\nI want to tell you today about another prominent 19th century Waterville family, the Dunbars. I am prompted to do this by the recent appearance of a new book given to the Waterville Historical Society by Cornelia Kelley Wolfe, daughter of Herbert Kelley, who for many years ran a book and stationery store at the corner of Temple and Main Street, a store which about half a century ago was operated by Ca~lCook \u2022<\/p>\n
Cornelia Kelley was for many years Professor of English at the University of Illinois. Late in life she married Dr. F. Eugene Wolfe, who began his teaching career in Economics and Sociology at Colby College in my own student days there. About a year ago I was delighted to receive a call from Dr. and Mrs. Wolfe.<\/p>\n
The book Mrs. Wolfe presented to the Society, entitled Founders Fairing, is a genealogy of the Richardson family and their collateral relatives. The author is a Californian, Otis Dunbar Richardson. Our interest in the book concerns not the Richardsons, but their relatives the Dunbars, the Moors, the Pulsifers, the Kelleys, and the Rollinses – all prominent Waterville families. In fact it was Harry Rollins who was Mrs. Wolfe’s messenger in bringing the book to me for presentation to the Historical Society.<\/p>\n
The family line representing Waterville began with Lemuel Dunbar, who was born in Bridgewater, Mass. in 1781 and who died in Waterville in 1865. His daughter Cornelia, born here in 1809, married William Moor of the noted family of Waterville lumbermen and shipbuilders, Moor’s daughter, Ann Cornelia, married Dr. G. G. H. Pulsifer and their daughter, Cornelia Ann Pulsifer, married Herbert Kelley of the Kerley bookstore. Kelley’s daughter was Dr. Cornelia Kelley Wolfe. Herbert Kelley’s sister married Fred Rollins, so that three well known local people of today come into the picture: Harry Rollins, Mary Rollins Millett, and Kitty Rollins Brown.<\/p>\n
When I was a student at Colby, a little more than fifty years ago Waterville had a skillful bookbinder, A. M. Dunbar, the last of the local male descendants of Lemuel Dunbar. As,late as 1923, A. M. Dunbar was still plying his trade, but only for a few customers because he considered himself retired. One of his last customers was the Library of Colby College when I was the college librarian.<\/p>\n
The Dunbars were Scots from the lowland district of East Lothian, the same part of Scotland from which came to Waterville and Winslow, the Niversons, the Stobies,the Salmonds, and the Burgesses, long associated with Hollingsworth and Whitney, predecessors of Scott Paper Co. The first Earl of Dunbar, created such in 1054, married a daughter of King Edward the Confessor. He sided with the Saxons against his Celtic forebears north of the border, and he built the Castle of Dunbar.<\/p>\n
The first of the Dunbar name to settle in New England was Robert Dunbar, who came to Hingham, Mass., in 1650. He had eleven children, all born in Hingham. His son James settled in Bridgewater. Though he died young at the age of 26, he had married early and left seven children. The will of Robert Dunbar, the first of the line in America, said: “I bequeath to my wife, Rose a living in my now dwelling house and the use of all land which I give to my sons Joseph and James, the whole term of her keeping the name of Dunbar; to my sons John, Joseph and Peter the home land as far as the river; to James Dunbar, son of my son James, ten pounds; to Joseph enough apples annually from the trees in my orchard to make two barrels of cider; to my daughters Mary, Sarah and Hannah, all my land on the other side of the river, share and share alike, and all my furniture after my wife’s decease.”<\/p>\n
It was Lemuel Dunbar, great-great grandson of the Dedham patriarch, who started the Waterville branch of the family. Born in Bridgewater in 1781, he came to Kennebec and chose a site on the west side of the river at Ticonic Falls, in the town that had separated from Winslow only three years earlier to become the town of Waterville.<\/p>\n
Lemuel Dunbar was a carpenter, and he built numerous houses in Waterville during the first half of the nineteenth century. He was the carpenter who built the woodwork of the first permanent structure of old Waterville College, the brickwork being done also by a local mason. That building known as South College, stood on the Old Colby campus until after the college removal to Mayflower Hill.<\/p>\n
Lemuel Dunbar and his wife arrived in Waterville in a two-wheeled chaise, in which they came from Bridgewater. It is doubtful whether they came all the way in that chaise. It is more probable that they brought it, at least as far as Augusta, by boat. However, by 1805 a rough, but passable road was open from Augusta to Waterville up the west side of the river through Sidney. The old road on the east side laid out when Fort Halifax was built in 1754, had also been widened and improved, but because there was no bridge between Waterville and Winslow in 1805, most land traffic came up through Sidney.<\/p>\n
In 1889, when A. T. Richardson, father of the author of the genealogy, brought his mother for a visit to Waterville, Lemuel Dunbar II, bachelor son of old Lemuel, was still living. He had inherited all of his father’s property on condition that he remain in Waterville and care for his mother and two unmarried sisters. In 1889 one of those sisters, Alice, was still his housekeeper. Lemuel II was considered to be owner of considerable property.<\/p>\n
