\nIt is time on this program to give some attention to the Franklin county seat of Farmington.<\/p>\n
In 1779, when the American Revolution was drawing to a close, Reuben Colburn, who four years earlier had accompanied Arnold on the march to Quebec, persuaded four other men to join with him in petitioning the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase for a grant of land on the Sandy River, near the northern end of the huge purchase. A grant was made on March 3, 1780 to the group called the Colburn Associates, and the area extended from the mouth of the Sandy, where it enters the Kennebec above Norridgewock, west 15 miles to include the present town of Farmington. At that time there was no white inhabitant along the Sandy.<\/p>\n
In late 1780 Stephen Titcomb had brought his family to the wilderness west of the Kennebec, intending to find a place to settle. The family became snowbound in the tiny settlement at Readfield. But during the winter Titcomb, on snowshoes, explored the country between Readfield and the Sandy River, and remained near that stream until the spring sap began to run. Then he returned to Readfield for his wife and children.<\/p>\n
On his way back to the settlement, Titcomb met Joseph Brown and Nathaniel Davis, two men from Winthrop who like Titcomb, were looking for places on the Sandy. Those three became the first settlers on the Franklin County tributary to the Kennebec. By 1782 there were eight families along the stream, and by 1790, the year of the first U.S. Census, nearly a hundred families had built homes on the Colburn Associates grant.<\/p>\n
In 1794 the largest community on the river, Farmington, was big enough to be incorporated as a town. At the turn of the century in 1800, Farmington was a thriving farm community with 942 people and an estate valuation of $60,000., But the inhabitants were spread over the town’s 36 square miles, and in the village there was only a small hamlet with a general store started in 1792.<\/p>\n
By the middle of the 19th century Farmington was famous for the Little Blue School, later to be called the Abbott School. Not far from Farmington, in the Town of Weld, is towering Mount Blue, where is now a state park. But nearer is a smaller peak called Little Blue. For that eminence, the private school opened by the Rev. Samuel Abbott in 1844 was named. Samuel was a brother of the more famous Jacob Abbott, author of the Rollo books for boys. Jacob had come to Farmington in 1836 and had lived there for seven years, when he left for New York. It seems that the brothers had intended to start the school together, but it was left for Samuel to do it alone. He carried it on for five years, when it was taken over by another Abbott, A. H. The school was first conducted in the house originally built by Jacob Abbott, where the boarding students were accommodated, as well as classes held.<\/p>\n
In 1858 Abbott erected a school building and purchased science equipment at $6,000. He called that equipment the philosophical, chemical and astronomical apparatus, and it was considered the best in any of Maine’s numerous academies. Abbott also acquired a sizable collection of minerals, called the cabinet, and the school library boasted 2,000 volumes – a thousand more than the older Hebron Academy had at that time. Students came from many other states as well as from many Maine towns and cities, and every year saw several from foreign countries.<\/p>\n
A. H. Abbott headed the school for 16 years, seeing it through the difficult period of the Civil War. In 1865 he leased the institution to Edward Purinton, a graduate of Bowdoin, who had operated a girls’ seminary in Gorham and had also served as the State Superintendent of Schools. During the next ten years several different men headed the Farmington school. Then, in 1876, A. H. Abbott took it back into his own hands.<\/p>\n
Under competent management, it continued as a notable school after Mr. Abbott’s death, and when I came to know it intimately, in the summer of 19}~, the headmaster was the dignified, goateed, and swallow-tail coated George Dudley Church.<\/p>\n
To carry on classes for some twenty boys during the summer, many of them from Spain or Spanish-American lands, around the Caribbean, Mr. Church had engaged a young Bowdoin graduate, Wade Bridgham, who was attending law school. He told Bridgham to hire a cheap helper. Like myself, Wade Bridgham had been a graduate of Bridgton High School and he and I had been close friends in that Cumberland County town . Wade knew I was teaching at Hebron, and he offered me a summer teaching job at what by that time had abandoned the name Little Blue and was called the Abbott School. So for six weeks in the summer of 1915, I taught Latin and English to about a dozen boys for most of whom English was a foreign tongue, and of Spanish I was abysmally ignorant. I doubt if I did a very effective job, but the pay certainly wasn’t high. I worked the whole six weeks for board, room, and total cash of $25.<\/p>\n
But I did learn something about the famous Abbott School, and I was sorry some years later to see it close.<\/p>\n
