\nMany times on this program I have mentioned the mills that once dotted the Messalonskee Stream from Oakland to the stream’s entrance into the Kennebec behind Pine Grove Cemetery.<\/p>\n
When the earliest settlements were made on both sides of the Kennebec in the pioneer town of Winslow, in the decade before the Revolution, the Kennebec was too swift and too uncontrollable for sawmills and gristmills. So the first mills were built on the small streams flowing to the Kennebec. On the Winslow side, those early mills went on the Outlet Stream that empties China Lake at East Vassalboro into the Sebasticook just before its confluence with the Kennebec. On the west, or Waterville side, mills were built on the Messalonskee. Only after building of the Ticonic Dam in 1792 could mills be erected on the Kennebec itself.<\/p>\n
I have been asked to tell exactly what mills once operated on the Messalonskee in what is now Waterville, and today I want to do so, beginning at the mouth of the stream and continuing up its course to Oakland.<\/p>\n
On the stream’s lowest power site, Silas and Abijah Wing built a dam and put up a combined sawmill and gristmill in 1790, but, as we shall later see, that was not the first mill on the Messalonskee.<\/p>\n
In 1809, Samuel and Joseph Hitchings bought the Wing mill, and next to it Samuel put up another building, in which he installed Waterville’s first carding mill. In one end of the new structure, he also turned out posts for bedsteads. Gathering machinery from Hitchings, Daniel Wells, on the said site, not only carded wool, but turned out some woolen cloth, thus operating the first textile factory. In 1832, Wells abandoned those enterprises and turned the place into a shingle mill.<\/p>\n
Twelve years earlier, in 1820, the very year in which Maine became a state, Joseph Hitchings, who had bought the place in 1809 in partnership with his brother Samuel, rebuilt the old Wing mill, and in 1830 he took out the grinding and bolting machines, making the place solely a sawmill.<\/p>\n
In 1832 all Maine rivers, including the Kennebec and its tributaries, experienced the biggest flood the state would see until 104 years later in 1936. That freshet of 1832 carried out all the structures on the old Wing power site. However, the sawmill, carried only a short distance downstream, was recovered, put up again, and operated, still under the Hitchings family. In 1834, they sold to Francis Batchelder of Boston, who built a sawmill on the west side of the stream. His venture was not profitable, and after the business closed in 1838 the buildings gradually rotted away.<\/p>\n
The next power site, a short distance above but still down near the mouth of the stream, saw one of Waterville’s earliest sawmills, put up two years earlier than the Wing mill. In 1788, Asa Emerson, for whom the stream would long be named, built a sawmill on this site. The town records tell us that in 1790 an election notice was ordered to be posted on the door of the Emerson mill. After Emerson’s death, the old building wasted away, and the site was not again used until Joseph Fairbanks took over in 1833. He built a higher and stronger dam, and opened the town’s first foundry, where he made cast iron plows. It was in that building about 1835 that Fairbanks designed the platform scale that was to make the Fairbanks name nationally renowned. The scale, however, was not actually produced for sale in Waterville.<\/p>\n
Fairbanks decided to join his brother in a larger foundry in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and it was there that Fairbanks scales were actually made. In 1843, John Webber and Fred Haviland acquired the abandoned Fairbanks property, and added to plows the manufacture of stoves and other iron products. During the next ten years they turned the business into a general foundry, both to make their own products and to do custom work. In 1871, the two partners sold a half interest to their respective sons, Frank Webber and C. T. Haviland, and the firm operated under the name of Webber, Haviland and Company. Two years later in 1873, Frank Philbrick bought an interest, and the firm name was changed to Webber, Haviland and Philbrick. In 1882, Haviland sold to the other two partners, and the firm became Webber and Philbrick.<\/p>\n
That foundry on the Messalonskee burned in 1895,and the next year the owners decided to abandon the old site and build a new and much larger foundry on the west bank of the Kennebec above Ticonic Falls. In 1900, the enterprise was made a corporation called the Waterville Iron Works, and on its site just south of the old campus of Colby College it remained until the land was taken over by Urban Renewal in the late 1960’s.<\/p>\n
Well into the first decade of this century, the old foundry site on the Messalonskee became the property of the Central Maine Power Co. That utility built and operated a small power station there until well into the 1940’s.<\/p>\n
