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A good way to begin the new calendar year of these broadcasts is to pay tribute to a Central Maine man of pronounced humane actions and gifted talents to whom this program has paid too little attention, Rev. Nelson Heikes of Albion. I came to know him well in the last year of his life and made several visits to tap his vast knowledge of regional history. Today I want to tell you something about that extraordinary man.<\/p>\n
Nelson Heikes was born on April 3, 1870, in Winston, Indiana, to parents of what was called Pennsylvanian Dutch ancestry. As I have previously pointed out on this program, the term Pennsylvania Dutch is a misnomer. The people of that part of Pennsylvania are not of Dutch but rather of German heritage. The confusion occurred through the German word for the German people, Deutsche. During the First World War we became acquainted with the Kaiser’s boastful slogan,”Deutschland uber alles,” “Germany over everything.” The people who settled midland Pennsylvania were therefore Deutsch, Pennsylvania Deutsch, and that was easily corrupted colloquially into Pennsylvania Dutch.<\/p>\n
Nelson Heikes’ father was a veteran of the Civil War, having served through most of that conflict in the 3rd Pennsylvania heavy artillery. Near the end of the war he was an officer at Fort Monroe, where the Confederate President Jefferson Davis was held as a prisoner. Nelson Heikes often told his father’s account of Davis’ capture by Union forces. A Michigan army company surrounded the tent where Davis was suspected of hiding. A young woman appeared at the tent opening, accompanied by an older woman in sunbonnet and long wrapper. The young woman asked. “Will you please permit my mother to go to the spring for some water?” The commander of the soldiers lifted the hem of the older woman’s wrapper and said, “Your mother wears awfully big boots.” Then he pulled aside the bonnet revealing whiskers. Said the officer, “You neglected to shave your old mother.” Thus was prevented the Confederate President’s escape.<\/p>\n
Nelson Heikes was the eighth and youngest of the Union officer’s children. Their Indiana home was a log house of good size, containing eight rooms and an attic, not the typical log cabin of tradition, but a comfortable house. Brought up in a Methodist family, Nelson Heikes attended church and Sunday School of that denomination until the age of 15, when he came under the influence of the Christian Church in his native Winston, and he joined that denomination.<\/p>\n
Heikes decided to enter the ministry and in 1889, at the age of 19, he preached his first sermon in the Christian Church at North White River, Indiana. Eager to obtain theological training, but lacking the financial means, Heikes became a farm laborer. During the summer of 1891 he worked on an Indiana farm for $12 a month and his keep. All summer he drove three horses abreast, much of the time breaking new ground for cultivation, the hardest kind of plowing. After the end of the week’s work on Saturday, he walked six miles to the church where he conducted two services on Sunday.<\/p>\n
That September Heikes entered what was called the School of the Prophets at Union Christian College at Meron, Indiana. Mr. Heikes later wrote: “The students at the college are different not only in their disposition, but also in their finances. Some wore good clothing, and others had to get along with patched garments, but all we’re considered equal. The
\ncomparatively affluent never lorded it over the poor.”<\/p>\n
Heikes’ home was 175 north from the school, and Heikes couldn’t get there except for the long, summer vacation during his seminary years. Those summers he spent recuperating his depleted finances by working on farms. When he completed his seminary training, Mr. Heikes’ first pastoral call was not in his native Indiana, but to faraway Maine. It came from the Christian Church at Ogunquit. Heikes often recalled his first meal in the house of the lay leader of that church when he arrived in the Maine coastal village. It was his first taste of Maine ocean fish, which became one of his favorite dishes for the rest of his life.<\/p>\n
Ogunquit was early in the 1890′ s, a summer resort as indeed it still is today. During Heikes’ first year there, a summer visitor was Francis Willard, the great temperance leader. Heikes first met her in the orchard back of the boarding house where Miss Willard was perched on the limb of an apple tree. Another minister was the evangelist, Dwight L. Moody, whom Mr. Heikes and the local Methodist minister persuaded to preach at a union service. It was at a Christian Conference of the York County churches held at South Berwick that Nelson Heikes met Cora Harvey, the girl who became his wife.<\/p>\n
In 1901, Heikes was asked to visit the Christian Church in Albion, with the view of becoming its pastor. It was his first experience with a narrow gauge railroad. He boarded the little two-footer at Wiscasset at 3:00 p.m. on a March day in that early year of the century. Only a few hours earlier had ended one of the worst blizzards of the year. The track was so badly drifted that the plow attached to the engine was not enough, and the train crew had to frequently use shovels while the train waited. When they got to China about 8:00 p.m., five hours out of Wiscasset, the crew was so tired they had to stay overnight, so it was eight o’clock the next morning when the train finally reached Albion. Mr. Heikes recalled that the mail clerk on that train was Charles E. Crosby. That man, thirty years ago, was my own nearest neighbor on Waterville’s Winter Street, and in the loft over his stable he still had cubbyholed cabinet in which he practiced sorting railroad mail.<\/p>\n
