with you some notes that Allen made when he attended the separation convention at Brunswick in 1816. Several times attempts had been made to separate Maine from Massachusetts, and make it a separate state. The attempt was not to succeed until 1820, but the Brunswick Convention came near to the accomplishment.<\/p>\n
An election held on the issue of separation on September 4, 1816 had authorized a convention to be held at Brunswick. If that convention gave a majority of five to four for separation, the Massachusetts Government had agreed to let Maine go. At that time only about one-third of Maine voters favored the Federalists, the party in control of the Massachusetts Legislature. Two-thirds of the Maine voters were Jeffersonian Democrats, the party of William King. The Democrats were generally in favor of separation; the Federalists opposed.<\/p>\n
Now let us turn to Allen’s notes: “On the first day all returns were accounted for except six towns, one of which was Lyman, where only six votes were in favor and 179 opposed. The Lyman returns were traced into two or three hands, then lost in the fog. The next day I saw Preble pass the Lyman return to a respectable clergyman from York County, behind the corner of the meeting house as we were entering for the afternoon session. I followed the clergyman and saw him lay the return on the secretary’s desk. When the convention was called to order, the secretary passed the return to the president, General King, saying that he found it on the desk. But the return was then summarily rejected by the Committee on Missing Returns.”<\/p>\n
Allen’s notes continue: “After four days of delay, the committee brought in a report favoring separation. This was vigorously attacked because of the rejection of unfavorable returns from Lyman and several other towns. An attempt to have the Lyman vote recorded was defeated 97 to 81. The report was finally accepted 103 to 84.”<\/p>\n
The vote had been so close and so much suspicion had been cast on the integrity of the convention, that its decision could not be implemented. Maine had to wait for the convention in Portland in 1819 before a clear majority in the district took a decisive stand for separation, and in the following year, 1820, Maine became a state.<\/p>\n
It is interesting to note how some of the delegates voted at that Brunswick convention in 1816. In favor of the report declaring the district for separation were King of Bath, Wellington of Albion, Prescott of Farmington, Chandler of Belgrade and Ingalls of Bridgton. Voting “no” were Barrows of Hebron, Ladd of Minot, Allen of Norridgewock, Drummond of Winslow, and Kidder of Waterville.<\/p>\n
Did you ever hear of the Maine town of Cork? Let me tell you about it.<\/p>\n
After Queen Anne’s War in the early 1700’s, enterprising men tried to found settlements in Maine. The Pejepscot Company, formed in 1715, centered at Brunswick and Topsham and east of there the heirs of Clarke and Lake had placed a few settlers at Arrowsic. It was in 1718 that Col. Hutchinson of Boston, in association with Robert Temple, started the town of Cork. Temple had secured a grant of land and wanted to introduce settlers. Five ships chartered by him brought 200 people to the Kennebec. Some of them became Temple’s tenants, some got adjacent lands, but this majority through fear of the Indians, left for Londonderry, N.H.<\/p>\n
Where was Temple’s settlement of Cork? Some historians have mistakenly placed it on a neck of land within the present city of Bath. Let us see what Temple himself wrote:<\/p>\n
“In 1711 I contracted with Capt. Luzmore of Topsham to bring me, my servants, and possessions from Plymouth, England to Boston. The captain told me that the open country on the Kennebec was a fine place for settlement. The Pejepscot Company persuaded me to undertake settling the lands on the east side of the Kennebec; so I brought three shiploads of families from Ireland. and soon 200 people were settled on the river. some whose descendants are still there, but many moved to Londonderry through fear of the Indians. After I had settled some families on the east side of Merrymeeting Bay, to which land we gave the name of Cork, I received a deed for 1,000 acres at the Chops of the Bay. That deed gave me ‘all that parcel of land on the east side of Merrymeeting Bay, fronting on the Chops, and extending up the river 3\/4 mile from the high water mark extending backward east by south upon a square into the wood until 1,000 acres are encompassed’.”<\/p>\n
The tract that Temple thus described was clearly what is now the town of Woolwich, across the river from Bath and long known as the thousand acre lot.<\/p>\n
In 1720 the Massachusetts commission that met to make treaty with Indian chiefs in the region reported: “The Indian complaints arise from the English settling above or northwest of Merrymeeting Bay, particularly on Swan Island and at a settlement called Cork on the east side of the river.”<\/p>\n
In his old age, Jonathan Preble, who had come to Arrowsic in 1716, said: “Opposite the east side of Swan Island on the mainland, on the south side of the Eastern River, three or four families were placed about 1720.”<\/p>\n
Thus, the northern boundary of Cork seems to have been the Eastern River in what is now Dresden, and the south line Temple Bar at a distance of 5t miles, so that Cork lay in nearly equal halves in what are now the towns of Dresden and Woolwich. The chops at the outlet of the Bay are 250 yards across, and there the river is very rough and choppy; hence the name.<\/p>\n
Writing from Georgetown in 1720, George Penhallon notified the governor in Boston: “I suppose you have learned of the confusion and disorder caused by the Indians at Cork, which has driven those settlers down here to Georgetown, whence they fled on to Boston. They had prospect of a good crop of corn at Cork when they had to leave. They would have been knocked on the head with tomahawks if they had stayed longer.”<\/p>\n
The Indian raids that caused the abandonment of Cork spread well down the river. The panic of the settlers was not easily allayed. Indeed the raids completely depopulated the town of Cork. There is no evidence that Cork itself ever had a garrison. An old map of 1719 shows a small fort at the Chops, and we know that a fort was built there later in 1745.<\/p>\n
When the new settlers came to the area in 1751 they found ruins of an old building on Hutchinson Point, a cellar and a chimney back. When building a cellar for Nathaniel Thwing in 1754, workmen used stones from an old foundation near by.<\/p>\n
And that is the story of Maine’s short-lived town of Cork.<\/p>\n
Year: 1970<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #827, Broadcast on January 4, 1970<\/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":[1205,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8985"}],"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=8985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8985\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}