History of Penobscot County, Maine; with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 22

Author: Williams, Chase & Co., Cleveland (Ohio)
Publication date: 1882
Publisher: Cleveland, Williams, Chase & Co.
Number of Pages: 1100

USA > Maine > Penobscot County > History of Penobscot County, Maine; with illustrations and biographical sketches > Part 22

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Several Indian villages were on the island. A smoke rose as a signal that the men were observed ; they signalled with another smokc, and the natives came to see them. Father Biard had met some of them on the Penobscot, and now inquired the way to Kadesquit. They answered that their place was better, and so wholesome that sick na- tives in the neighboring parts were brought thither to be cured. But when Father Biard could not be persuaded, they belied their own sanı_ tary praises, and begged the good father to come and see their saga. more, Asticon, who was very sick, and like to die without the sacra- ment. This wily stroke prevailed : they took him round to the eastern shore of a bay which is now called Somes's Sound, from a Gloucester man who settled there in 1760. Great shell-heaps still indicate the site of Asticon's village. He only had an attack of rheumatism; so the father asked the natives to show him the place which they esteemed to be so much better than Kadesquit. They took him around the head of the Sound, to à grassy slope of twenty or thirty acres, with a stream on each side, running down to the tide. The bay was as still as a lake ; the black soil fat and fertile, the pretty hill abutting softly on the sea and bathed on its sides by two streams, the little islands which break the force of waves and wind.

These islands are the Great and Little Cranberry, and Lancaster's. The cliffs rise to a great height, and the water at their base is deep enough for any ship to ride a cable's length from the shore. No won- der that Father Biard thought no more of Kadesquit. They planted the cross, threw up a slight entrenchment, and La Saussaye began to plant, for the time was early June.

Fernald's Point, on the western side of Somes's Sound, about two miles from Southwest Harbor, is the spot assigned by local tradition as the seat of this first and transient mission in Maine. The "little hill" mentioned in Father Biard's Relation is, according to Mrs. Clara Barnes Martin, author of a capital guide-book for Mount Desert, a bold promontory (the Flying Mountain)

joined to the eastern spur of Dog Mountain by a narrow isthmus, on which are Mr. Fernald's pastures. There is a spring at high-water mark on each side of the Point, and a brook runs from the mountains through the pas- ture. The mountains in Biard's day were covered with a heavy hard-wood growth, and as the Sound here is completely land-locked, the Point and Cove would offer the most tempting shelter to the storm-tost missionaries.

"About half across the isthmus and a little up the hill, so as to command the water on either side without losing its shelter, are two holes in the ground which are shown as the ruins of the Frenchmen's cellars. They are a few rods apart, running north and south, ten to twelve feet long at present, from two to three feet deep, and of vary- ing width."

AT PENTAGOET.

The Castine Peninsula seems next to have been sought by the zealous and persevering emissaries of the cross. In 1646, according to Father Druillettes, who was at Pentagoet this year, a small hospice or monastery of Capuchins was in existence there, with Father Ignatius, of Paris, as superior. The little community welcomed the new comer, says Mr. Parkman, "with the utmost cordiality." It is thought, says Da Costa, that this visit of Druillettes led to the erection of a new and more permanent hospice. This appears to have been put up or at least commenced in 1648, by the evidence of an inscription upon a copper plate found in 1863, near the ruins of the brick battery commonly called the Lower Fort. It is in Latin, with the words much abbreviated, but may be easily translated as follows :

"1648, JANUARY 8. I, FRIAR LEO, OF PARIS, CAPU- CHIN MISSIONARY, LAID THIS FOUNDATION IN HONOR OF OUR LADY OF HOLY HOPE."

No traces of this establishment can be found after the next year, when D'Aulnay, the patron of the Capuchins, was dispossessed by La Tour.

Catholic missionaries much frequented this stronghold of the warlike Frenchman and religious zealot D'Aulnay, about the middle of the seventeenth cenutry. Mr. Wil- liamson says that no other place in this Eastern region was so much inhabited by them; and further :

His priesthood, consisting wholly of friars, made the savages believe that Catholic rites and ceremonies were the essentials of religion, and that the dictates of the missionaries were equivalent to the precepts of Divine authority. Indulgences and super- stitious forms, as allowed by the Jesuits, were altogether more accordant with their notions and habits than the self-denying doctrines of restraint and the rigid precepts of reform, as taught by the Protestant mission- aries.

During the occupancy at Pentagoet by the Castines, and perhaps subsequently, the Catholic Parish de Saint Famille (Parish of the Holy Family) was maintained there, with at least one priest in charge.

