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ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 02953 4747
Gc 974.102 W469m Martin, Bud. West Gardiner's hundred years
West Gardiner's Hundred Years
CENTENNIAL 1850-1950
West Gardiner, Maine
GEN
WEST GARDINER'S HUNDRED YEARS
By Bud Martin
Published by the Town of West Gardiner on the occasion of the first Centennial of the town, cele- brated August 19, 1950.
Printed by the Kennebec Journal Co., Augusta, Maine
Copyright 1950 By W. H. Martin
Allen County Public Library 900 Webster Street PO Box 2270 Fort Wayne, IN 46801-2270
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REPORT
To the Citizens of West Gardiner, Maine:
We have prowled the attics and burrowed in the cellars, as directed, and we have sought the magic stereoscope to bring the fathers back in three dimensions, lifelike, for you to view.
And we think the magic must be somewhat dimmed, for we found no pictures of saints or sinners all in black and white,
But mottled people sometimes good, often bad; sometimes happy, often sad, like you.
HISTORY COMMITTEE
JOSEPH E. WARE, Chairman
BUD MARTIN
KARL R. COLLINS
LLOYD TOWLE
A. D. COLE
VIOLA RICE MARTIN
ERNEST WILES
EDWARD BYRON
HAROLD C. GOODWIN
BASIL U. GORDON SIDNEY M. GRAY Selectmen, ex officio
For the Century Ending 1950
SELECTMEN OF WEST GARDINER, 1950
1st Selectman HAROLD C. GOODWIN
2nd Selectman BASIL V. GORDON
3rd Selectman SIDNEY M. GRAY
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WEST GARDINER'S HUNDRED YEARS
PRE-HISTORIC
Once upon a time no rain or snow fell upon the fields of West Gardiner, nor any sunshine, nor was there any land whatsoever upon which to pay interest and taxes.
This was in the division of time known as the Tertiary Age, which was a very long time ago indeed, when all the neighborhood was many fathoms deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean, now called, and there was no Town Hall at Lower French's Corner, nor anyone to stand up on his hind legs in it and argue save some fishes and a few relatives of the Barnacle Family who were not even registered voters and to whom no one would have paid the slightest attention, anyway.
The records of these dismal times are written in the blue clay of West Gardiner, in the form of marine life remains. Deep down, this blue clay is salty to the taste, so it is said, and this is another indication that once it was the ooze of the ocean's floor.
Things weren't much better even after the ocean receded, for there followed a period when ice covered the land to a depth of many hundreds of feet, and the great glaciers held their ponderous parades over the granite ledges, grinding huge boulders to fine powder as casually as your grandmother grated nutmegs. And that is where West Gardiner's gray clay came from, the wise men say.
Such was the condition of our town in pre-historic times.
HISTORIC BEGINNINGS
A few thousand years later land plants began to grow in the clay and the rock weatherings and these lived and died and formed a soil and trees grew and men came from somewhere, and that is when the very early history of West Gardiner, or any other place, really be- gins-with the coming of man.
West Gardiner, which is to say the territory in which it is included, has been claimed by at least five nations within the past four hundred-fifty years. It has been part and parcel of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the State of Maine; it has been within the counties of York, Lincoln and Kennebec and the towns of Gardinerston, Pittston and Gardiner. But it has voted the Democratic ticket only once or twice.
Spain and Portugal claimed the New World, which included West Gardiner, after the discoveries of Columbus. England put in its claim soon after, by virtue of John Cabot's voyage. Whereupon King Francis I of France declared he "would like to see the clause in Adam's will" which made the American continent the exclusive property of these claimants and, in 1524, ordered his own exploration of the coast and named the entire land New France.
The fifth race or nation of men who claimed West Gardiner's sur- rounding territory in those early times were the resident Indians, who often welcomed the white men with true State of Maine hospitality, even as we natives are being exhorted to welcome tourists, today, and we suspect there may be a lesson in this somewhere.
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WEST GARDINER'S HUNDRED YEARS
The Indians were one of four tribes of the nation of Abnakis or Abe- nakis and some historians assert that the name Kennebec has its derivation in the name of this tribe, which is Canabis. Others mention the term Quinibeque, or Kinibeki, meaning serpent, or monster, which the Indians gave to the writhing waters of Hellgates, near Bath.
