USA > Maine > The Catholic church in Maine > Part 4
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Cheverus followed a rather rigid schedule during his annual missions to Lincoln County. He would spend the first week with the Kavanaghs and attending to the Catholics of New- castle and Damariscotta. Then he would start on a circuit (it expanded with the years), returning on alternate Sundays to offer Mass at St. Mary's of the Mills or St. Patrick's. The circuit took him through the towns between the Kennebec and the Penobscot, from Augusta to Bangor, concentrating, however, on the towns on the lower Sheepscott, Damariscotta, Medomac and Georges Rivers: Bath, Wiscasset, Whitefield, Pittston, Gardiner, Edgecomb, Bristol, Jefferson, Waldoboro, Warren, Hope, Union, Belfast.
As the circuit extended the number of Catholics increased. He must have been, as we are today, surprised to discover that Catholics were quietly slipping into these coastal towns. On his first circuit, during his second visit (1799), he contacted
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twelve Catholic families that had a total of forty children. No doubt one Catholic family would direct him to another or would post him on newcomers to the district. By 1804 there were more than two hundred Catholics living within twenty miles of the little chapel of St. Mary's of the Mills. By 1820 we know that there were one hundred and eight families (prob- ably four or five hundred persons) in the two congregations of St. Patrick's and St. Dennis'. Whitefield had outstripped Damariscotta and Newcastle in numbers of Catholics. Good land was more easily available there, and Whitefield became a rural Catholic center.
This growth of prosperous Catholic communities in Damaris- cotta, Newcastle, and especially Whitefield where the concen- tration was on farming, was obviously the solution to the Irish immigration problem that was disturbing the civil authorities of American ports of entry and the bishops and priests of these cities. The example was not lost on Bishop Benedict Fenwick of Boston when he visited Whitefield and he would attempt to divert the Irish immigrant to the soil. And the success of Cheverus in unearthing stray Catholics in these river and coastal towns allows us to suppose that Catholics were quietly entering the coastal towns of Maine in considerable numbers. Many, however, did not have a Cheverus on the search for them.
Bishop Cheverus returned to France in 1823 with many pleasant memories of Damariscotta. He could at that late day even smile about his escape from the pillory for officiating at the marriage of Elizabeth Jackson, a sister of Mrs. James Kav- anagh, and James Smithwick. It was the first Catholic marriage in the town and it took place in the Kavanagh home on the first day of the new century. Cheverus had made the trip from Boston to be there. It was a gala day, but some months later Cheverus was in court charged with breaking the law that forbade under severe penalty any one other than a settled min- ister to solemnize marriages in a Massachusetts town. He would have been fined eighty pounds and sentenced to an hour
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in the pillory, if an able lawyer had not shown the court that he was empowered to solemnize marriages within the meaning of the law. The point whether he was authorized to officiate at marriages in Newcastle was never settled, due to a timely accident to the judge. But Cheverus returned from Newcastle in the fall of 1801 with a written agreement that he was the pastor of the Catholics of Newcastle and Damariscotta.