FATHER GABRIEL DRUILLETTES

afterwards labored among the natives on the Kenebec. According to Charlevoix, he was the first Catholic mis- sionary to the Canibas Indians, among whom he began to reside in 1646. At the same time, says this author, " the Capuchin priests had a trading-house and religious hospital at Pentagoet." In 1688

HISTORY OF PENOBSCOT COUNTY, MAINE.

FATHER VINCENT BIGOT

was at Penobscot for the purpose, Governor Lincoln says, " of gathering the savages into a new village on the lands of the king of France and to guard them against the efforts of Governor Andros to draw them to the English." M. Denonville, in a letter to the French Minister of Ma- rine, acknowledged the good offices of the brothers Bigot in "the good intelligence" he had preserved with the Abenakis and the success they had reaped in their ex- peditions against the English. Jaques, the younger Bigot, is supposed to have been at this time a missionary on the Kennebec .* The following is related by Govern- or Lincoln of the elder brother, he who was at Penob- scot :---

Charlevoix alleges that Vincent Bigot once accompanied the Abenakis in an expedition against New England, and knowing that on their re- turn a large party was in pursuit, he endeavored to urge their flight. They replied that they did not fear the English, and refused to hasten their march. At last they were overtaken by a force twenty times as numerous as their own, and, having placed the missionary in safety, they with cool intrepidity engaged in battle, strewed the field with dead bodies, and, maintaining the fight the whole day without the loss of a man, compelled the enemy to retire.

These missionaries were of the family of the Barons Bigot; and, when we consider that circumstance and compare it with the life of more than patriarchal simplicity which Vincent led at the established seat of his mission, we shall know how to appreciate the apostolic zeal with which he was inspired. Although often among the Abenakis of Maine, the piace of his residence was at the village of Francois, to which the Governor of Canada had attracted many of the alert and intrepid warriors of our tribes, to guard the important and central set- tlement of Three Rivers from the incursions of the Iroquois. The father dwelt among them and devoted his life to their conversion and guidance. His domicil was a rude cabin of bark, his bed a bearskin spread upon the earth, his dishes were taken from the birch-tree, and his food was the sagamite and the game which the savages furnished him.

FATHER THURY

was a Jesuit priest of great adroitness, and an unceasing enemy of the English, who had his mission at Penobscot about 1687, when the conquest of Nova Scotia by Sir William Phips had pushed the boundary of New Eng- land to its present halting-place, the river St. Croix. The French could not yet attempt the reconquest of the ter- ritory, since their inability to defend it had cost them its possession ; but they could still use the savages, already exasperated by the encroachment of the English, to an- noy and perhaps destroy their adversaries. Father Thury was a fit agent among the powerful tribes about the Penobscot. In 1689 he is said to have called to. gether the Indians at his chapel, and, with an appearance of the deepest sorrow in his face and bearing, to have set before them a vivid and exciting image of British ag- gression in these words :

My children, when shall the rapacity of the unsparing New England- ers cease to afflict you? And how long will you suffer your lands to be violated by encroaching heretics? By the religion I have taught, by the liberty you love, I exhort you to resist them. It is time for you to open your eyes, which have long been shut ; to rise from your mats and look to your arms, and make them once more fight. This land belonged to your fathers, long before these wicked men came over the great water ; and are you ready to leave the bones of your ancestors, that the cattle of heretics may eat grass upon your graves? The Englishmen think and say to themselves, "we have many cannon ; we have grown strong while the red man has slept; while they are lying in their cabins and do

not see, we will knock them on the head ; we will destroy their women and children, and then shall we possess their land without fear, for there shall be none left to revenge them. My children, God commands you to shake the sleep from your eyes. The hatchet must be cleaned of its rust to avenge him of his enemies and to secure to you your rights. Night and day a continual prayer shall ascend to him for your success ; an unceasing rosary shall be observed until you return covered with the glory of triumph.

Such an appeal, to such an audience, could not be without tremendous effect. General Lincoln says: "The savages were transported with all that fury of which they are so susceptible, and a hundred warriors made a vow at the altar to march to Pemaquid, and never to return until they had driven the English from the fort. They executed the resolution with a sort of pious mania of courage, and twenty pieces of cannon were surrendered to address and valor, as will be found more accurately traced in the history of this tragic event.