The name Cobbosseecontee, given to the lake and to the stream which partially bounds West Gardiner south and west today, also is of Indian origin, as you know. Variations of the word appearing in old records are: Cabbassa, Cabbassa-contee, Comaseconte, Cabbassaguntiag, Cobbosseeconti- quoke, Cabbassaguntiquoke, Cobbiseconte. These are derivatives of the Indian word for sturgeon. Copsecook is another name associated with what we, today, call simply-"Cobbossee," which is about seventeen miles long, from Cobbossee Lake to the Kennebec River at Gardiner, and used to have some fish in it.
These rivers, the Kennebec and the Cobbossee, played very important parts in the drama which is the history of West Gardiner, as we shall see. Centuries ago men walked not when they could ride, even as you and I, and the Kennebec was a broad highway for the first vehicles of the white men in America, which were ships - both English and French.
The contest between England and France for possession of America delayed the settling of places like West Gardiner many years. There were wars and rumors of wars, with the Indians for the most part siding with the French against the English. Hundreds of white settlers were killed by Indians in what is now Maine. This and nearby territory changed hands nine times in 127 years, until possession was decided in favor of the English and the fall of Quebec erased the name of New France from the map of North America in 1759.
Fur and fish were the valuables which lured the first traders and the earliest settlers into the Kennebec Valley. The New England colonists took 20 hogsheads of beaver from the Kennebec in 1634, most of which had been obtained by trade with Indians. Sturgeon from the mouth of the Cobbossee was another important early export. There was great potential wealth in the timber, but it could be harvested only when the land was set- tled sufficiently to provide lumberjacks and sawmills. There were white oaks eighteen and one-half feet in circumference and pine and hemlock to match them in the Kennebec Valley, so it is said.
Settling of the new lands was under the control of great English com- panies, like corporations, who derived their authority from grants or patents bestowed by the English kings. The first of these was a sizeable chunk of pasture and woodlot granted by James I in 1606 to the London Company and to the Plymouth Company. It contained all of the land in America between South Carolina and New Brunswick, from ocean to ocean. The deeds to West Gardiner farms are based upon this and subsequent grants made by English Kings.
Also there were many Indian deeds to Kennebec land, one transaction having been made at the bargain price of "two skins of liquor and one of bread for more than a million acres of land." However, the Indian titles didn't hold much water because the tribesmen were nothing but poor, be- nighted heathens after all, and couldn't possibly expect to have any say in the disposition of territory to which their only claim was that they had pos- sessed and occupied it for more years than their fathers could remember.
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WEST GARDINER'S HUNDRED YEARS
Anyway, it was argued that the Indians meant to convey merely hunting and fishing rights-not title to the land itself. If there's any lesson at all in history it's that weaker nations have no business standing in the path of "progress."
We haven't space, here, to chronicle the bickerings over ownership of the Kennebec by succeeding generations of English grantees, patentees, pro- prietors, purchasers, squatters, traders, settlers, colonists, big companies, little companies, rich men, poor men, honest men and rascals. Litigation over Kennebec lands was a cause for rejoicing among lawyers for many, many decades. The territory wherein West Gardiner now thrives eventually came under the ownership of "The Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase from the late Colony of New Plymouth" in 1753. The land comprised ap- proximately one and one-half million acres, extending from the Wesserunsett River southerly to the north line of Woolwich on the east side and the north line of Topsham on the west side of the Kennebec river. It was fifteen miles wide on each side of the Kennebec-thirty miles wide in all.
There were many ants at the picnic of the early real estate men, or pro- prietors, as they were called. They were trying to sell a wilderness which they never had seen and which never had been surveyed. Often squatters took possession of land, without an aye, yes or no from anyone. Many of these were men who came to trap and hunt moose and who remained just long enough to sell the land they had no title to to later comers. This seems to have tended toward promotion of unkind words and unpleasant incidents. More than once, gunpowder spoke in the arguments over titles.
Things didn't really begin to take shape in the West Gardiner neighbor- hood until Dr. Sylvester Gardiner came to town. Dr. Gardiner was a Boston physician born in Rhode Island in 1707, who made money out of the drug business before drugstores put their pills in the back room and began to sell linoleum, hardware and baby carriages. He was one of the stockholders in the Kennebec Company and in his early fifties when he came here.
