USA > Maine > York County > York > New England miniature; a history of York, Maine > Part 17
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In 1764 sixteen pounds were needed to carry out "the most advantageous form of amending and improving the Seats and Positions of the Court House", and in 1767 Thomas Bragdon was ordered to make repairs and to pay the town's share of the cost. Apparently courts were still being held in taverns during the January and April terms and perhaps even in October, for in 1752 Edward Ingraham was allowed and paid "for candles, fire- wood and House Room for the two years last past", and in 1769 Esaias Preble received three pounds. A committee was appointed "to inquire into the cost of a stove for the Court to set there at January and April terms". In 1771 David Sewall was reimbursed six pounds for an iron stove set up in the Court House. In 1782,
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the windows being "very much out of repair" and the stove in need of attention, Esaias Preble entertained, and again in 1783.
Beginning in 1782, it becomes apparent from the records that the building was fast deteriorating and that it lacked in these busier days the size and accommodations required by the judges and other officials. In 1800 and 1801 the Supreme Court sessions were removed to Kennebunk. In 1803 Joseph Bragdon was al- lowed only four dollars "to make alterations. ... for the accommo- dation of the gentlemen of the bar".
In 1811 the building of a new courthouse was begun. At a meeting of the First Parish on November 25, 1811, it was unani- mously voted :
Whereas the ancient building. ... called the Court House which the Judicial Courts while held in said town have uniformly occupied and improved for a series of years beyond the recollection of any of the present inhabitants has from its size and decayed situation become inconvenient and insufficient for those purposes, And whereas by the general consent of the parishioners a Committee with the explicit approbation and appointment of the town in its corporate capacity have from donations of individuals in this and some of the neighboring towns erected and boarded the frame of a building of 40x50 feet in area and two stories in height for the purpose of supplying the place of the ancient town and county house aforesaid and with a feet's distance there- from,
We. . .. do now unanimously vote, grant and agree that the said new building, the land or soil which it covers with convenient avenues to and from the same shall and may be used, occupied and improved by the several Courts of Justice and the suitors attending the same whenever the said Courts shall be holden within the town of York .
In a town meeting held on May 6, 1812, Elihu Bragdon as agent was instructed "to sell the old court house and have it removed as soon as the new Court house shall become so far finished as that the Courts can be conveniently held in it and that the money from the sale be appropriated towards finishing the new Court House". According to George Alexander Emery, the old building was moved to the low land belonging to the parish on the other side of the street by its new owner, Josephus Howard, who occupied it as a dwelling house and harness and saddlery shop.
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Old Gaol and Courthouse
The new town house-the present town hall-was less frequently used by the county for holding courts; until 1832, when Alfred officially was made the county seat, only sessions of the inferior court met there. Town meetings were held in the building, a room was set off as an office for town officials, and during six months of each year the grammar school of District 1 occupied a room. Perhaps, over the years, the pupils did in- creasing damage to the building and its contents, for in 1852 the town voted to have suitable locks provided to keep the doors locked, and to close up the "middle room usually let as a school room" to prevent access to the rest of the hall. The school agent was given "liberty to cut a new door opening to the said school room on the outside towards the meeting house". That door, though rarely used, is still there.
The deed drawn in 1869 by Washington Junkins conveyed to the town the Gaol and the Court House "situated in sd Town and the land upon which they stand, upon the condition that the sd Inhabitants. . .. shall forever furnish to and for the Inhabitants of the County of York suitable room in sd Courthouse or in some other suitable place in sd town of York for the use of the Probate Court . . . ".
The building continued to deteriorate until it became a favorite target for vandals bent on destruction. Around 1870 an association of civic-minded citizens, banded together by the zealous efforts of the organizer and leader, Nathaniel Grant Marshall, contributed and raised sufficient funds to remodel and repair the badly damaged structure. In 1873 the town hall, once more at- tractive to behold, was rededicated in a dignified ceremony that was made memorable by the principal speech, delivered by Mr. Marshall, in which he gave a short review of the hardships and privations endured by ancestors of many in his audience that their descendants for all times could take pride in their town and strive to protect its honor and its beauty. Copies of his speech are still prized possessions among the keepsakes of old York families.
