USA > Maine > Knox County > Rockport > Camden Hills; an informal history of the Camden-Rockport region > Part 1
USA > Maine > Knox County > Camden > Camden Hills; an informal history of the Camden-Rockport region > Part 1
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ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 02867 2019
Gc 974.101 K77d Dietz, Lew, 1906- Camden Hills
CAMDEN HILLS
'An Informal History of the Camden-Rockport Region
by Lew Dietz
Pictures by Catroll Thayer Berry
Berry
Carroll
The Camden Hills
FUITE BI
CAMDEN HILLS
An Informal History of the Camden-Rockport Region
By LEW DIETZ
ILLUSTRATIONS BY CARROLL THAYER BERRY
Printed for THE SMILING COW by THE CAMDEN HERALD PRESS Camden, Maine
Allen County Public Library ! 900 Webster Street PO Box 2270 Fort Wayne, IN 46801-2270
Copyright 1947 by THE SMILING COW
One
TUESDAY, 11 of June, we passed up into the river with our ship, about six and twenty miles ..... the river itself, as it runneth up into the Maine very nigh forty miles towards the great mountains, beareth in breadth a mile, sometimes three quarters and on both sides every half mile very gallant Coves .
This from the journal of James Rosier, that sharp-eyed little clerk who, in 1605, shipped with Captain George Way- mouth out of Ratcliffe, England on Waymouth's memorable voyage of exploration to the New World. Making landfall off Cape Cod, Waymouth planned to sail south, but contrary winds carried his ship, Archangel, northward. This river was the St. George, the "great mountains," the Camden Hills.
Ten of us with our shot, and some armed, with a boy to carry powder and match, marched up ..... about four miles in the Maine, and passed over three hills; and because the weather was parching hot, and our men in their armour not able to travel far and return that night to our ship, we resolved not to pass any further, being all very weary . . "
Waymouth's was probably the first voyage to America with a purely scientific motive. His backers were seeking a likely spot for English plantation. Rosier in his True Relation pays the region a glowing tribute. And it was, incidentally, the early usage of the term "Maine," meaning mainland, from which the state subsequently derived its name.
Unfortunately, not many of our early explorers were blessed with such conscientious chroniclers as this clerk of Waymouth's. Just who the first white man was who sighted the Camden Hills is a matter of unproductive conjecture. Andre Thevet, a sea-going French priest, sailed the entire Maine coast in 1556 and spent a week in the Penobscot pow- wowing with some Indians. He saw the Hills and he had this to say :
... Having left La Florida (it appears from early maps that all land south of the Kennebec was considered Florida) on the left hand with all its islands, Gulfs and Capes, a river presents itself which is one of the finest rivers in the whole world which we call 'Norumbeque' . . . before entering said river, appears an island surrounded by eight very small islets which are near the country of the green mountains ."
Thevet goes on to say that about three leagues up this "river" he found an island four leagues in circumference and shaped like a man's arm. His river, historians have decided was Penobscot Bay and the "green mountains" our Camden Hills.
It was a few years later that the fabulous Norumbega was explored by the even more fabulous David Ingram. David was a pirate and slave trader to begin with and he re- turned with accounts of this region that qualify him as an honorary member of any tall story club. What actually he
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found in these parts no one will ever know. What he related to his wide-eyed cronies back in England over mugs of ale, bears repeating.
"All the kings in those countries are clothed with painted or colored garments ..... and they wear great precious stones which commonly are rubies, being four inches long and two inches broad . ... . All people in general wear bracelets as big as a man's finger upon their arms ... . . where of one commonly is gold and two silver, and many of the women also do wear great plates of gold covering their bodies and many bracelets and chains of great pearls . "
Warmed by a few more rounds, Ingram's imagination further expanded. There was gold to be picked up on the street as big as paving blocks! There was a great store of gold and copper in the rocks to be had for the digging, pieces of gold in the river as big as a man's fist. And the houses! Why the roofs were of glittering gold and silver with mag- nificent entrances of pure crystal! There were pearls to be had for the sweeping up. He passed over his strange lack of evidence by glibly remarking that after awhile he got tired of picking up pearls and so threw them away.
The Frenchmen De Monts and Champlain got wind of these tall tales and set out, a few years later, to look into it. One of their chroniclers remarked acridly, "if this beautiful town ever existed in nature, I would like to know who pulled it down for there is nothing but houses here made of pickets and covered with bark of trees or with skins."