Every summer had some pleasant event that remained vivid. In 1801 the Kavanagh's fourth child was born, their second son, and he was named John Cheverus Kavanagh; two years later there was another child to be baptized and he was named Francis Matignon Kavanagh. In 1803, the two Boston priests paid the Kavanaghs and the Cottrills a great tribute by bring- ing Bishop John Carroll to Damariscotta. He had come to Boston to consecrate the Franklin Street church and they brought him to the two Irish pioneers of Maine, for they had contributed a thousand dollars towards its construction and had supplied the timber for the church. The happiest day, no doubt, for both Cheverus and the Irish community was July 17, 1808, when St. Patrick's was blessed. St. Patrick's was the fulfillment of many years of planning. To provide a temporary place for worship until their plans fructified, St. Mary's of the Mills had been constructed. As early as 1800 Bishop Carroll had been informed of the plans for "a good brick church ... which would cost at the lowest estimate four or five thousand dollars." Five years later $2,070 had been collected, Matignon and Cheverus each donating one hundred dollars. The site for the new church was in Damariscotta Mills, not Newcastle as frequently stated, and this was purchased from the two mer- chants for five hundred dollars. The church was completed through the generosity of these two men who contributed two thousand dollars to the building fund, donated the land for a cemetery adjoining the church lot and land for a rectory. No diocese has had such loving care and concern expended on its first church. These pioneers have not been forgotten. A visitor today to St. Patrick's will notice that the first window on the
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epistle side is in memory of James Kavanagh and its counter- part on the gospel side is dedicated to his friend, Matthew Cottrill, while the other windows are reminders of other pi- oneers and their descendants: the Hanlys, Madigans, McGuires and Mulligans. They were unaware at the time St. Patrick's was blessed that they were entertaining the first bishop of Boston, for the information that Pope Pius VII had appointed Cheverus on April 8 bishop of Boston with jurisdiction over all New England was slow in arriving. 1970682
In all his relations with this community there was only one sharp disappointment. He expected Edward Kavanagh and John Cottrill, the eldest sons of the two merchants, to be priests and to carry on his work in New England. He had directed their education; four years at the College de Montreal, a year at Georgetown, and then at St. Mary's, Baltimore. But John Cottrill did not attend classes at St. Mary's; after the transfer had been arranged, Matthew Cottrill decided "to keep his son at home and make a merchant of him." Bishop Cheverus' name- sake, John Cheverus Kavanagh, accompanied Edward to Bal- timore in the fall of 1811 to attend Mount St. Mary's in Emmits- burg while Edward was at St. Mary's in Baltimore. Edward spent two years there, and there is no doubt that he intended to study for the priesthood, for on April 14, 1813 he received the tonsure, the first step towards the altar, and when the war prevented his return to Baltimore in the fall of 1814 he studied theology under Matignon in Boston. The war also changed his plans. It ruined his father's business, and the merchant looked to his eldest son to salvage whatever possible. Edward turned to the mercantile business, to law, and eventually politics for his career. One of the puzzling aspects of the Catholic com- munities of St. Patrick's and St. Dennis' was the failure to pro- vide priests for Maine. Under the guidance of Cheverus and Ryan one would have expected four or five, at least. Maine's Catholic history would have been quite different if the expected had been realized.
Edward Kavanagh, however, did make his mark in Maine
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history. He remained a staunch Catholic and became a model for Catholics in politics. Despite the political disadvantages of his religion and racial ancestry, he won the respect and confi- dence of his Protestant neighbors. They elected him first to highly esteemed offices in his own township, and then to the lower (1826) and upper house (1828) of the state legislature, and next to Congress (1831-35), and, after a fine record as a diplomat in Portugal (1835-1841), he succeeded as President of the Senate, to the office of governor (1843) when Governor Fairfield resigned to become a United States Senator. He was the first Catholic to hold these offices in any New England state.
After his election to Congress and before the session opened in the fall of 1831, Kavanagh and John G. Deane were com- missioned by Governor Samuel E. Smith to investigate and report on the inhabitants living in the Madawaska district, that northern section of Maine that was claimed by both Maine and Great Britain. This investigation resulted in the first clear report on the people living in this area and in the discovery that there was another vigorous group of Catholics in Maine.
3. MADAWASKA
A surprise awaited Edward Kavanagh on reaching Mada- waska. On the banks of the River St. John, between the St. Francis and the Grand Falls, a run of about sixty-four miles, was a Catholic community that antedated the Irish community on the Damariscotta. The settlers on the St. John were also surprised to discover that one of the two commissioners appointed by the State of Maine to interview them was a Catholic. They had been completely isolated from Maine authorities, and Maine officials, in return, were hazy about affairs on the St. John. A census had been attempted in 1820
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and John G. Deane, the other commissioner, had gathered some information on the district during the late 1820's. This land was disputed between the United States and Great Britain and had been since the peace treaty of 1783. Maine claimed the land, and since the federal government was anxious to settle the dispute without recourse to war Maine had decided it was time she had a complete picture of the situation. Kavanagh, of course, was selected because he was a Catholic, recently elect- ed to Congress, and spoke French fluently. Governor Samuel E. Smith surmised that these two qualifications, with the added prestige of being Congressman-elect, would win the confidence of the settlers, and his surmise was correct, for Kavanagh and Deane found the settlers friendly and cooperative with the exception of two families who had linked their fortunes and their future with the New Brunswick authorities.