THE EVOLUTION OF U. S. 1
BEFORE MASSACHUSETTS USURPED the Province of Maine, the pioneers did most of their traveling on water. For overland journeys there were only trails available such as none but expert woodsmen could surely follow, wide enough only for horses and men to travel in single file, over which the course would be changed in wet or dry seasons. Then, as vehicles were brought into use and the paths were widened, the course would vary at the option of the traveler according to any desire to go around a tree or a boulder, or to the choice of high ground or low for a preferable place to ford a stream. Boundaries were not speci- fied, and intrepid riders, trusting in their sense of direction, would take short cuts which the inexperienced would not attempt alone. There might therefore be a maze of lanes which collectively might comprise as much as a hundred yards in width in some places. A story is told of a party being lost in the woods between Straw- berry Bank and Agamenticus for two days.
After 1652, after they had ridden from Boston to hold courts in Maine, magistrates usually were in a mood to make the first business of a session to impose fines on some towns for not keeping the roads in passable condition.
Close to town there were further complications as new facilities were needed to reach newly-developed industries. There would be occasion to cross private property to get to a new mill or ferry, and travelers, unmindful of owners' rights and interests, would approach their destination at any angle which seemed to them most suitable, to the end that a swath would be trampled that might deprive an owner of the gainful use of acres of his land. Or bars and fences might be removed and not replaced, so that a man's cattle might escape into the woods. In those early years there were many actions brought into courts or town meetings to decide an owner's right to keep passageways within reasonable bounds, or a traveler's claim that he had been unjustly halted and even threatened with violence by irate proprietors.
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Fines for neglect were imposed upon towns, and schemes were proposed to foster community spirit in road repairing, but the traveling magistrates continued to find the going terrible. Not until in 1699 did the General Court lay down ultimatums, de- manding of each board of selectmen that they plot definite courses for roads leading through their towns to connect at the boundaries with the main roads in neighboring settlements. Even then only the direction, not the width, of the highway was defined. Four roads in York were laid out by the selectmen in compliance with these orders. The directions as they are set down in the town records were no doubt sufficiently intelligible to the citizens of that day though they may be puzzling to most readers in later centuries.
An abbreviated description of them may be interesting, if only to illustrate how the purpose in those leisurely days was to bring the roads as close as possible to the homeowners' doors, no matter how crooked the highways might become in the process, rather than to lay them straight in order to shorten distances. Beginning at Wells "at the Markt tree, thence to Cape Neddick as the path now goes" it went along the present Shore Road in Ogunquit to Perkins Cove, thence to the right, over the Pine Hill Road "down the hill by Mis Waeres orchard" (incidentally this land is still owned by a Weare family), and right, "over the Bridge and so over the river at the point" up Clark Road to what is in this day the junction with U.S. 1A on Diamond Hill. Thence to Short Sands "and then cutting a little bough by the head of the pond"-now filled in and at present in use as the business section of York Beach-"and so A Long upon the Sea Wall or Ridg that lies between the Sands" across Long Sands and up Long Sands Road to the Village and on, roughly, as one travels now to South Berwick-allowing for the straightening done over two and a half centuries.
"As allso the highway from the Lower End of the Towne to the Mill"-so begins a description featuring Ferry Lane before the "Road to the Mill" is defined.
The third road described or "laid out" takes as the starting point the Old Cemetery ("the Beareing Place") and through York Harbor to Stage Neck "While we Come to the Stage point or ferrey place".
The fourth road, starting again at the Old Cemetery (this time called "the Buring Place") led down what is now Lindsay Road "and so to the [Second] Meeting House. ... and over where
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the Bridg used to be", thence to the right along Indian Trail, and having arrived at the present Organug Road where no road then existed, straight across and through the present golf course "by the head of bas Cove Crick to Rowland Youngs".
With these four main roads formally recorded, the idea of having more roads laid out legally became popular, and much space in the town records is thus taken up. The present roads which lead inland from the modern U.S. 1-Long Hill, Chase's Pond, Mountain, and Logging Roads-were in earliest days each and every one known as the Path Into the Woods, and soon after 1700, were officially recognized as public highways.