Ye Olde Doc Sylvester was no absentee landlord. He moved right up here on the Kennebec and lived, as a sort of resident manager of the prop- erty. He was so successful at getting settlers upon the land that the com- pany granted him extensive properties at one time or another, until he is said to have owned in the neighborhood of twelve thousand acres in and near West Gardiner. Much of it was in 32,000-acre chunks with a one-mile front- age along the Kennebec and a depth of five miles of wilderness.
Dr. Gardiner purchased a sloop and established what was probably the first fairly regular transportation line and means of communication with the outside world. Then he moved in some skillful workmen from Falmouth and built sawmills at the Cobbossee's mouth and the first gristmill in a radius of thirty miles or more. This was right around the year 1760; when this territory was set aside from the old county of York and became a part of Lincoln County. Wave after wave of bloody Indian warfare had reddened the waters of the Kennebec. But now the French and Indian War was all but over. The French were beaten at Quebec and the Indians decimated. The time was ripe for settlement, in earnest.
The territory upon which we now focus our attention is the old planta- tion of Gardinerston, or Gardinerstown, which comprised the present areas of
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WEST GARDINER'S HUNDRED YEARS
Pittston, Randolph, Gardiner and West Gardiner, and which was named for Dr. Sylvester Gardiner.
Dr. Gardiner's policy of regular communication and of building mills and stores to accommodate prospective settlers, as well as a "Great-House" to serve as a tavern, very promptly began to pay dividends. Whereas it had previously been almost impossible to obtain bona fide settlers, Gardiner was able to pick and choose persons whom he thought would become good citi- zens and assets to the community.
Meat was no problem to these early settlers, for the country abounded in game, and the rivers in fish. A catch of "sixteen noble salmon, one Sun- day morning before breakfast" is recorded.
Some prices of early times were: paper, 8 cents per sheet; boards $5.00 per thousand; corn $5.00 per bushel; shoes $15.00 per pair; butter $1.33 per pound.
Weather bothered, then as now. The years 1761 and 1762 were dry, with no rain from June to the last of August. "Almost all vegetation was burned up, and the woods in all directions were on fire." (Hanson)
Cash money was scarcer than hen's teeth. Trade among the settlers was largely by barter of services and home-produced goods. To some extent they lived "by taking in each other's washing," is one way of expressing it.
Probably, when all is said and done, one of the most valuable acquisi- tions of Dr. Gardiner was the water power rights to Cobbossee Stream, which remained in the Gardiner family for many years and which still are, and always have been, a prolific source for disputation in West Gardiner. Development of the Cobbossee's water power is unquestionably one of the chief reasons for the rapid growth of Gardinerston. As Kingsbury and Deyo put it: "Gardiner city is the natural product of the water power of the Cobbosseecontee river. It was organized by the forces of nature, and is run by the force of gravity."
Apparently there were no hard and fast standards of size or price for the lots sold to early settlers. Lots near a mill privilege were generally of five or ten acres. Further away from the stream they were more likely to be one, two or more hundred acres. Five to ten shillings was the cash price for a lot, at one time.
Others acquired land by fulfilling an agreement to build a house twenty feet square "and 7 feet stud"; and to "reduce three acres to tillage within three years, and work two days each year on the ministerial lot."
The main idea, in this period, was to get settlers who would come, and stay, and clear the land.
And she grew, and she grew, and she grew, Olde Gardinerstowne did, until a census taken in 1764 disclosed that of the 24,000 souls then resident in Maine, two hundred of them were in "Cabbassa," one of the olde names for Gardiner, and "Cushnoc," which was the olde, olde name for Augusta.
"About the year 1766-7 there was a season of great scarcity. They made dried moose meat a substitute for bread, and they were destitute of vegetable food for a long time. When the ice broke up some of the settlers went down to the mouth of the river (Kennebec) in bateaux, and waited there until the first coaster appeared. This was done frequently afterwards, in times of scarcity." (Hanson)
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WEST GARDINER'S HUNDRED YEARS
Three years later army worms made their first appearance. According to Hanson, "they devoured all before them, and moved over houses rather than pass around them."
In 1772 Dr. Jonathan Hicks "was the first physician who ventured to settle here. He found the people so healthy or so poor that he went back to Massachusetts, whence he came."
Two years later another medicine man, Dr. Robert Taggart came to town with his brother, John. John was attacked by wolves while working in the woods with an axe. "He leaned his back against a tree and fought them so long and so well, and laid so many of them dead around him that the rest retreated."