And before Waymouth too, came Bartholomew Gosnold out of Falmouth. He was a freebooter and it seems he was looking for "Sassafras root, cedar and Furs." He did look up from his mercenary quest to find this piece of coast "very pleasant to behold" and to discover to his astonishment, "a pair of Christian trousers on the legs of a savage."
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The next year a friend of Gosnold's, Martin Pring, ven- tured into Penobscot Bay and some of his company went ashore on Vinalhaven and found a silver fox, giving the name Fox Islands to the group. He noted that beyond the Bay "was a high country full of great woods."
So there were others before Waymouth's historic ex- pedition but these were, for the most part, adventurers. It was Waymouth's voyage that paved the way for the coming tide of colonization. And it was from his hands that the Indian had his first taste of white man's duplicity. Rosier reports that they were all treated with utmost courtesy by the curious aborigines (although their women were kept out of sight.) In return, five Indian braves were lured aboard the Archangel with trinkets and carried off to England in chains. The Red man, unapprised of White man's penchant for souvenirs, was inclined to consider this treachery.
Without much doubt it was the voyage of Waymouth to the region of the "great mountains" that convinced Sir Ferdi- nando Gorges that his future and fortune lay in the New World. It became an obcession that was to dog him to his grave. It had been Gorges and Arundel who had backed Waymouth's expedition and both were pleased and encouraged by his report. Besides being an ambitious and rather avari- cious man, Gorges was a fervent royalist and churchman. Unquestionably, his fear and dislike of the French, who were commencing to establish themselves near the St. Lawrence, strengthened his resolve to plant Englishmen on this ragged fringe of Coast.
Although Gorges has been called the Father of Maine Colonization, which doubtlessly he was, his grant and that of his partner, John Mason, didn't include territory further westward along the coast than the Kennebec. After the sorry failure of the first Popham colony there was, for many years,
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little heart to face a Maine winter in this land that even the doughty John Smith, after his voyage to this region in 1614, called "a country to affright rather than delight."
And further to discourage the settling of the Penobscot was the fact of the double claim upon it. During these early years the Bay country was a kind of no-man's land between outposts of two unfriendly nations, the English and the French. And to top this uncertainty, the region was being used at the time by the Tarratines and the Wawanocks as a warring ground in their bloody struggle for supremacy.
Although it was to be over a hundred and fifty years before settlers came to the Camden Hills, this region was hav- ing its history. In 1629, a great tract of land, extending from the Muscongus to the Penobscot, was granted by the Council of Plymouth to John Beauchamp and Thomas Leverett. All the King (the owner by divine right of all English lands) asked was "one fifth of all such Oar of gold and silver as should be gotton out and obtained in or upon such premises."
Beauchamp promptly died, leaving upon American his- tory the mark of his name on a spit of land in Rockport. Leverett, however, came to Boston, and though he became a man of distinction in this new city, he did nothing further about Camden. It wasn't until 1719 that his grandson, then president of Harvard College, decided to look into the property he had inherited. He looked into it and found that time had confused his title. He found it expedient to divide his claim into ten shares. These Ten Proprietors in turn took Twenty Associates. It is from the Twenty Associates that Camden was spawned.
And it is just about here that General Samuel Waldo struts upon the scene. The Proprietors were having diffi- culties with a certain David Dunbar who, clothed in Royal authority, and bearing a grandiloquent title of Surveyor
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General of the King's Woods, was carrying his arbitrary power so far as to demand tribute for each tree cut in the wilderness. The incensed Proprietors chose Waldo as their agent and dis- patched him to England to lay their case before the Crown. The Proprietors, upon Waldo's return, rewarded him (or perhaps found it wise to convey to him) half of their grant
This was just the beginning of the confusion. After lur- ing a considerable number of Germans to the region of Muscongus with florid and over-optimistic real estate adver- tisements, the General died of apoplexy. His death was followed by years of litigation which was finally resolved amicably in 1766 at a meeting between the heirs of the Twenty Associates and the heirs of the departed General.
The Waldo heirs took land to the westward that included Lincolnville and comprising some 400,000 acres. The Twenty Associates took title to the land that was to be Appleton, Hope, Montville, Camden and Rockport.
The region of the Green Mountains was ready for its first settler. He came a year later. His name was James Richards.