They still turned off a straight course to go by as many front doors as was practicable, circling stumps and boulders to follow the easiest grades.
Shortly after 1803, the County Commissioners laid out a road down to the river from Main's Hill, thence direct to York Corner, thus bypassing Ferry Lane, and on to Scituate Men's Row. There was great opposition to this plan before, during, and even after, the road and Rice's Bridge were actually built. Agents were instructed annually by vote in town meetings to oppose the plan before the General Court in Boston, and even after construction, to urge that the road be abandoned and Rice's Bridge demolished. Finally, after several years of fruitless appeals, a vote was passed that henceforth no agent should be instructed to oppose the road.
In 1823 Daniel Grainger of Portland petitioned to the Supreme Judicial Court to lay out a new road from the bridge at Kittery to the bridge at Portland in order to widen and straighten the old Post Road (as the King's Highway was called after the Revolution) and to reduce grades. Thus, after two hundred years, attention was given for the first time to the purpose of shortening distances in order to save time. Work on the road was begun in 1827.
It may be said that such was the beginning of U.S. 1, al- though it was not called by that name until nearly another hun- dred years later. In Supreme Judicial Court Records, V, 493 ff, on file in the Court House at Alfred, may be found the full de- scription of the road through York County, but only that part of it which relates to the Town of York concerns us here. The way from Kittery towards York, having crossed "the mill dam across spruce creek" runs "thence. . .. on a line as nearly straight as the nature of the land will admit to the old road" (thus cutting off the Picott and the Adams Roads in Kittery) "leaving the same
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and pursuing a course to Rice's Bridge, .... thence to near the dwelling house of Samuel Junkins. ... thence leaving the old road" (instead of turning toward the Village) "and passing in a direction to the old road" (that is, that part of it, built in 1803, which went as far as Newtown only), thence over a new piece of road from Newtown to the Post Road or Nason Road, where the old road was met again, and on past the mill on Cape Neddick River to the beginning of the Mountain Road.
Before this time, the old road went forty rods up that road to "Wyer's Tavern", then owned and conducted by either George or James Weare. Thence it turned right, across the present field land, to the beginning of the Pine Hill Road. "Thence leaving the old road" (at the beginning of the present Mountain Road) and "on a line as nearly straight as the nature of the land will admit and inclining to the left and passing in the rear of Theodore Wyer's house" (Weare's Tourist Home in the twentieth century. The Pine Hill Road was thus cut off and the present stretch of road was newly built) ". .. to a turn in the old road near Max- well's tavern in Wells".
Such was the course (with minor changes over the years) of what Nathaniel Grant Marshall, in admiration, called "The Great Main-Travelled Road" from Kittery to Wells, until it was widened and topped with concrete, around 1914, to meet the needs of heavy traffic by automobiles. It was a dirt road, laid out four roads wide, but only a width of twenty feet was kept up in most places; muddy and rutted from November to near June and dusty and wind-blown during the warmer months. New gravel was dumped in holes when complaints were made, with the result, usually, that there would be two new holes made where before there had been but one. When major repairs became necessary, sections of the road would be "macadamized", with several layers of rock fill, coarse at the bottom to fine on top. As part of this method of reconstruction, roads would be rounded up to a crown in the center so that water would be shed by the shortest route to the sides and not permitted to wash out gullies by flowing along the ruts. These crowns made even moderately fast automobile driving dangerous on narrow roads. Then, a few years before World War I, came the era of "hardtopped" roads, built wide and flat.
It may be said that U.S. Route I, through York, Maine, was nearly three hundred years being transformed from a path through the forest to part of a national highway.