They found a settlement that was about forty-five years old, had emerged from the primitive stage and was now assuming some of the signs of the melting-pot. By 1831 many nationali- ties had gathered on the river's banks: a remnant of the original Indians, some of the original Acadian settlers and their chil- dren, French Canadians, Maine Yankees, Nova Scotians, New Brunswickians, Irish, Scotch, English and even Italians. One group, however, dominated, and it was not the Yankees as might be expected. This river, really New England's last frontier, had moulded a new type: the Madawaskans, those who had been born in the district.
The American Revolution had a hand in the origins of the Madawaska colony, for the original settlers were about twenty Acadian families who had been displaced from their homes in and around Fredericton to satisfy the American Loyalists who had been driven into exile by the revolution and had moved to the mouth of the St. John, then a part of Nova Scotia but soon (1784) established by these Loyalists as the province of New Brunswick. The refugees from the American Revolution, then,
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had compelled these Acadians to become refugees again; that had been their unhappy lot during the century. They settled not far from an Indian village located near the convergence of the St. John and Madawaska rivers and where, in 1783, two French-Canadian trappers had established a trading post. They first settled on the south bank of the river and hence were on what would be American soil when the international boundary was finally established in 1842. It is not clear whether these Acadians selected this place to escape British jurisdiction (as Maine claimed) or were settled there with deliberate plans by the English. The Acadians had no preferences for either gov- ernment; they wanted to be alone. Neither Massachusetts nor Maine was in any position to provide them assistance, where- as New Brunswick could and did take care of their few material needs and Quebec looked after their spiritual wants.
Another group of Acadians from the Kennebecasis River in Nova Scotia joined the original settlers in 1790 and French- Canadians were soon attracted to the new settlement. In 1790 and again in 1794 the settlers received land grants from the British authorities, an exercise of authority the settlers accepted since it gave them title to land. The land granted in the first instance was on both sides of the river from the Madawaska to the Green River and the land between the Green and the Grand River was disposed of in the second grant. There were Canadians among the first and second grantees, and there were Canadians on the petition addressed in 1792 to the Bishop of Quebec asking his permission to build a church. This petition was written by a priest, Father J. H. Paquet, who spoke for the thirty-one families of the settlement. It would seem that they were attended by a missionary shortly after their arrival, for Madawaska was an Indian mission station.
The first New Englanders, men from the Kennebec region, added a new racial element to the frontier settlement in 1817 and they started to take over the river banks between the St. Francis and the Fish Rivers. By this year the Acadians and Canadians had extended their holdings beyond Madawaska to
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the Fish River. During the 1820's there was a rapid influx of newcomers from all directions: Maine, New Brunswick, Can- ada, Nova Scotia. Kavanagh and Deane made an effort to tag each settler with a nationality, and when one with the name of Charles McPherson did not sufficiently identify himself they listed him as an "alien." But the Madawaskans dominated the life on the river banks. And in time they controlled the section the Yankees had appropriated; St. Francis, opposite the mouth of the St. Francis River, and Fort Kent, at the confluence of the Fish and St. John, became French-speaking or Madawaskan towns. They gradually moved down the streams that flowed into the St. John, founding towns like Wallgrass and Eagle Lake on the Fish River. And the original settlers gave their names to streams (Violette Stream; Daigle Brook) and to vil- lages (Cyr, Daigle, Michaud, Ouelette ).
The population increased rapidly from these new migrations and the traditionally large families. By 1831 there were about two thousand settlers. Twenty-seven families alone had a total of 334 children, an average of more than eleven to a family. The four Thibedeau families had fifty-one children; the five Cyr families had fifty-seven children. The Irish were just get- ting established by 1831 and being late comers the majority appear to have been single. There were, however, eleven fam- ilies with Irish names (probably only the father was Celtic) and together they had thirty-four children. The Thibedeaus outnumbered them.