When Lemuel I had come to Waterville in 1805 he at first worked at his carpenter trade for 75 cents a day and his board. He had a fine baritone voice and sang in the choir of the First Baptist Church after that society was organized by Jeremiah Chaplin in 1818. Lemuel was soon in business for himself and before his death in 1865, he had become a man of some wealth.<\/p>\n
Lemuel II told the Richardsons that his father and mother, in their old age, complemented each other. Lemuel lost his sight and his wife her hearing. They occupied a room, neatly furnished, close to the street, where Lemuel could hear what his wife could not and she could see what he could not.<\/p>\n
Lemuel Dunbar’s brother Asa had a daughter who married John Thoreau, and they became the parents of the famous naturalist and author, Henry David Thoreau, friend and neighbor of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa Alcott in old Concord.<\/p>\n
The Richardson’s connection with the family was through Lemuel’s son Otis Holmes Dunbar, and when the Richardsons visited here in 1889, the house where Otis was born was still standing near Ticonic Bridge. A. T. Richardson described it as “a small, low, pioneer relic crowded among others on the north side of the street.” Richardson wrote: “Later Lemuel II moved the old house across the railroad to a spot near where the observatory is at.” Since the Shannon Observatory, that long stood on the east side of the athletic field on the old Colby campus, was a new and widely heralded feature in 1889, that may be the observatory that Richardson meant. But because Richardson also says “to a spot near the foot of Dunbar Hill where the observatory is”, he may have meant the older observatory that stood at the top of the hill back of Sanger Avenue near the present site of the Harris Bakery. Perhaps some listener can help me by telling where and what was Dunbar Hill.<\/p>\n
Otis Holmes Dunbar grew up in Waterville, but as a young boy was sent to live with his Fobes grandparents in Bridgewater. He later returned to Waterville and learned carpentry with his father. He had the misfortune to pull a muscle while working on a boat being built by the Moors, and he was lame all his life. In 1836 he married Mary Talbot in the old Talbot house in Winslow. They moved into an old square house across the railroad track in Waterville (I take the phrase “across the railroad track” to mean “across Front Street” from the Head of the Falls. Of course in 1836 there wasn’t any railroad, so location designated “across the track” was anyhow an afterthought by a later writer.) In 1847 Otis began to erect a house of his own, farther west from the river, but the coming of the A & K R R took his land by eminent domain, so he finally built a two-story house on the south side of Sherwin Street.<\/p>\n
A. T. Richardson’s mother was Camilla Dunbar, a daughter of Otis Dunbar. She was quite a gal. As a young lass, she thought she could do anything the boys could do. The boys had found a place in Waterville where they could take their sleds and slide down the river bank on to the Kennebec ice. Camilla said, if the boys could do that, so could she. Taking her baby sister Mary and putting her ahead of herself on the sled, and steering with her foot, Camilla pushed off down the bank. On the other side of the river frozen into the ice was a boat. Across the river flew the sled bang into the boat. The baby was knocked unconscious, and Camilla had to haul her all the way home and tell the folks what had happened. Fortunately the baby suffered no permanent injury.<\/p>\n
Camilla’s father Otis was not one of the more prosperous Dunbars; he was often hard up. So, when Camilla once desperately wanted a new pair of shoes and her father could not buy them, she learned shoemaking and made a pair for herself.<\/p>\n
In the 1880’s there was little a girl could do to earn money except work in a home at very low pay as a hired girl. But Charles Hathaway had just started a shirt factory in Waterville and Camilla Dunbar got a job there. Apparently Mr. Hathaway expected longer working hours than the girls thought fair. On April 19, 1855, Camilla recorded in her diary: “Quite a bit of excitement at Hathaway’s. Fourteen of us girls decided that we had to work too many hours a day. We made our decision known to him. He was very angry and took us each separately into a room to bring each of us around to his hours of work. All agreed to his terms except Ann Bec~y and myself. I demanded my pay and departed with $30.00.” That spirited girl, Camilla Dunbar, was then 19 years old.<\/p>\n
Our time today is now up, but next week I shall tell you more about the interesting Dunbars of Waterville more than a hundred years ago.<\/p>\n
Year: 1971<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #911, Broadcast on December 12, 1971<\/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":[42946,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9204"}],"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=9204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}