6
FRI
THE NATHAN BROWN HOUSE
Concerning this snug-eaved house on Chestnut Street in Camden village there is considerable controversy. It is be- lieved by some to be the Major Minot house referred to in Locke's History as the first frame house built in Camden. Be- yond a doubt William Minot from 1771 to 1785 did own the land upon which this present house stands; but there is no conclusive evidence that this is the actual house or that it still exists. One old resident, who was born in this house, claims that it was her father's belief that it was built by a Captain Condon of Matinicus in 1764. There was a Condon concerned in this property for there is a recorded deed showing a con- veyance of land (no building is mentioned) from a Benj. Con- don to Nathan Brown and Ephraim Barett in 1789. According to geneological references Benj. Condon came to Camden about 1778 so it is probable, if he was the builder, that this house was constructed about 1780. What we know for a cer- tainty is that Ephraim Barrett lived in this house while his new home was being built across the street in 1806 and that Nathan Brown, who married Suzanna Barrett, lived here for many years until his death. When the house was re-shingled fifty years ago giant sheets of birch bark were found as insula- tion between the shingles and roof boards. Altho the age of this house cannot be accurately fixed it is probably the oldest, certainly one of the oldest and least altered of the old houses in the region.
Two
JAMES RICHARDS was a restless young man who, just the year before, had moved his family from Dover, New Hamp- shire to Bristol, Maine. He came alone that fall of 1767 into the wilderness of what was called Negunticook Harbor to cut ship timber. The green mountains didn't "affright" him, he was charmed by them as well as by the bright stream that tumbled down into the sea. So the next spring he stowed his family aboard a small boat and fetched them hither to settle.
His first crude cabin was built in the shadow of Mount Battie on land confined now by Free and Washington Streets and bounded by Elm and Mechanic. His land went to the river, the rights of which his heirs controlled for a hundred years. (The legend has it that his wife Betty was also charm- ed by the mountain and gave her name to it. There is evidence however, that this mountain was so designated some years before the arrival of Camden's first settler).
Negunticook was a wild but peaceful spot in those days before the Revolution. There were few Indians in the region
to harass the settlers. The Wawanocks had been decimated by the scourge of small pox and internecine wars had reduced the once fiercesome Tarratines to a few tattered remnants. We learn that there were a few Indian huts on Eaton's and Beauchamp's Points when James Richards came but it appears that these nomadic survivors were peaceably disposed. Our first historian, Mr. Locke, reports that local Redmen were wont to come to the Richards' dooryard to sharpen their knives, a habit that made Betty Richards uneasy for a time. But she got used to it.
And soon she had company, for the next year her hus- band's brothers, Joseph and Dodipher, arrived and built cabins nearby. The Richards clan proceeded to clear corn land and produce children whose descendants still populate the region.
It was two months after Richards' arrival in Negunticook that Goose River (Rockport) had its first settler. Robert Thorndike had also come alone previously to cut timber. He had, in fact, a number of years before Richards' advent, pre- pared for his future by purchasing some fifty acres of land from the Twenty Associates. This original tract extended from the Eastern shore of Rockport Harbor eastward to the Lily Pond. He brought his wife and brood of seven from Cape Elizabeth in July and built a rough-timbered house on the small hill overlooking the Harbor (near where the present Methodist Church now stands). Robert Thorndike, thirty- nine years old at this time, brought up twelve children on the "River" before he died at the venerable age of 104.
Robert Thorndike had little more than time to clear a corn patch when he was joined at Goose River by his brother, Paul. Paul was followed by John Harkness, Peter Ott and John Ballard. And out Clam Cove way (Glen Cove) were set-
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tling three Williams, Upham, Porterfield, Gregory and a young man named Barak Bucklin.
Over at the Harbor (throughout the early history, the terms "River" and "Harbor" were generally used to designate the two settlements of Camden and Goose River, embraced by the township of Camden) a Major William Minot was building the first frame house of the region on the western side of the inner Harbor and was preparing to construct a grist mill near the falls at the foot of the river. After Minot, came Abraham Ogier of Quebec to take up lot 33 on the plan of the Twenty Associates, a tract of land extending from Ogier's Point west- ward to the Lily Pond.
Abraham Ogier's permit may be found in the Lincoln Records at the Rockland Court House and seems worthy of inclusion for its reflection of the times.