Mr. Williamson adds the following testimony as to the aid rendered by religionists of this stamp to Count Frontenac, then governor of Canada :

Fit instruments to effect his purpose were the French missionaries, The four or five who were pre-eminent in his service were M. Thury, Vincent and Jaques Bigot, and Sebastian Ralle, all of whom were ar- dent and bold enthusiasts, always ready, with tearful eye, to preach from a text in their creed, that "it is no sin to break faith with heret- ics." Thury and Vincent Bigot had been a long time among the Tar- ratines, and were well acquainted with their dispositions, language, and habits.

RALLE,

sent from France into the French colonies by the society of Jesuits, passed about four years among the tribes in the vicinity of Canada. and in 1693 chose Norridgewock for his abode, where he dwelt twenty- six years. His entire devotion to the religious interests of the Indians gave him unlimited ascendancy over them.

Father Ralle awakened so great an attachment among the Indians that the mere attempt of the English under Colonel Westbrook to sieze him, at his station at Nor- ridgewock in 1722, was the chief exciting cause of the three-years' Indian war. He was barbarously killed, scalped, and mutilated, August 12, 1724, by Captain Moulton's men, in an attack upon Norridgewock. Char- levoix says: "Thus died this kind shepherd, giving his life for his sheep, after a painful mission of thirty-seven years."

ON THE PENOBSCOT.

By this time Fathers Le Masse, de la Chasse, and Lauverjat, had become missionaries to the Indians on the great central river of "Mavooshen." According to Greenleaf's Sketches of the Ecclesiastical History of the State of Maine, published in 1821, the Catholic mission- aries very early pushed their enterprises up the Penob- scot. He says :

Some time in the reign of Louis XIV. of France [about 1700] a French architect came over from that country and erected a place for public worship in Indian Old Town, an island in the Penobscot above the head of tide-waters, which was then and still is considered the headquarters of the Penobscot tribe. This church was burnt by the Anglo-Americans in the old Freuch war [in 1757], because the Indians adhered to the French, to whom they have ever been friendly; and it is said that the governor or king of this tribe wears to this day, as a badge of honor, a medal with the likeness of Louis XIV.

At the period of the Revolution the Catholic mission- ary on the Penobscot was Father Juniper Bathmaine. Then, from Boston in 1762, came the Reverend Father Anthony Matignon. His successors have been, in order

* He was pretty certainly there as late as 1699.

Daniel J. Davis

HISTORY OF PENOBSCOT COUNTY, MAINE.

the Right Rev. Bishop (afterwards Cardinal) Cheverus and James Romagne, the Rev. Father Stephen Caril- leaux, a native of Paris; Father Dennis Ryan, who had been ordained by Bishop Cheverus in 1818; Fathers Basset, O'Brien (now of St. Mary's, Bangor), and others. The Indians on the Penobscot reservation have never been self-supporting in their religious services, and the State appropriates but one hundred dollars per annum for the sustenance of their priest; so that the work among them still partakes largely of a missionary char- acter. Of late years, as has been noticed, a convent of the Community of Sisters of Mercy has also been located upon Oldtown island.

FATHER ROMAGNE.

For a score of years, during the latter part of the last century and the fore part of this, the Catholic interests among the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot Indians were served by M. Romagne, a French priest. Governor Lin- coln says of him :

He became acquainted with their language so as to be 'able to con- verse in it, and the affectionate remembrance in which he is held by them is proof of the discreet manner in which he conducted towards them. He is spoken of as having been a faithful missionary and a man of unspotted life. He has been succeeded by various occasional in- structors, each of whom has discharged his duty in a manner to com- mand respect even from those who have, perhaps, some of the prejudices against his doctrines, and to be very useful to the savages. During the term of his visit among the Penobsccts he lives in their village, in a small tenement prepared and kept for the purpose, and devotes himself to adjusting the balance of sin and repentance, to dealing out salutary admonitions, and to performing the rites of his church and the func- tions of his office among his pupils.

Father Romagne returned to France in 1819. Nar- rowing gradually to the Penobscot country, we have not included notices of the later missionaries to the Passama- quoddy Indians, who have been at least equally self-sac- rificing and laborious.

Of the general usefulness of the missionary element in the colonization of the country, notwithstanding the attachment of the early emissaries to the cause of France, there can be no reasonable question. They undoubtedly uplifted and purified, to some extent, the savage nature. Mr. Williamson says of the labors of Biard, Masse, Druillettes, the Bigots, Ralle, and the rest among the Abenakis and Etchemins :

They effected great changes in the views and practices of the natives. 'The Powows lost their influence, and came to an utter end. Supersti- tious rites and rituals, blended with endeavors to inculcate and deepen the moral sense and to encourage religious worship, becoming estab- lished, are still extant among the remnants of the tribes. But neither their morals, manners, or virtues, have undergone any very extensive or real improvements.

