USA > Maine > Lincoln County > Waldoboro > History of old Broad Bay and Waldoboro, Volume 1 > Part 56
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Captain Cornelius Turner appeared and agreed to build a house for this purpose, 30 feet square, 10 feete posts and to furnish the same so as to be Convenient for the Court to set in and to accomplish the Same By the time the Court comes next September and to build said house near the Road between the ferry [Rodney Creamer farm] and the New Bridg and give the town the privilidge of said house for the Courte to meete and set in for the space of six years, ... which the town Accepted of according to the above Egrement.
Captain Turner made good his word and the house was christened by a Town Meeting held there on September 12, 1786. This courthouse was located on Kinsell's Hill, which is formed by the southern slope of Kaler Hill. Here was located all the necessary adjuncts of a court, including a whipping post, where Frederick Castner recalled in his boyhood seeing an Irishman lashed for theft. The Court sat here for the next six years, but continued to hold sessions in Waldoborough until 1799.
The winter of 1785-1786 was one of outstanding severity. The night of Tuesday, January 18, 1786, is believed to have been the coldest ever experienced in New England. The snow came early and it remained all winter. It snowed and snowed, and froze and froze; fences and stonewalls disappeared. All winter long oxen and wood sleds with heavy loads passed at will over walls and fences in all directions. Goods were hauled on runners until the third of May. Ploughing was started a day or two after the snow disappeared. It had been so deep that there was no frost in the ground, and farming operations could be started at once.9
The staunch and unwavering conservatism of Waldoborough folk was startlingly apparent even in earliest times. It was re- flected in no way more curiously than in the consistent refusal of the town to participate in the new structure of county, state, and federal government which was growing up in the revolution- ary and post-revolutionary years. The new forms involved in these changes seem to have impressed the Germans as unnecessary
9Eaton, Annals of Warren, p. 285.
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innovations and departures from the ancient and feudal tradition which had been the core of their culture for centuries, and on them all they resolutely turned their backs. Their record in this respect is appallingly consistent. Beginning in 1779 they refused to have any part in ratifying the "New Constitution or form of Government" for Massachusetts Bay. On September 18, 1780, they voted "to drop the matter of electing a Governor" and the usual lesser officials. In 1781 they would have nothing to do with choosing "a county register or county treasurer."
Again, on April 5, 1784, they defeated a move to have a town vote taken on state officers, and not until April 4, 1785, were any votes cast for state officials, and such votes were very few indeed: John Hancock and his slate received twenty-five votes. Thereafter the vote increased somewhat in size, and in 1787 Esquire Thomas was given forty-three votes for Senator from the county, although it was voted to send no representative to the General Court for that year. Strangely enough the town seems to have participated in the ratification of the Federal Con- stitution. This document had been drafted in May at Philadelphia, and at its November session the General Court called for a Con- stitutional Convention to act upon it and authorized the towns to choose as many delegates as they were entitled to under the state constitution. Waldoborough at its meeting of December 10, 1787, voted "to choose a delegate to represent the town in a convention ordered by the General Court.""In January 1788 three hundred and sixty representatives convened in Boston, of whom forty-six were from Maine. There was in the District strong opposition to ratification. York County voted against it; Cumberland for it, and Lincoln for it by a margin of two votes, one of which was cast by Benjamin Brown.10 If Doctor Brown was the Waldoborough delegate the town had at least its part in determining the funda- mental law of the new nation.
The issue of fish has been a perennial one in our history. From the time of the incorporation of the town those who looked forward each year to the coming of the alewives, shad, salmon, and other fish, fought their annual battle with the millmen for the passage of the fish to the spawning grounds. In the first Town Meeting Nathan Soule had been elected "to tack kear that the fish have a free Bass," but the fish came in such awesome num- bers each year that it was sometimes difficult for their proponents to make the town folk realize that they might need any con- sideration. But the time came when the fish, having faced many frustrations, became indifferent and a scarcity was noted. This caused general concern, for there were many who could still
10The Massachusetts Centinel, Sat., Feb. 9, 1788.