Dr. Taggart "was favored with quite a practise at one time. He had one unfailing remedy in some cases. When ordinary means of cure failed, he would cause a black cat to be flayed and would wrap his patient in the reek- ing skin. He was willing to insure a cure after that was done." Hanson fails to record whether the cat was insured, too.
And then she grew some more. In spite of droughts, crop failures, army worms and quack doctors she grew, Gardinerstowne did. Settlers came, trotted out a song, and received their grant of land for the singing thereof. Some fulfilled the conditions of the grant and obtained title, others felled a few trees and moved on, and Dr. Gardiner had the land to sell over again. There is every indication that he tried to treat everyone fairly.
For fifteen years there was comparative peace upon the Kennebec. And then the stupid acts of George III and his British Parliament generated enough heat to set off spontaneous combustion. The British marched on Lexington. Paul Revere rode. The colonists who had been denied their rights as Englishmen now sought to cast off the yoke of England.
They were times that tried men's souls. Most of the settlers favored independence; a minority were for the king. Many Tories departed for Eng- land or Canada, among them Dr. Gardiner. Those who remained had a hard time of it. Some were tarred and feathered. Hanson observes that "it took about as much courage and fortitude to be a Tory, then, as it did to be a Whig."
Dr. Gardiner's property was confiscated, and some of it sold at public auction. Arnold went up the Kennebec on his way to Quebec, stopping long enough to acquire some bateaux built of green lumber from Major Reuben Colburn. It is reported that soldiers confiscated some nails to build these boats when a Gardinerstown storekeeper, who was a Tory, refused to sell them at less than twice the regular price.
The town was poor in money but it offered to go into debt for its share of the costs of war, and it supplied its share of men to fight, though it didn't get credit for it, at first.
The War for Independence ended in 1781. Dr. Sylvester Gardiner did not return here to live. He practised "physic and surgery" in Newport, R. I., until his death in 1786. Most of his real property was restored to his grand- son and heir, Robert Hallowell, to whom he willed the bulk of the Kennebec property on condition that he take the name of Gardiner which he did, becom- ing Robert Hallowell Gardiner by act of legislature in 1802.
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WEST GARDINER'S HUNDRED YEARS
There was confusion and hardship for the first few years while the new nation was cutting its teeth. There was a terrific deflation of the currency, forty dollars of currency being worth only one of specie. Tea was $19 per pound; corn $35 a bushel; molasses $16 a gallon; West Indies rum $26 per gallon; coffee $3 per pound; salt $45 for the bushel; wheat the same; hay $200 per ton, in Continental currency.
The year 1779 was a memorable one for Gardinerston, which took a new name and experienced a "terrible tornado which swept the entire state. The darkness was terrific, and was relieved by such lightning as was never seen before."
This year the Plantation of Gardinerston, sometime known as Gardiners- town, was incorporated into the Town of Pittston, without change of bound- aries. Change in the name is attributed to resentment at Dr. Gardiner's British sympathies during the Revolution. The new name honored the family of John Pitt, which had been prominent in the settlement of the portion of the town east of the Kennebec. John Pitt was a member of the Massachu- setts Legislature and brought in the bill of incorporation.
The year 1779 is notable, too, because it is the first reference we find in the available histories to the name of West Gardiner. "About this time West Gardiner was settled by Tibbetts, James Dunlap and others," Hanson states.
James Dunlap "lived latterly about a mile below Purgatory Bridge in a logging camp built by Benjamin Shaw," according to Hanson. It is under- stood that he also lived upon the Neck, at one time.
Clason recounts this tale of the Dunlap family: "In January, 1796, Mr. Dunlap with his wife and youngest child went visiting to Litchfield Corner, leaving six children at home, the oldest, a daughter, aged 13 years, and the next a son aged 11 years. On a Tuesday morning the children were coasting, sliding down the yard in front of their cabin out upon the stream. They slid near a fallen tree that lay in the ice, when the sled broke through and the four oldest children were drowned. The two saved were Samuel aged six years, and Betsy aged four years. These two little children stayed in the cabin alone until the following Friday when their parents returned, there being no one who knew of the sad accident until that time. To add to the sufferings of the little ones a heavy snow storm came up Wednesday and put out their fire. These two children were the only ones of James and Elizabeth (Potter) Dunlap, that lived to grow up."