With the following poetic touch from the pen of our own Whittier, in his poem of Mogg Megone, we close this rapid sketch :

A rude and unshapely chapel stands, Built up in that wild by unskilled hands; Yet the traveller knows it a place of prayer, For the holy sign of the cross is there; And should he chance at that place to be Of a Sabbath morn, or some hallowed day

When prayers are made and masses are said, Some for the living and some for the dead, Well might that traveller start to sce

The tall, dark forms that take their way

From the birch canoe, on the river-shore, And the forest paths to that chapel door; And marvel to mark the naked knees And the dusky forehead bending there, While in coarse, white vesture, over these, In blessing or in prayer,

Stretching abroad his thin, pale hands, Like a shrouded host, the Jesuit stands.

CHAPTER VII. COUNTY ORGANIZATION-CIVIL LIST,

Yorkshire-Lincoln County-Hancock County-Penobscot County- Its First Officers-The County Buildings-The Civil List of Penob- scot-Hannibal Hamlin-Representatives in Congress-Governors of the State -- Supreme Judicial Court-Presidents of the Senate-Secre- retaries of the Senate-Speakers of the House of Representatives- Clerks of the House-Secretary of State-State Treasurer-Attorney- Generals-Adjutant-Generals-State Land Agents-The Courts and their Officers-County Clerks-Sheriffs-Registers of Deeds-Treas- urers-County Attorneys.

The ancient and obsolete counties,-of Canada, Corn- wall, and the rest, if any-which were practically un- known in the affairs of Penobscot county, although nomi- nally covering its present territory, have received sufficient attention in previous chapters.

YORKSHIRE.

The first county organization that takes hold upon the modern history of Maine, those of which the present York and Somerset counties are lineal successors, were the districts or counties of York and Somerset, or New Somerset, the former of which is commonly known in early annals as Yorkshire. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, or- ganizing his province between the Piscataqua and the Kennebec, under his patent of February 3, 1635, had established his government under the name of New Somersetshire. When, four years later, April 3, 1639, he received a charter from Charles I. his territory and its inhabitants were erected into a body politic by the title of the Province or County of Maine, commonly called the Province of Maine. The next year a division of this was made upon the river Kennebunk, into two dis- tricts or counties, called respectively "West" and "East," but which came in time to be known by the names be- fore given. In 1652, upon the submission of the people of Kittery and Agamenticus to the authority of Massa chusetts, one of the conditions of the submission was that the Isles of Shoals and all the territory northward and eastward belonging to Massachusetts-that is, below the parallel of 43° 43' 12"-should form a county called Yorkshire. The borough bearing the aboriginal name of Agamenticus, which had been made by Gorges an exten. sive city (on paper), named from himself Georgeana, was at the same time made a town by the name of York, the second town created in the State, and was continued as the shire-town.

The Court of Common Pleas, which was organized in the county the next year, was steadily maintained until

HISTORY OF PENOBSCOT COUNTY, MAINE.

the separation of the District of Maine from Massachu- setts in 1819.

In 1691 the provincial charter granted by William and Mary to the Royal Province of Massachusetts, extended the country and so practically the County of Yorkshire, to the river St. Croix or the confines of Nova Scotia.

In 1716, however, the General Court of Massachusetts formally attached to the county of Yorkshire, which theretofore had embraced strictly only the old Province of Maine, "all the families and settlements eastward of Sagadahock"-and of course within these the Penobscot country. Yorkshire county was, in fact, now legally ex- tended to the St. Croix. York was retained as the shire- town for this great county. In 1735 the county had nine towns, and sustained a levy of £46, 7 shillings, and 2 pence, or nearly one-twentieth of the entire assessment upon the counties of Massachusetts Bay.

LINCOLN COUNTY.

