\nToday’s broadcast comes so close to Waterville’s municipal election that my listeners may find it interesting to hear what local voters were thinking about in the early years after Waterville’s incorporation 171 years ago in 1802.<\/p>\n
Asa Redington was authorized by the Mass. Legislature to issue on July 13, 1802, a warrant to Dr. Moses Appleton, in his capacity as constable, to call a meeting of the inhabitants of the newly incorporated town of Waterville to choose a moderator, a clerk, a treasurer and other necessary officers; the meeting to be held in the public meetinghouse at Ticonic Village at 10 A.M. on Monday, July 29, 1802.<\/p>\n
That was Waterville’s first town meeting, and despite my frequent mention of persons and places of those days, a bit of identification may be in order.<\/p>\n
The place was the Meetinghouse built in 1797 by the town of Winslow, that then included Waterville. It was not Winslow’s first meetinghouse, because that had been erected three years earlier near Fort Halifax, and it still stands there on Lithgow Street, the present house of worship of the Winslow Congregational Church. As population grew on the west side of the river, people protested against having to cross the then bridgeless stream to go to church. The result was a second meetinghouse built on what is now the City Hall common. A hundred years later, when the present City Hall was built, the meetinghouse which then faced Common Street, was moved back and turned around to face Front Street. It continued to be used for public meetings, especially for Democratic and Republican city caucuses, after Waterville became a city. It is a serious blot on Waterville and an indication of public indifference to historical heritage, that the town’s first public building was not somehow preserved, rather than torn down, when about half a century ago, City Hall needed parking space. That venerable building, no longer standing was the place where Waterville’s first town meeting was held.<\/p>\n
Now a word about old meetinghouses. The kind represented by those first two Winslow structures – the one on Lithgow Street and the one on Waterville Common – were not built exclusively for religious worship. They were literally meant to be just what the name implied in its broadest sense, meetinghouses, in which would be held religious, political, social, and other public meetings. It is true that religious worship provided the compelling motive for building the structure, because Massachusetts law (and Maine was then a part of Mass.) required that the town, at taxpayers’ expense, provide a house of worship, and likewise by taxation hire a minister.<\/p>\n
As time went on, various Protestant denominations were organized in Maine towns and built their own meetinghouses. But as late as 1818, when the Rev. Jeremiah Chaplin came to Waterville to start the institution that became Colby College, there was no denominational meetinghouse, and on his very first Sunday in town Chaplin was asked to preach in the building where, 16 years earlier, had been held Waterville’s first town meeting. Within 15 years of Chaplin’s coming, the town got three denominational meetinghouses, the Baptist at the corner of Elm and Park Streets, the Universalist near the junction of Elm and Silver Streets, and the Congregationalist on Temple Street.<\/p>\n
Before those denominational structures were built, the town meetinghouse was made available to preachers of various denominations under an equitable plan controlled by the town’s selectmen.<\/p>\n
Now a word about the two men mentioned in the first town warrant. Asa Redington was one of the town’s most prominent pioneers. A veteran of the Revolution, with five long years of military service, he had come to Vassalboro after that war and had married a daughter of Nehemiah Getchell. When in 1792, Redington and his father-in-law built the first dam across the Kennebec at Ticonic Falls, Redington moved his family to Waterville, built a house and operated a shipyard on the site of the later Lockwood Mills, and became a wealthy operator in lumbering, shipping, and real estate. In 1814, for his son Silas Redington, he built the home on Silver Street that is now the museum of the Waterville Historical Society.<\/p>\n
The other man mentioned in the warrant, Moses Appleton, was Waterville’s first full time physician. A member of what would later be called the famous Appletons of Beacon Hill, Moses chose not to accompany his brother Samuel to Boston, where the Appletons became renowned and wealthy merchants. Moses and Samuel had both graduated from Dartmouth, but Moses forsook business for medicine, and came to the pioneer town of Waterville to practice that profession. He had been preceded by two part-time doctors, John McKechnie & who had surveyed the Waterville lots for the Plymouth Co. and had built the town’s first sawmill and gristmill, and Obadiah Williams, who was early owner of one of those huge McKechnie-surveyed lots in what later became the heart of the business district. Both McKechnie and Williams had died before Moses Appleton arrived in town, so conditions were ripe for an enterprising young doctor. Although Dr. Appleton gave major time to treating the sick, he could never forget that he came from a business family. He operated here a large farm, he dealt in lumber trade, he invested in various new enterprises, including Waterville’s first bank and its first bridge across the Kennebec, and he profitably bought and sold many acres of land.<\/p>\n