On the Messalonskee, the Webber firm had depended upon water power to turn their factory wheels. When they built their new plant on the Kennebec, there had become available a new source of power, electricity. The wheels on the new factory were turned by a 20 horse power electric motor, with current furnished by the Waterville and Fairfield Light and Power Co.<\/p>\n
As we continue up the Messalonskee, the next power site is at what is now the pumping station of the Water District near the Western Avenue bridge. At that place the stream makes a sharp series of drops, affording several different power privileges. On the lowest of these, near where the Red Star Laundry now operates, Samuel Appleton, Zebulon Sanger and John Ransted built in 1850 a paper mill to turn out newsprint. We must not think of that first Waterville paper mill as anything like the present Scott plant. It was indeed a tiny mill, using rags rather than wood pulp, and its production was very small.<\/p>\n
In 1860, a Boston company bought the privilege from the Apppleton firm, and proceeded to make paper from cedar bark. It was not successful, and in 1873 Winslow Roberts and A. P. Marston took over the property and put up a large factory to make wooden shanks for boots and shoes. In 1875 they had the largest factory payroll in Waterville, employing 50 men. Their plant was unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1878 and was never rebuilt.<\/p>\n
Just a bit upstream from the Appleton site, Windsor and Barrett built Waterville’s first carpet factory in 1842. In it their successor, Amos Gilroy, made genuine Wiltshire carpets. It was said they had only one fault: the buyers could not live long
\nenough to wear them out.<\/p>\n
When William Pearson acquired the property in 1848, he put up additional buildings and started a tannery that used 3,000 cords of bark a year. Pearson closed the plant in 1854, and it stood idle until the close of the Civil War in 1865, when H.S. Ricker reopened the tannery. Ricker’s chief product was leather for shoe uppers.<\/p>\n
The third of those clustered power sites near the Western Avenue bridge was the largest and the first to be used on the entire stream. There, as early as 1778, John McKechnie, pioneer settler and surveyor for the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase, built the first mill to be erected on the west side of the Kennebec near Ticonic Falls. Like so many other mills, that McKechnie mill was a combined sawmill and gristmill.<\/p>\n
McKechnie died in 1782, and his widow inherited the mill property. She soon married David Pattee, who took over operation of the McKechnie mill, so that at the end of the 18th century, it was known as Pattee’s Mill. It was in 1830 that James Crommett, a name to be long associated with the place, acquired the old McKechnie power rights. By that time the old mill was in ruin. Crommett restored the decaying dam, raised it to a higher level, and built a larger mill for both lumber and grain, as well as machines for carding wool. From that time until well into this century, the place was called Crommetts Mills.<\/p>\n
On the same dam in 1858, Winslow Marston began the manufacture of matches – the old, vile smelling sulphur matches, attached together in what were called cards, like the Portland Star matches of my own boyhood. Marston was a persistant fellow. Though twice burned out, he twice rebuilt, and continued operation until 1889. The old McKechnie water privilege itself became in 1873 the property of Henry Butterfield, who put up a plant to make shovel handles. There 65 men turned out 35,000 handles a year.<\/p>\n
It was there in 1887 that the Maine Water Company put up a pumping station. The source of Waterville’s city water was then not China Lake, but the Messalonskee Stream. That water was pumped to the reservoir on Upper Main Street. Later a much enlarged station was built to handle the China Lake water.<\/p>\n
The next power site upstream is near where the Rice’s Rips road crosses the Messalonskee, and a short distance above the rips is the steep cascade that has long been a source of power. That is in Oakland, not Waterville. There the Cascade Woolen mill was erected in 1888, and there it still successfully operates. On the same site in 1836 Leonard and Hale had started West Waterville’s first making of edge tools. In 1857 Reuben Dunn, who was making such tools at North Hayne, moved to the Messalonskee and started what became the prosperous Dunn Edge Tool Co. By the turn of the century their annual payroll was $32,000, which represented a large number of employees at a time when most workers got no more than a dollar a day.<\/p>\n
There were a number of other early mills along the stream in what is now Oakland Village – all the way from the Cascade Mill to the start of the stream at the foot of Messalonskee Lake.<\/p>\n
And that is the story of more than a century of manufacturing on Waterville’s part of the Messalonskee.<\/p>\n
Year: 1975<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #1038, Broadcast on February 9, 1975<\/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":[42942,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9520"}],"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=9520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}