The county of York, or Yorkshire, embracing the whole of the present State of Maine, remained in exist- ence for nearly a century and a quarter from the organi- zation under Gorges. Before 1760 a subdivision of the county had been called for by the growth of the popula- tion eastward; and directly after the reduction of Que- bec by the English the agitation was renewed, and a pe- tition was presented to the General Court at the opening of the January session, which "enumerated the incon- veniences arising from the establishment of the courts and the public offices in the corner of the county, where all the jury trials were, except a few of a minor class, which were tried at a single term of the Inferior Court each year, at Falmouth; and prayed that the county might be divided, a new one erected, and that [ Falmouth] appointed a shire-town, in which, it was said, a good court-house and a sufficient goal were already finished." A counter memorial was presented by the Plymouth pro- prietors, asking that the eastern part of the Maine settle- ments might form a separate county, with the shire-town at Pownalborough. York county was accordingly cut down to very narrow limits, comparatively; and two new counties were erected by an act of June 19, 1760, called, respectively, Cumberland and Lincoln. The lat- ter included the Penobscot valley in its extensive terri- tory, which embraced the whole of the Maine country from Nova Scotia to the east line of Cumberland county, namely "the eastern shores of New. Meadow's river to Stevens's carrying-place at its head; thence to and upon Merrymeeting Bay and the river Androscoggin thirty miles; and thence north two degrees on a true course to the utmost northern limits of the Province." It was a vast, and, except for a thin fringe of settlement along the seaboard, a wilderness county. Pownalborough, a large town in point of territory, covering the later site of Wis- casset and two other towns, which had first been incor- porated and named in honor of Governor Pownall, was made the seat of justice for the new county.

In 1764, by a rather loose census, ordered by the British Lords of Trade, Lincoln county exhibited a pop- lation of 4,347. No places nearer to the present Pe- nobscot county are mentioned in this return, than

Broadbay, Georgekeag, and Meduncook (now Thomas- ton, Warren, and Friendship). These together num- bered, probably by estimation, but 200 souls.

HANCOCK COUNTY.

Thirty years more passed, while the grand army of civilization was slowly, but surely, on the march. The tide of emigration had swept with the sea tides up the Penobscot and every great river of Maine, and the be- ginnings of many a prosperous city had been made by the sea. The time had come for another subdivision in Eastern Maine; and the General Court, by act of June 25, 1789, carved two new counties out of the trans- Penobscot part of Lincoln. These were fitly named, in the freshness and fervor of patriotic memories, Washing- ton and Hancock. The act went into effect May I, 1790. Mr. Williamson thus defines the boundaries of these counties :

The divisional line between Lincoln and Hancock, commencing on the margin of Penobscot bay, at the northeast corner of Camden, pro- ceeded westerly in the upper line of that town to its corner; thence northerly to the north limit of the Waldo patent, and thence north to the Highlands; leaving to Lincoln the seacoast between New Meadows and Penobscot Bays, and all the opposite islands.

The dividing line between Hancock and Washington commenced at the head of Goldsborough river, east branch, and proceeded to the southeast corner of township number sixteen, and thence due north to the Highlands. The eastern boundary of Washington county was drawn by the river St. Croix, and thence north so as to include all the lands within the Commonwealth eastward of Hancock.

Both counties were bounded on the north by the utmost northern limits of the State, and to each county were annexed all the opposite islands.

The whole of the present Penobscot county, except a part of the western lower part, was in Hancock county.

Penobscot, since Castine, was made the shire-town of Hancock county. In 1814, Bangor, to accommodate the northern part of the settlements in the county, was made half-shire-town with Castine, with regular courts and registry of deeds thereat, and remained such until the erection of Penobscot county.

The first county officers in Hancock were: Paul D. Sargent, of Sullivan, William Vinal, of Vinalhaven, and Oliver Parker, of Penobscot, Judges of the Court of Common Pleas; Paul D. Sargent, also Judge of Probate; Jonathan Eddy, of Penobscot, Register of Probate; Simeon Fowler, of Orrington, County Treasurer; Thomas Phillips, Clerk; Richard Hunnewell, of Penobscot, Sheriff ; William Webber, of the same, Register of Deeds.

Hancock county in 1798, according to Morse's Amer- ican Gazetteer of that date, was a large maritime county of the District of Maine, bounded north by Lower Can- ada, south by the ocean, east by Washington county, and west by Lincoln county. It was 190 miles long from north to south, and nearly 60 broad; thus having an area of 10,500 square miles, or almost one-third of the entire area of Maine, being a tract larger than Ver- mont, New Hampshire, or Massachusetts. It contained twenty-four townships and plantations, "of which Penob- scot and Castine are the chief." In 1790 it had a pop- ulation of 9,549. A great part of the county, it was hardly necessary to state, was still unsettled, the popula- tion not yet reaching one person to the square mile.

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History of Penobscot County, Maine; with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 22

Author: Williams, Chase & Co., Cleveland (Ohio) Publication date: 1882 Publisher: Cleveland, Williams, Chase & Co. Number of Pages: 1100

Author: Williams, Chase & Co., Cleveland (Ohio)
Publication date: 1882
Publisher: Cleveland, Williams, Chase & Co.
Number of Pages: 1100