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remember when the fish alone had carried the settlers through some of the gravest emergencies of their past. In consequence drastic measures were taken for their protection, and on March 11, 1778, came the first fish legislation, it being enacted "that no person or persons shall be allowed to catch any salmon, shad or alewives , or set any seine, net or pot or other machine for such a purpose for one year." As a penalty such persons were "to forfeit for the benefit of the town, the seine, net, pot or other machine so used and to pay a fine not exceeding 3 pounds for the use of the town." Thereafter the fish became the object of annual solici- tude, and the date was set each year, mills or no mills, when the dams were to be opened for the passage of the fish. In the year 1790 the date was set for the 12th of May.
The question of setting the District of Maine off from Massachusetts was first agitated in this decade. Around 1785 the movement had grown to the extent that its supporters had founded the first newspaper in the state, the Falmouth Gazette, the first number of which appeared January 1, 1785. After much agitation and many meetings held over the course of the year, Waldobor- ough on January 7, 1787, gave its usual conservative verdict of five votes for separation and twenty-five against it.
It was in the middle of this decade that Waldoborough re- ceived its first Jew in the person of Susaman Abrahams. Susaman was a wandering trader and one not without means. On June 2, 1785, "in consideration of £60 paid by Susaman Abrahams trader," Philip Schuman sold his farm of one hundred and thirty acres located on the east side of the Medomak "about three quarters of a mile from the falls at the head of Broad Bay river." This would place Susaman's new house between the present Atlantic Highway and the Maine Central tracks. Schuman also sold his stock with the farm, which affords us an idea of the stock carried by the small farmer of this period. This is listed in the deed as one yoke of oxen, seven years old, one pair of steers, three-year olds, one pair of steers, one year old, three cows, one heifer, three years old, one heifer, two years old, one bull, two years old, and twelve sheep.11 The swine Schuman was significantly not able to effect any sale of, at least not to Susaman.
Abrahams was no ordinary individual; he was amusing, orig- inal and unique.12 His background was the Hamburg ghetto, and his case history certainly had its shaded portions. In his early days in America he had travelled as a pedlar dealing in old clothes. To save expenses he customarily lived on bread and butter, and carried his butter with him in a covered pewter porringer. He
11Lincoln Co. Deeds, Bk. 18, p. 87.
12Sibley, History of Union, p. 110.
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had fled the Old World to escape the consequences of some mis- demeanor, and had had a hand in the sinking of the ship which brought him to these shores. In Waldoborough he seems to have transferred his interest from old clothes (for here there was little else) to the tanning and coopering business. He was a meticulous accountant and kept his records in Hebrew characters which were read from right to left, possibly a baffling problem for the tax collectors of that day. English was difficult for him and he in- variably translated from Hebrew through the medium of German into English, a process which usually wrecked the idea with which he had started.
He was entirely practical and hewed to the reverse of the doctrine that the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. Conse- quently he was very observant of his written or printed prayers, but his behavior was not always consistent with his outward piety. On his arrival in Waldoborough he was promptly and ironically elected to the office of hog-reeve which must have been a severe strain on his orthodoxy, and with almost equal promptitude he was appointed along with Squire Thomas to membership on a committee to prosecute those whose rams persisted in running at large at unwanted seasons of the year. In all this there was no taint of persecution, but rather a savor of Rabelaisian humor characteristic of the earthiness of the local peasant stock.
In the 1790's Susaman shook the dust of Waldoborough from his sandals and turned his back upon the town forever. It all seems to have come about in this way. On a certain Christian Sabbath in July, Susaman had occasion to write a letter and not being able to write in English he needed an amanuensis and ac- cordingly sent for "Christopher Newbit," but Christopher being a righteous man went to the constable instead and charged Susa- man with intent to sin on the Sabbath. This charge resulted in a fine of five shillings.13 The Jew was inconsolable. Apart from the extortion of five of his shillings, he could not reconcile himself to justice of this sort. The Christian Sabbath was not his Sabbath, and his reaction was to run the entire gamut of his ritual. Seated on the ground he tore his hair, spilled ashes on his own head, wailed and fasted, and then in rage unappeased he left town. Again the fact is here emphasized that persecution was a factor utterly foreign in this situation. Susaman was treated exactly as any Christian would have been at this time for a similar offense.