NATHANIEL BARRELL
ONE OF THE MOST TRYING times in our nation's history came after the war of the Revolution was won, before the Consti- tution was adopted and the first president chosen. For six years, from 1783 to 1789, the thirteen colonies carried on independent- ly, each of them distrustful of the others. The will to unite was unanimous, but there was disagreement about the terms which should be contained in a constitution that should be the basis for a common set of laws to govern a union of states. By the end of 1787, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Con- necticut had ratified the constitution which had been proposed, but in accordance with the Constitutional Convention, approval of nine of the thirteen colonies was required before all would unite. Popular feeling in the other eight colonies was against adoption, and men of influence publicly expressed the people's opposition.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts had called a con- vention in Boston to commence on January 9, 1788, and this was viewed by patriots in all parts of the country as a period of extreme anxiety, for Governor John Hancock and his friends were known to be opposed to the constitution as it then read.
The Town of York sent two delegates to Boston, having elected Captain Esaias Preble and Nathaniel Barrell in a town meeting held for that purpose. The latter had made himself conspicuous, both in York and in Boston, on the subject of rati- fying the federal constitution.
Nathaniel Barrell (1732-1831) was born in a house on Sudbury Street in Boston, one of the sons of John and Ruth (Greene) Barrell. His father was a wealthy merchant, owner of many ships with which he carried on extensive trade in England, Africa, and the West Indies. All of the sons were given training to become merchants, but Joseph in Boston was the most success- ful. Nathaniel engaged in business in Portsmouth.
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While living in the New Hampshire city, Nathaniel met and wooed the York heiress, Sally Sayward, only child of Jonathan. On November 23, 1758, they were married by Reverend Isaac Lyman. A year later he was a lieutenant in General Wolfe's army at Quebec, and while he was away his first child, Sally Sayward Barrell, was born.
In 1760, Nathaniel left his wife and young daughter to sail to England, presumably on business for his father and his father-in-law. He arrived just at the time when King George III succeeded to the throne. According to family tradition the king presented him with a sword and a mirror on a beautifully carved frame. Three years went by before the young father returned to his family in Maine.
While he was abroad, his father-in-law, by now one of the justices of the Provincial Court and a prominent man in New England, bought several farms, previously owned by Grover and Allen families in the Beech Ridge section of York, which he combined into one estate of several hundred acres. The Old Mill in 1634 had once stood on a part of this land. The old Grover home, a two-story farmhouse of no mean size for the times, he enlarged to the present three-and-a-half-story building which two centuries later is still the largest residence in York.
In 1763, the year when he returned, Nathaniel Barrell "of Portsmouth, N.H.", bought real estate in Biddeford, Maine, and in the deed he is called "Gentleman". Perhaps this is evidence that he gave thought to starting business in some other city. However, in that same year he was established as a merchant in Portsmouth, in partnership with his brother Colburn, and from 1763 to 1765 he was a councillor of the New Hampshire Province.
In 1764 Reverend Robert Sandeman came to America from England to spread the gospel of the so-called Glassites, a form of religious belief preached by his father-in-law, Reverend John Glass. In America the sect, known as "Sandemanians", at- tracted many disciples in Boston, in Danbury, Connecticut, and elsewhere. When Reverend Mr. Sandeman preached in Ports- mouth, Nathaniel Barrell became a follower, and with his char- acteristic impulsive enthusiasm, devoted his main efforts to the support of the church. In his zeal he openly criticized the teachings of the other clergymen, thereby making enemies among influ- ential citizens.
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In 1765 repercussions were felt in Portsmouth from the riots in Boston against the Stamp Act imposed by the King of England. The sentiment of the patriots was that all who did not proclaim themselves openly and often against the king were Tories. But Reverend Robert Sandeman preached the simple doc- trine that Christians should "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's"-to King George the ruler belonged the taxes. In re- sentment rioters destroyed the Sandemanian church. Nathaniel Barrell and his brother Colburn invited further disfavor when they signed, with others, a petition addressed to Governor Ben- ning Wentworth of New Hampshire for reimbursement for the damage done to the church. The brothers suffered business re- verses, and even their fellow Sandemanians took advantage of their ingenuous friendliness and trust. Nathaniel must have written of his troubles to his pastor, who was then in Boston, for a letter from Reverend Mr. Sandeman reads: "I am far from thinking that even your enemies consider you as a tricking mer- chant. I rather consider both your brother and you as having too much unsuspecting openness for being merchants at all . . . ".