So it was that, when Waterville’s first town meeting was called in 1802, attached to the warrant were the names of two of its most prominent citizens.<\/p>\n
When that town meeting assembled, the voters elected as their first moderator, Elnathan Sherwin for whom Sherwin Street is named, and as town clerk Abijah Smith, son-in-law of Obadiah Williams, and co-donor of the City Hall common. Sherwin himself was elected first selectman, and the other two were Asa Soule, a prominent farmer, and Ebenezer Bacon, a sawmill operator. Officers whose titles prevailed for many years were surveyors of highways, surveyors of lumber, measurers of wood and bark, sealers of weights and measures, and fence viewers. Other offices filled in 1802 have long since been discontinued, such as cullers of staves, sealers of leather, pound keepers, field drivers, hog reeves, fish wardens, and tythingmen.<\/p>\n
That last office was especially interesting. The tythingman was supposed not only to take the church attendance and collect the tithes, but also to keep a sleeping congregation awake. He carried a long stick with which he kept nodders awake by tapping them on the head.<\/p>\n
A month after that first organizational meeting in July, 1802, Waterville held its second meeting – this time to raise money. They voted $1000 for the town’s general expenses, $300 for schooling, and $100 for preaching. They voted to hold future town meetings alternately in the Ticonic Village meetinghouse where they had first met and in the newer West meetinghouse in that part of Waterville that is now Oakland. In November they voted an additional $50 to be spent for preaching alternately in the two meetinghouses.<\/p>\n
In April, 1803, the voters added to modest appropriations for schooling and preaching their largest single appropriation of all: $1500 for roads. The next month the country was being stirred by the prospect of war with France, and Waterville voted to procure for the town’s defense $50 worth of ammunition.<\/p>\n
Until 1810 schooling in Waterville was haphazard. Some person, usually a man, would open a school and the town would agree to pay him on a per-pupil basis. In the whole area of Waterville, that then included Oakland, there developed half a dozen such schools. Then in 1810 the town decided to adopt the district school system, making an annual appropriation for all the town’s schools and dividing it among the several districts in proportion to the number of pupils. Ten districts were created, the largest of which was the Ticonic District in the center of the little village that had grown up around the lumber mills and shipyards below Ticonic Falls. Another district was at Ten Lots in the extreme western part of the town. The other eight districts carried the names Rose’s, Asa Soule’s, Almand Soule’s, Tozer’s, Low’s, Moors’, Osbourne’s and Crowell’s.<\/p>\n
An early problem in Waterville was the disposal of the offal of fish.<\/p>\n
The Kennebec provided lots of fish in those days -herring, shad and salmon – and they were taken in huge quantities not by sportsmen, but for commercial sale, especially when salted and packed in barrels. The way the fishermen cleaned their fish on the riverbank and left the offal there to decay was anything but tidy or sanitary. So in 1804 the town voted that it should henceforth be unlawful to leave the offal of dressed fish anywhere between the lower part of Captain George Clarke’s shipyard to the meetinghouse – in other words along the river bank from the front of Sherwin Street to the Head of the Falls.<\/p>\n
In the early days Waterville had no poor farm, no common shelter for paupers. But, from earliest colonial times, impoverished people had allover America been accepted as public charges, especially as they grew old and were widows or widowers, they could not take care of themselves. If they were childless, or deserted by their children, the town had to find some means for their care. The most common practice was what was called auctioning them off. The care of such a person was thus committed to the lowest bidder. That explains a Waterville town meeting vote of 1805, when a husband and wife were actually auctioned for keep by two different families. William Black went to one family for 69 cents a week, while his wife went to a different family for 65 cents a week. Those figures were what the town paid the two families for taking care of the Blacks.<\/p>\n
Even at the low prices of 1805, they couldn’t have got very lavish food. Well, that is the story of Waterville’s town meetings in the first three years of its history. I’ll have more on this subject on some future broadcast.<\/p>\n
Next Sunday Little Talks will be devoted to Christmas as it has on the Sunday before Christmas in everyone of the past 26 years. This year the program will be unusual, featuring the experience of a member of my own family celebrating Christmas below the equator.<\/p>\n
Year: 1973<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #992, Broadcast on December 16, 1973<\/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":[35313,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9407"}],"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=9407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9407\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}