From here he went to Thomaston and later moved to Union. In the latter town on one occasion a fellow Jew came to keep the Passover with him. The iron vessels before being used were heated red hot that no leaven by any possibility might remain attached
13Jacob Ludwig's Notebook (ms.), Libr., Me. Hist. Soc., Portland, Me.
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to them. After all these elaborate preparations had been completed Susaman's appetite got the better of his piety, and he brazenly cooked and consumed a huge mess of eels, of which he was desperately fond, to the utter horror of his guest. Despite his professed faith in Judaism he quite regularly attended Christian worship and was a pew holder in the first meetinghouse in Union. He observed the Jewish Sabbath (Saturday) by abstaining from hard labor, but rode about and transacted business. On Sundays he would work secretly for a part of the day at his tan yard, and once fell into a vat and was nearly drowned. On November 29, 1810, he was married to the widow, Mary Jones, of Friendship. He died October 6, 1830, about eighty-seven years of age. Susa- man's whole career in this area rather clearly reveals the absence of any deep racial prejudice in the settlement at this period.
There were also negro residents of Waldoborough in early days. There had been slaves in Maine since the 1730's, and this condition of servitude had been tolerated down to 1788, when, on March 26th, this condition was virtually abolished by act of the legislature. Two of the negroes had some connection with Squire Thomas. The case of "Africa Peter" has already been reviewed, but there was also "old Rial" and his wife who came to Waldoborough in the early 1780's. On June 2, 1783, the town underwent one of its periodic purges in order to divest itself of undesirables, for on this date the following were warned out of town by action of the selectmen: "Aron Simmons, Joseph Shere- man, Barnabas Simmons, William Chapman, Moses Simmons, Jo- seph House, Charles Dunnels, and a negro man named Ryall with their families." However the others may have disposed of them- selves, it is known that Ryall stayed, which could only mean that some powerful influence was exerted in his behalf and guarantees given that he would not become a public charge. This new legis- lation of 1788, however, had made the Ryall-Thomas relationship clear beyond peradventure, and the colored man continued his career on his back lot working at odd jobs and in season specializ- ing in the butchering and dressing of hogs.
On April 30, 1789, George Washington was inaugurated in New York as the first President of the United States. In this election the people of Waldoborough, true to their tradition of conservative indifference, failed to participate. One of the first acts of the new administration was to make the costs of the Castine expedition in 1777 an item of the national debt, thus relieving the inhabitants of the state and District of a very considerable part of their local debt. This act doubtless went far toward removing the current suspicion among "the Dutch" of the new order of things. On June 25th of the same year the General Court set off from
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Lincoln the counties of Hancock and Washington. Thereafter the bounds of Lincoln County were reduced to the area between the New Meadows River and the Penobscot. The eastern bound of the town came at this time also under critical scrutiny.
Tradition has it that when this bound was originally sur- veyed in 1773, the amount of rum consumed by the surveying party resulted in an extremely tortuous boundary line, so that many of the settlers along this eastern line had difficulty in deter- mining in which town they resided or just where their property was located. This confusion was slow in being cleared up. Two committees were appointed in succession to "straten said line," but nothing came to pass until May 1789 when it was voted to choose a committee to meet with a committee from Warren "to agree about the line" between the two towns. At this conference Waldoborough was represented by Captain Turner, George De- muth, and Esquire Ludwig. The line was arranged by mutual agreement, and was surveyed and marked by James Malcolm. In the next century the line was again questioned by Waldoborough, and in 1836 the Supreme Court appointed as arbiters Jonathan Cilly, John S. Abbott, and Lucius Barnard. Their report was ac- cepted and the bound adopted as laid down. All other bounds of the town have remained as originally surveyed a hundred and eighty-odd years ago.