The two brothers went out of business soon afterwards; Colburn moved to Boston, and Nathaniel and his family went to York to live on his father-in-law's farm on Beech Ridge.
His obsession for the Sandemanian doctrine was also a source of friction between him and his wife's father. Jonathan Sayward, himself a pious man and a pillar of the First Parish Church of York, wrote in his diary about an affront which Na- thaniel inflicted upon him in January 1769 which must well-nigh have broken his heart:
I have great exercise with my son-in-law Nathaniel Barrel on accompt of his religious tenets, he having embraced the Sandemanian tenets and his temper which is very severe concurring with this rigid church government which makes his conversation insupportable, but he is in the hands of God. I hope will bring good to all of us his family and more in consequence of he will not allow either of his children to visit us for fear as he saith we should teach them the worship of another God for he will not have the same.
Jonathan Sayward, the wealthiest merchant in York, had as heir to his extensive business enterprises only one child, a daughter married to a man who had failed as a merchant. With no hope for success for his son-in-law, he must await the maturing of a grandson, and now Nathaniel and "his temper which is very
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severe" and "his conversation insupportable" denied him the right to know his grandchildren and to guide a grandson along the path to becoming a merchant and succeeding him in his business.
The next decade and more were trying times for both men, in public life as well as in private. In 1768 Jonathan Sayward, himself, had come under suspicion as a Tory. Having, as York's representative to the General Court, been one of the unpopular "Rescinders", the only one from Maine, he had been stripped of all his public offices and allowed no part in the conduct of the war. His crime was not that he was a Tory, but that he did not believe that the colonists could reach a successful conclusion against the might of the well-trained troops of England and against the British Navy which was master of all the seas.
Nathaniel Barrell, too, was barred from participation in military affairs. During the years of actual warfare he threw himself with his customary wholehearted absorption into agri- cultural pursuits on his father-in-law's farm on Beech Ridge, setting out shade trees and an orchard, and experimenting in new methods of planting and harvesting. In 1780 he called himself "a novice at husbandry" in a letter in which he wrote that he was carrying on a study into the steeping of wheat seed in strong brine for forty-eight hours to find out if such treatment would hasten or improve germination.
But when the ratification of the constitution by the states was under discussion, Nathaniel Barrell was aroused to a mood of fiery partisanship. Utterly opposed, he let his sentiments be known in extravagant language. At the town meeting of 1787 when two delegates to the convention in Boston were to be chosen, he "be- haved so indecently before the Choice as extorted a severe Repri- mand from Judge Sewall" but he swayed the meeting, neverthe- less, by his unrestrained harangue, and was elected a delegate.
With Captain Esaias Preble, also strongly opposed to ratifi- cation, he went to Boston with the understanding that the citizens of York expected them to state in no uncertain terms York's complete opposition.
Not all York voters, however, were against ratification. There was a minority group of conservatives among the business and professional men who would have preferred delegates who would be willing to ratify the best constitution attainable at the moment in the hope of improvements in it at some future time. These men, dismayed at the decisions arrived at by mob rule, stood in dread of the outcome.
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In Boston, the Convention dragged on through the month of January, with the weary representatives growing more deter- mined in their opposition. Towards the end of the month, some of the wisest and most influential men such as Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Rufus King, sensing that the union of the states hung in the balance as long as Massachusetts set an example of contrariness which the remaining colonies would follow, met in private and attacked the problem which was causing the dead- lock, namely, that the constitution as it stood threatened to deprive the states of powers to govern themselves.
At the meeting on January 31, the ailing His Excellency Governor Hancock "borne up the broad aisle in men's arms, his gouty limbs wrapped up in flannels to protect him from the cold" was given the presiding chair, "the scene creating an intense sensation". In a well-received speech he proposed the nine amend- ments which have come to be known as the Bill of Rights. Samuel Adams endorsed them and called for immediate action. Then came many speeches, some in opposition, among which were a few made by Maine delegates. Major Samuel Nasson, once a citizen of York but at that time a delegate from Sanford, opposed in a prolonged speech. A large committee to study and report was appointed, one of whose members was Nathaniel Barrell of York.
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