The Tibbettses referred to by Hanson probably were Solomon Tibbetts and his son Edward, who went to the Neck, or thereabouts, from Gardiner, in 1774, according to Clason. Solomon was born in Lebanon, N. H., in 1710, and was one of the early settlers of Gardinerston, where Edward was born in 1762. Solomon had twelve children. Edward had a dozen, too, but he was married twice.
The Neck is painful to historians endeavoring to name the earliest set- tlement in West Gardiner. This interesting region is unquestionably one of the first in town to become the home of white men. But it was a part of Litchfield until 1856, when it saw the light and petitioned to be included in the Town of West Gardiner. It seems that both towns can claim these early settlers. And they do.
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WEST GARDINER'S HUNDRED YEARS
FRIEND'S CHURCH
The Neck comprises 1760 acres, of which 590 are upon islands or be- neath the waters of Lake Cobbossee; and a famous bog which has success- fully contested the right of way with many generations of road builders.
Harold Goodwin, Selectman, and Fred Trafton, old-time lumberman and West Gardiner business man, can put up a pretty convincing argument for their theory that the granite of which Christ's Church in Gardiner was built, about 1819, came from the old Pinkham lot on the Neck. There cer- tainly was one whopper of a quarry, for these parts, near Cobbossee Stream, on the old Pinkham place, and the remaining ledges are of the same brown tint as the granite of the church. It is known that the stone for the church was transported to Gardiner down Cobbossee Stream on scows or "gunloes" and that a canal some five hundred feet in length was cut across the shal- lows at the foot of Pleasant Pond, to facilitate its passage.
Across the Neck Road and still on old Pinkham property is a smaller quarry, of the more common gray granite. The Pinkham place is now owned by Charles Mason.
Quarrying was one of the early industries of West Gardiner, in a small way. A few worked at the trade of stonecutting here, and there was suf- ficient trade in the product to require a "Surveyor of Stone" as one of the town officers. And that's another thing that is no more.
There are the remains of two small quarries within a couple of hun- dred yards, east and north of the Community House on High Street. And there are others in town.
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WEST GARDINER'S HUNDRED YEARS
There was also a "cordwainer" in town once; one Aaron Haskell, who bought what later became the Merle Fuller place below French's Corner on the Hallowell Road in 1805 for $500 and made shoes of cordovan leather, which was called "cordwain," which is a very flavorful word, the like of which is seldom met up with in these latter days, which is a great pity.
Returning to granite: It is interesting to observe that most of the great slabs which are the foundations for some of the chimneys and so many of the houses and bridge abutments of the town were produced locally. Some of these were cut from granite boulders in the fields-not quarried from ledges. There is one of these boulders on the farm of Harry Spear, on the Benson Road, with the drill-marks in it, where the wedges were driven to split off a slab that will last as long as the pyramided stones of Ancient Egypt. Other farms have these boulders too, and cattle and own- ers have had to walk out around them for generations.
But we're getting ahead of the story.
In 1799 Kennebec was established as the sixth county of Maine, and old Pittston forsook old Lincoln and became part of the new county.
Another important date in the history of West Gardiner is 1803, when Robert Hallowell Gardiner became twenty-one and engaged Solomon Adams to survey what is now the town, excepting the Neck, marking out roads and numbering farm lots, and starting the greatest real estate boom West Gar- diner has ever seen.
By this time George Washington had served his two terms as the na- tion's first president; John Adams had followed for one term and had been succeeded by Thomas Jefferson. There had almost been another war with Great Britain and one with France. The Federal Government had been in- stalled in Washington. We were a nation, and we were proud of it, and we had a great big chip on our shoulder to prove it.
It was a lusty, turbulent era of rapid growth and almost explosive ex- pansion. It was a preview of the rush to settle the West, which was to come decades later. No need to wheedle settlers to come here, now. Every- one wanted land. Young R. H. Gardiner had the land, and he wasted no time in putting it on the market.
EARLY LAND SALES
The following account of land sales by R. H. Gardiner in what is now West Gardiner were exhumed from old county records. They are in no sense offered as a complete account of the transactions of 1803, and per- sons familiar with the amount of time and effort required to disinter such material from the dust of almost a century and one-half will understand why.
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