During the 1780's the east and west sides below the First Falls began to assume something of their present-day form. The highways had been laid out in their present positions; the farm- houses had been moved back from the river and new houses erected on lots adjacent to the present road. The village as we know it was not yet there, although there was a considerable settlement around the falls, and it had begun to threaten the primacy of the Slaigo brook area, which early had assumed consid- erable importance as a business center due mainly to the large- scale operations of Squire Thomas. The question of where the real center of the town was going to be was not finally settled until the lapse of another quarter of a century.
The last two decades of this century witnessed in the older areas along the river the gradual disappearance of the log cabins and the rise of the frame house. The first of these had come around 1769, when David Holzapfel erected the present Smouse house on his own farm as a residence for himself. During the Revolu- tion there had been little major building. Money had been scarce and of little worth, and the insecurity arising from the war dis- couraged people from such undertakings. The end of the struggle, however, ushered in a considerable building boom in which the log cabin disappeared and the low-posted Cape Cod house became
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the prevailing architectural type. From this period date the oldest houses in the town: the Walter Boggs house built by Ludwig Castner, the house of Mrs. Arthur Scott built by Franz Eisele, my home built in 1785 by Isaiah Cole on the slope of the original Cole's Hill. The house of Mrs. Lawrence Davis built by Captain Stephen Andrews, and the Ewell and Carrie Feyler Hart home- steads date from this same period, albeit a little later. There was also a second type of home, contemporaneous, but in a more pre- tentious style. This type would include the square-roofed man- sions erected by Abijah Waterman (the Andrew Currie house), Colonel William Farnsworth (the Glenn Mayo home), possibly the Charles Samson house (S. E. Patrick home) and the Waterman Thomas mansion on the Slaigo brook (burned in 1865). The log cabin lingered longer in the back-districts, but there it also gave way to the more commodious and pretentious houses as fast as the circumstances of the property holders made such a transition feasible.
By way of brief summary it may be said that the 1780's was a period of rebirth and readjustment. It witnessed the end of the long struggle for independence, and the beginning of a long period of unfettered development leading up to the climax of the Great Days of the mid-nineteenth century.
XXIII EARLY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS
Men themselves, and not the Gods, increase their troubles by their own folly.
SOLON
T. HE EARLIEST EDUCATIONAL traditions and patterns at Broad Bay were those of eighteenth-century Germany. The English and Scotch-Irish who had settled the Town of Leverett in 1736 had made no beginnings in the educational or religious fields. Both were clearly implicit in their plans as well as in those of General Waldo, who set aside Lot No. 19, the present Andrew Currie farm, as a ministerial lot, and somewhere along the east side of the river, in a location now unknown, reserved land for a school lot. But religion and education in this early community never passed beyond the stages of the original plan. Accordingly, it remained for the Germans to lay the foundations of a purely German system of schooling in the settlement, patterned in all respects on that with which they were familiar in their old homes.
It cannot be affirmed that these first settlers were educated, or that there were no illiterates among them, but it is possible to remain strictly within the bounds of fact in stating that many of them could read, write, and handle the simple calculations of arithmetic. The rudimentary system which they had known in their old homes had been long established and it was a compulsory one. Since the seventeenth century the Volksschule (common school) had existed in the towns for the children of artisans, and in the country for the children of peasants. The only basic modification effected in the eighteenth century was that the con- trol of schools passed from the church to the state, but even under state control clergymen continued to be employed very commonly as teachers, and compulsory attendance, a church duty in the seventeenth century, became a state duty in the eighteenth. Throughout this latter period regulations were made more exact- ing, the curriculum was improved and the period of compulsory attendance extended through the fourteenth year, "until they have learned not only the most essential things about Christianity
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and have finished with reading and writing, but also can stand a test on the material presented to them in approved text books." This material judged by modern standards was limited indeed. A Prussian Schulordnung of 1763 restricted the body of instruction in the common schools to reading, writing, religion, singing, and some arithmetic, which altered nothing essential in the system as it had existed throughout the entire century.