Boston, June 28th, 1773
At a meeting of the standing committee of the Proprietors, called the Twenty Associates of the Lincolnshire Company, voted - Whereas, Mr. Abra- ham Ogier had encouragement, some time past, to come from Quebec and settle upon a front lot in Camden, which he now applies for, but all those lots being taken up and settled, it is therefor voted, that the said Ogier be permitted to settle upon lot 33, of Beauchamp Neck, upon the following conditions, viz: Said Ogier shall perform and do all the duties which other settlers in said town are obliged to do and perform, as mentioned and expressed in the printed conditions of settlement for settling the Town; and, in addition thereto, he shall work two days extraordinary in each year, on the roads and
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ministerial lot in said Town, so long as settlers by Articles are obliged to work thereon.
A true copy - attest :
Nath'l Appleton, Pro's Clerk
This is to certify that said Abraham Ogier hath performed all the aforesaid conditions, as witness our hands.
Robert Thorndike Sam'l Mclaughlin John Groos James Minot
This was the Plantation of Camden just prior to the American Revolution; a dozen or so crude, lonely houses of unskun logs, scattered along the shore from Clam Cove to Negunticook, connected by a few axe-blazed trails. Small patches had been cleared for corn but the settlers depended more on their flintlocks to fill their larders and game was plentiful. James Richards, they tell us, accounted for at least seventy moose and thirty bears, one of the latter whose fore- paw "filled a peck measure." It was a loose, uncohesive settlement, slashed out of the encroaching wilderness. A British landing party, a few years later, called it a collection of pig sties.
The British, perhaps, didn't under-rate the habitations but they were soon to learn that they had underestimated the men who lived in them.
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THE WILLIAM GREGORY HOUSE
One of the oldest houses in the region, this home of Cap- tain William Gregory stands up the old County Road in Glen Cove. His first house built near this site, a crude affair of logs, billetted the Officers of the Pine Hill Battery during the Revolution. The present house was built in 1781. William Gregory, one of Camden's first settlers, was chosen Moderator at the first town meeting. It was here in this house many years later that William Gregory's grandson, Hanson Crockett Gregory, invented the hole in the doughnut. There are many colorful and romantic versions of this momentous discovery. The one held by his current decendants is simply that Hanson as a young boy came home to find his mother making fry cakes. He sampled one and finding the center doughy sug- gested that she cut the centers out. This his indulgent mother did, little knowing, at that moment, she was concocting a deli- cacy that was to become as American as pumpkin pie. In recent years this old house underwent considerable alterations but the clean simple lines of the original house can still be distinguished.
Three
T HE focus of the Revolution was many miles away from this wild stretch of Maine coast but the Plantation of Camden was soon involved in the struggle for American Independence. Although the settlers, being isolated, had as yet no strong feel- ing of nationalism, the harassments of the British soon con- vinced them that they had a personal fight on their hands. Camden had its collaborationists who were all too eager to give aid and comfort to the enemy but the settlers, for the most part, became fervently loyal to the new cause.
Robert Jameson, just getting settled on his new land on the Point now bearing his name, was mowing his field that first war summer when a British barge (or "shaving mill," as they soon were to be dubbed) approached and nineteen men, led by a Tory named Pomeroy, came ashore. This Jame- son, it seems, having been outspoken in his espousal of the rebel cause, was a marked man. He was forcibly detained, his home sacked and his livestock slaughtered.
According to our early historian, Jameson was a violent and powerful man with a long memory. He met up with
Pomeroy after the war and settled the account with a blow that all but finished this Early American Quisling. And it was this same Jameson who came upon another traitor at Peter Ott's Tavern and picking him up like a length of cord- wood, tossed him into the roaring fireplace.
Now a word concerning Leonard Metcalf. He was a bosom companion of James Richards (later he made himself fabulous, when on a hunting excursion with Richards, he rode a bear down Mount Battie) and he came to Camden the same year as this first settler. His cabin stood near the shore on Metcalf Point (Dillingham's Point). This redoubtable Leonard Metcalf appears to have been of a heroic mold, the sort of man that wars are made for. The most memorable incident in Leonard's personal war with the British occurred at an enemy landing on the west shore of the Harbor near his cabin. Met- calf and a friend named Andrew Wells spied a British schooner making into the cove. Metcalf went for his musket and sent Wells for a drum. Thus equipped, the resourceful duet proceeded to imitate a defending regiment, Wells beat- ing his drum and Leonard drilling imaginary troops at the top of his lungs.