"Almost all are Roman Catholics," the Kavanagh-Deane Re- port observes. The exceptions would be the Yankees and the more recent immigrants from New Brunswick. The Madawas- kans were also deeply religious. There were, according to Kavanagh, three churches or chapels along the river banks and two of them were on the south shore. The oldest, and the mother church of all the others on both sides of the river, was St. Basil's, located on the north shore, four or five miles from the Indian village at the mouth of the Madawaska. The settlers had petitioned the Bishop of Quebec for permission to build in
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1792, and no doubt they were anticipating a request for a resident priest when the petition was made. Presumably it was built shortly after the permission was granted. The church had, in 1831, a steeple and a bell, there was a parish rectory with a spacious parish lot of forty acres all cleared and a frontage of sixty rods on the river's bank. Here Father Jean Elie Sirois resided, pastor of St. Basil's. Kavanagh and Deane attended Mass there on the feast of St. Ignatius, July 31, and after Mass they had a talk with the pastor. He gave them the impression that another visit would not be agreeable. The cool reception was evidently mentioned to other settlers and they corrected the two commissioners, telling them Father Sirois wanted to see them again. Kavanagh and Deane were experienced men and quite capable of recognizing an open house. They did, however, write him a letter before their departure.
Father Sirois was not the first pastor of St. Basil's. Since 1786 the Madawaskans had been visited by a priest, and Father Ciquard, the missionary who had first worked with the Passa- maquoddy Indians, had resided with them during part of the years of 1794-1798. They had had a resident priest since 1808. Bishop Cheverus and his successors were never in the position to provide them with spiritual care, and this was the factor that linked them to Canada and New Brunswick long after the in- ternational boundary had been established.
It is quite obvious that the settlers and not Father Sirois gave them their information on the other two churches. Kava- nagh refers to them as parishes. St. Basil's was the only parish at this time, but there were two missions and it would seem that local pride had already raised them to the status of par- ishes. The two churches or chapels on the south bank of the river were at the extremities of the settlement, St. Bruno's near Van Buren and St. Luce (formerly St. Emilie, according to the Kavanagh-Deane Report ) near Frenchville. The growing population needed the two churches, and the settlers rightly figured that it was more convenient for the priest to cross the river to say Mass than for the large families to travel to St.
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Bruno's. These two church buildings had been built recently, for in the deed dated July 22, 1828 whereby Father Sirois ceded these two church lots to the Bishop of Quebec there is no mention of churches or chapels. The next year, however, Sirois was directed by the bishop to offer Mass and to give an instruction on one Sunday each month at St. Luce, while the Madawaskans were instructed to provide transportation for the priest on sick calls and funerals. And it would appear that some of the settlers were anticipating the bishop, for Kavanagh was told where the boundary line separating St. Luce from St. Basil was: where Hartford's Brook emptied into the St. John.
St. Bruno's is the oldest of the churches on the south or American side of the river and was the mother of the churches in the Maine section of Madawaska. It was established as a parish in the fall of 1838, and five years later St. Luce had her resident priest. By then the chapel that Kavanagh had seen had been replaced with a more suitable church.
The south bank of the river was the more popular with the Madawaskans. There were five grist-mills in the settlement, four on the American side, and the best of the five, the one on the north bank, was owned by a Yankee: John Baker. There were also five sawmills, and again four of these were on the American side. There was a blacksmith shop on each side of the river. There was also a school on each side; the one on the north side had a teacher supported by the New Brunswick authorities and the one on the south side, an "English school," according to Kavanagh, was presided over by an unnamed old soldier. Actually formal education did not play an important part in this isolated, self-supporting frontier settlement at this time.