The legal framework set up in support of any system fur- nishes but a single aspect of its workings. Another phase is pro- vided by the extent to which practice falls short of its regulating machinery. In Germany the legal requirements laid down by the Princes were not popular, and everywhere the principle of com- pulsory attendance encountered poverty, indifference, parental obstinacy, and the ever familiar profit motive. Exemptions from attendance at school were common, especially in the planting and harvest seasons, but yet in the end, as Professor Paulsen observes, "it would not have been easy to find a child entirely without some formal instruction," even though it were not of a very high order.
In the larger centers the ministers were ofttimes teachers, and the sacristan or sexton sometimes functioned in this role, while in the country artisans frequently assumed this duty and in this way added ein paar grosschen Schulgeld to their meager incomes, and in many cases little more to the formal training of their pupils. A sentence of Paulsen's drawn from his own experience as a boy in a country school in the early nineteenth century gives us some insight into the early schooling of our forebears before they ever reached these shores. It follows:
I recall from the first country school I attended that learning to read remained for many, who attended the school only during the win- ter months, a stupendous task through the spelling, the syllabifying up to the reading of words, and sometimes with small success; writing was ofttimes a wretched copying of letters, and lastly the principal object of long torment, learning to recite parrotwise the church catechism, a few mottoes and hymns.1
This brief outline of the educational system under which the first Waldoborough Germans grew up furnishes us with a clue to the pattern of early education in the new settlement and to the degree of literacy possessed by the people reaching these shores. Naturally some had more education than others and were able to write with some degree of ease. In the Archives of the Moravian Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, are preserved let-
1These data on the early German school system are based on Friedrich Paulsen's Das Deutsche Bildungswesen in seiner Geschichtlichen Entwickelung (Leipzig, 1909).
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ters by Philip Vogler, David Rominger, and Georg Hahn. Other documents bear the legible signatures of Michael Seitz, Balthasar Kastner, Nicholaus Orff, Michael Rominger, Peter Kroehn, Jacob Ried, and Matt. Seitensberger. The office of the Registry of Deeds at Wiscasset, Maine, contains hundreds of signatures of the early Broad Bayers, some in a beautiful script and others scarcely legible, as though written by hands so gnarled and knotted by toil as to be no longer capable of the finer muscular coordination required by writing. Here and there among those of the first gen- eration are those who affixed a simple mark in the place of a sig- nature, and many of the next generation reverted to this easier method for lack of education.
At least one of the settlers completed his training in the rudiments in a Broad Bay school. In the memoirs of Philip Christo- pher Vogler, it is written: "In 1761 there was an awakening [a religious revival] in his neighborhood, and he became concerned about his salvation. His youthful years had been spent in ignor- ance and in school he had not gone far enough to learn to read, so now he grieved that he could not seek for himself the com- forting words of the Holy Scriptures, nor read them." When Brother Soelle, the Moravian missionary, came to Broad Bay all the Voglers "joined the group which Brother Soelle served, also keeping school for the children and our Brother Philip took this opportunity and learned to read."2
That the early fathers of the settlement were to some degree literate should not be taken to mean that they were necessarily avid of education. The fact was that they regarded it as a good thing within limits, and these limits were simply enough educa- tion for the usual business dealings and for rendering their reli- gion more meaningful. Doctor Benjamin Rush, an observer of the early German settlers in Pennsylvania, has defined their limited interest in education in the following words:
All the different sects among the Germans are particularly atten- tive to the religious education of their children and to the establishing and support of the Christian religion. For this purpose they settle as much as possible together and make the erection of a schoolhouse and a place of worship the first object of their care. They commit the edu- cation of their children in a peculiar manner to the ministers and offi- cers of their churches. . . . They are proud of a cultivated ministry, treat all with proverbial respect. They of all others usually took good care to build a schoolhouse near the church. They of all others speak of the schoolmasters as next to the pastor. But free schools in the sense of divorcing them from the church they have never yet learned heartily to love.3
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