In the 1860’s, Farmington was the scene of a celebrated murder trial, one in which a man was convicted entirely on circumstantial evidence. Lawrence Doyle had worked as a hired man in several families at Strong, when at the age of 30 he was accused of killing a woman named Lura Libby. Admittedly ignorant and illiterate, Doyle had until his arrest a reputation for being quiet and inoffensive. No one had ever known him to strike another person. But circumstances placed him at the scene of the crime near the time of its perpetration, and his own bewildered evidence didn’t help his case. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. But that was the time when no Maine governor for nearly twenty years would sign a death warrant. So Doyle lingered in the state prison at Thomaston until he died there a natural death in 1880.<\/p>\n
In 1863 Farmington saw another criminal case. Jesse Wright, a farmer of Phillips, had a quarrel with his neighbor Jeremiah Tuck, claiming that Tuck’s sheep had grazed on Wright’s land. In the midst of a hot argument, Wright shot Tuck, killing him instantly. Waterville had an interest in that case, because the prosecutor was the Waterville-born lawyer, Josiah Drummond. Like Doyle, Wright was found guilty and sent to Thomaston to await the governor’s warrant for his execution. But again no governor would sign the death decree. Since Wright was 70 years old when he went to Thomaston and it became clear that he would not hang, a lot of sympathy was aroused for him in Franklin County – so much that in less than a year he was taken out of the state prison and committed to the Farmington jail, where he enjoyed considerable freedom until he was pardoned and set free by Gov. Joshua Chamberlain.<\/p>\n
It was also in the 1860’s that a third case caused excitement in Farmington. Joseph Edes, an 80 year old farmer of Temple, went to the home of Samuel Richardson to try to settle a dispute about a line fence. Richardson became excited, seized an old sword, and struck Edes so hard that the blade broke. Richardson then grabbed his gun and a melee ensued, in which Richardson’s wife took part. Edes managed to disarm Richardson and was backing out the door when Richardson grabbed a cane and made a fierce assault on the aged man. Edes died before nightfall. Richardson shouldered his gun, marched to Farmington, and gave himself up to the sheriff. The subsequent trial pronounced Richardson guilty of murder, and the judge sentenced him to death. But, like Doyle and Wright, he was never executed. He too died a natural death in Thomaston.<\/p>\n
Now for a complete change of subject. The most famous of early American dictionaries was of course that produced by Noah Webster, from whose first such work descends the present prestigious Webster’s International. But long before Webster began his word collection in Connecticut, the most popular dictionary used on this side of the Atlantic had been produced in England by Samuel Johnson in the middle of the 18th century.<\/p>\n
A few months ago I saw a miniature abridgment of that Johnson dictionary, printed in Boston in 1810. It bore the title “Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language in Miniature, to which are added an alphabetical account of the heathen deities and a copious chronological table of remarkable events, discoveries and inventions. Published by Watts and Blake, 36 Cornhill, Boston, 1810.”<\/p>\n
In this smaller edition, some of Johnson’s notorious definitions have been toned down. Johnson had no use for Scotland, and declared that, when he and Boswell visited there, they were fed up on oatmeal porridge. So, in his big dictionary, Johnson defined oats as “a grain used in England for horses, in Scotland to feed the people.” This small American edition defines oats simply as “a grain generally given to horses.”<\/p>\n
Johnson hated the Whig party and its leaders. So he gave this complimentary definition of Tory, which is repeated verbatim in the American edition: “Tory one who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state and the apostolic hierarchy of the Church of England.” His definition of Whig was “one who was against the court interest in the time of Charles II, and for it in successive reigns.” He defined Catholic simply as “a papist.” A Protestant was “a reformer who protests against papely.” An apothecary was “one who prepares medicine for sale.” Science was “knowledge studied by precepts.”<\/p>\n
The chronological table added to that little dictionary of 1810 has some intriguing items – 4004 BC, Creation of the World; 2548 B.C., the Flood; 2188 B.C., the Kingdom of Egypt founded; 1491 B.C., the Exodus; 1193 B.C., the Trojan War; 33 A.D., the Crucifixion; 64 A.D., Great Fire of Rome under Nero; 410 Alaric the Goth captures Rome. The last item in the chronology is 1805, death of William Pitt.<\/p>\n
The little book does tell us that America’s first newspaper was the Boston News Letter in 1704, followed by the American Weekly Mercury in Philadelphia in 1719, and the New York Gazette in 1721. And next week we shall have more from this old dictionary.<\/p>\n
Year: 1975<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #1049, Broadcast on April 27, 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\/9550"}],"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=9550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9550\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}