It is interesting to read what Mr. Heikes wrote about Albion, where he served for many years. He said: “I found the people of Albion on the whole a united group who worked together to build a better town. The chief factor in that solidarity was the village church. Here the gospel had been preached since the earliest settlement of the town. The first minister was the Rev. Daniel Lovejoy, father of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, martyr to the freedom of the Press, and most famous graduate of Colby College.”<\/p>\n
Mr. Heikes’ first pastorate in Albion was for five years. He then moved to the Christian Church in Bangor. It was there that a lecture was one evening delivered in Heikes’ church by the man for whom he was named, General Nelson Miles of the U.S. Army, a close friend of his father’s during the Civil War. In 1909 Heikes moved to the pastorate of the Christian Church at Freedom, N. H. In that year his wife, a loyal and devoted co-worker in his religious work, died. Four years later he married Miss Anna Wood who joined him in the pastoral work at Freedom.<\/p>\n
In 1915 Heikes moved again to a mission church of the Christian denomination in Lynn, Mass. That was the year of Billy Sunday’s crusade in Boston, and it is interesting to note what Mr. Heikes had to say about that evangelist. He wrote: “I have heard Mr. Sunday 28 times and had some opportunity to evaluate him. I believe he is a valued servant of God and brought many souls into the Kingdom, but he was too obviously an actor, drawing as much attention to himself as to the Lord he proclaimed. I have heard other evangelists with whom I have been more impressed.”<\/p>\n
In 1917 Heikes received an urgent call to return to Albion. He heeded the call and in that town he spent many more years. He arrived at his old church just as the United States was entering the First World War. The Albion church became the center for Liberty Loan drives. Heikes heard of another New England town that had elected a town war historian and he proposed the same plan for Albion. He had in mind that John Parlin, Principal of Albion’s Besse High School, would take on that duty, but the voters insisted that Heikes himself take the post and they appropriated the generous sum of $15 a year to meet its expenses. That amount surely paid very little to Mr. Heikes’ costs in getting the required information. He drove hundreds of miles with horse and buggy or sleigh, securing biographies of everyone of the 89 men and one young woman from Albion who were in the nation’s service in World War I.<\/p>\n
After another interval of pastorate again in Freedom, N.H., Mr. Heikes made his final move back to Albion in 1926, and remained there until his death. He tells about buying a place there in Albion. “One day I was walking along the road in the Puddle Dock section of Albion when I met a complete stranger. In the course of our conversation, I asked him if he knew of a place for sale. He directed me to a place only a few rods farther on the road, owned by Arthur Stanley. My wife and I bought the place and moved into it in September, 1926. Puddle Dock is an old, settled place that has seen better days. It once had a sawmill, a grist mill, and a number of stores, and at the time even boasted board sidewalks.”<\/p>\n
There the Heikes lived for 15 years until the wife died in 1942. All through the years they continued to be devoted workers in the Albion Christian Church, where Mr. Heikes often supplied the pulpit between regular pastorates, and near the end of his life became its regular preacher again. After his wife’s death, he sold the Puddle Dock house and went to live in the home of Mr. and Mrs.John DeBressy Clark on the crossroad between the road to Benton Falls and that to Winslow, and there he spent the rest of his life. It was in that house that I paid him several visits.<\/p>\n
The account I have given of Nelson Heikes seems to reveal a very ordinary man, but he was far from that. He had a talent for writing. Besides numerous religious articles published in the official paper of his denomination and in the religious pages of Maine newspapers, he was a careful, accurate writer of local and regional history.<\/p>\n
In addition to his historical record of Albion boys in World War I, he wrote a carefully researched account of Albion’s most famous son, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, and he encouraged Colby College to take perpetual care of the Lovejoy family cemetery on the shore of Lovejoy Pond, near the place where the abolutionist martyr had been born. Heikes himself cut a limb from a cherry tree near the Lovejoy birthplace from which were made several gavels, one of which he presented to Colby College. Mr. Heikes also accumulated much information about the town of Albion, which proved of great value to later workers in that field.<\/p>\n
Mr. Heikes’ outstanding quality was his stalwart Christian faith, far transcending allegiance to anyone denomination. He was a sterling ecumenical man. All through his life he exemplified his firm belief that “except the Lord build the house one’s labor is in vain.” “Man’s insufficiency,” said Mr. Heikes, “is more than made up for by God’s sufficiency.”<\/p>\n
Year: 1980<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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