These tactics, however, served merely to delay the land- ing. The invaders landed three barges on the west shore of the inner Harbor. In a solo delaying action, the story goes, Metcalf stumbled backward over a log and one of the landing party spied him and shouted : "There's one of the damyankees dead!" With that Metcalf arose, roaring: "That's a dam lie!" He let them have another ball before joining a band of his fellows on the way to warn Goose River.
It was in this foray that Major Minot's saw mill was burned and grist mill touched off. James Richards' first home was also destroyed by the marauders.
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But Leonard Metcalf was to engage the enemy again shortly after this incident and with considerably more suc- cess. An American Coaster, hotly pursued by a British barge, went ashore near Ogier's Cove. Metcalf rallied a few neigh- bors and, together with the crew of the luckless Coaster, they drove the barge off. Metcalf, it is reported, kept running out from the cover of the thicket for better shooting.
And it is not surprising to find that Leonard Metcalf was one of the band of local patriots drafted from the region to embark on Commodore Saltonstall's expedition to dislodge the British at Castine. With him from the village on this ill- starred campaign were William Gregory, Peter Ott and Andrew Wells. The expedition turned out disastrously due, history tells us, to chicken-hearted Saltonstall's failure to exploit his initial advantage and reinforce his valiant landing party who had scaled the heights at a cost of a hundred dead. The proud little flotilla was burned or scuttled and one rem- nant of this ragtag bobtail army retreated home through Bel- fast and Camden.
With Castine firmly in the hands of the British there were dark days ahead for the Penobscot settlers. To increase the rising tension, the loyal citizens of Belfast were abandon- ing their homes rather than take the oath of allegiance to the Crown and were treking to Camden or on to the westward. There was very little with which to oppose a landing in force. The barracks at Clam Cove, under the command of General Ulmer of Ducktrap and the small force at Camden commanded by Benjamin Benton, didn't total more than three hundred men. The only artillery at the settlement's disposal was one 18 pounder mounted on Pine Hill overlooking Clam Cove.
It was during these uneasy day that Robert Thorndike, Goose River's first citizen, figured in an exciting adventure. Captain Samuel Tucker of Marblehead, commanding an
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American privateer, had captured a British merchantman off Blue Hill. Tucker was shaping his course down the Bay, hotly pursued by the infamous Captain Mowett of His Royal Navy when he came across Thorndike fishing off the Ledges. Captain Tucker impressed Thorndike, rather arbitrarily, it seemed to the Goose River settler, forcing him to pilot his ves- sel out of the Bay. The chase narrowing, Tucker slipped into a shallow cove near Harpswell. Mowett, unacquainted with those waters and realizing the advantage was his, waited out- side. By this time, it appears, our Robert Thorndike had for- given the indignity and knowing the waters (he had come from Cape Elizabeth), he offered to take Tucker out under cover of darkness. This he did three nights later in a stiff no'easter. The Yankee Tucker, and his fat prize, slipped past Mowett and out to sea and eventually arrived safely at Salem Harbor.
It is just about here that Lt. John Harkness steps into our local history. John, a wounded veteran of early Revolu- tionary campaigns, had come to Goose River in 1779 at the age of 29 and built himself a small cabin on the west shore of the harbor near the creek. He returned one day from the forest to find his hut ransacked and his precious musket gone. Across the harbor, he spied a band of British raiders guarding their booty-laden barge. All John Harkness wanted was his musket and he knew only one way of retrieving it. He circled the cove, stepped out upon the raiders and snatched up his gun. Pointing it at the heads of the startled marauders, he coolly backed away and slipped into the forest.
This was the beginning of what may well be termed Goose River's first love story. Perhaps at this time John was already courting Elizabeth, the young daughter of Peter Ott, the Inn keeper. Perhaps, being a solitary man, he had not yet joined the social life of the settlement. What we do know
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is that about this time, Peter Ott's Tavern was also visited by British raiders. The uninvited guests went directly to the cellar and knocked the bung out of a rum keg. Elizabeth rushed to the scene shouting, "Stop, you villians !" and, holding her fist over the flowing bung, put up such a spirited defense of her father's property that the invaders were forced to retire in confusion.
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