The Madawaskans remained isolated from the main currents of American life but found themselves caught up in the bitter dispute between the United States and Great Britain over the boundary line described in the peace treaty of 1783. The north- eastern boundary could not be determined. The first group of Acadians had settled there two years after the treaty was signed
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and hence unwittingly involved themselves in this long dispute. Their wishes, however, were not consulted by either side. By religion and language they were linked with Canada, but the immediate parties of the dispute were Maine and New Bruns- wick. Although the attempt of the Americans to organize Madawaska into a township in 1831 was abortive, Kavanagh and Deane reported that no one could mistake the direction of the sympathies of the Madawaskans; they were on the side of the Americans. The Madawaskans were a cautious people, and this surely was the correct impression to give to the two Maine commissioners. The titles to their land could depend on Maine.
Edward Kavanagh had a hand in deciding whether the Mad- awaskans would be American citizens or British subjects. He was one of the four Maine commissioners appointed by the Maine legislature to consult with Daniel Webster, Secretary of State, and Lord Ashburton, British diplomat, in determining the international boundary. It was settled in 1842, and un- fortunately for the Madawaskans the St. John River was accept- ed as the boundary line. This divided the settlement. All on the southern bank henceforth were Americans. The next year Kavanagh was Governor of Maine, succeeding to that office March 7 when Governor John Fairfield resigned to take a seat in the Senate. Some months after he was in office he received information from some of the inhabitants of Madawaska that was not news to him. He was told that the people of this district were generally unacquainted with American laws and customs, were unable to read or write, and only a few under- stood English. Kavanagh understood the problem better than his informant, for he had observd and reported in 1831 that the Madawaskans were strangers to the Anglo-Saxon political tra- ditions of assemblies, elections, magistrates, courts and war- rants. Relatively free from any outside government, they were governed by customs and usages that had long been respected; spotting a few trees was sufficient to establish title to a land; title to lands was transferred without a deed. And yet there was peace and good order in the settlement. Now, however,
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they had to be introduced to a new way of life. Most of the original grantees were dead by 1843 (in 1831 thirty-two of the forty-eight of the original settlers of 1790 were still living), and this eased somewhat the difficulties of the transition.
The transition would have been easier if ecclesiastical juris- diction had followed the international boundary, as was cus- tomary; American Madawaska would then have become part of the diocese of Boston and the curious situation whereby some of the Maine Catholics were in the diocese of Frederic- ton and the others in the diocese of Boston would have been avoided. This would not have displeased the Madawaskans who asked in 1843 to be incorporated into the Boston diocese. For all their quiet ways they loved to make petitions which were usually ignored. But the petition was too late in any case, for Rome had acted during the previous year.
Rome's administration of Madawaska is puzzling. In 1829 the Madawaska district became part of the diocese of Char- lottetown, Prince Edward Island, but the bishop was unable to care for the Madawaskans and so the Bishop of Quebec con- tinued to supply the priests for the Madawaska churches. This situation continued until 1842. Then, on September 30, 1842, forty days after the United States Senate had approved the Webster-Ashburton treaty whereby the land south of the St. John became American soil, Rome established the new diocese of Fredericton, comprising the province of New Brunswick. The entire Madawaska district, American as well as British, was assigned to this new diocese. This confusion was com- pounded in 1860. A new diocese was established in New Brunswick. The northern part of the province was taken from the diocese of St. John (the see had been moved from Fred- ericton in 1852) and given to the new see of Chatham. But only the British section of Madawaska was assigned to the new diocese; American Madawaska remained part of the St. John's diocese. This arrangement, of course, offered all sorts of troubles and in the end the Bishop of Chatham became the Vicar-General for American Madawaska and ministered to the
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entire district. All this confusion could have been solved in 1842 by assigning American Madawaska to the diocese of Bos- ton. It is true, of course, that Bishop Fenwick and his succes- sor were in no position to supply priests for the district. But they could have arranged with the Bishop of Quebec to service the Madawaskans as easily as the Bishop of Charlottetown. It is rather obvious that the administrators in Rome were weak in American geography, and there remains a strong suspicion that they were following the advice of those who did not want to see the Madawaskans under the spiritual jurisdiction of an American diocese. Rome was informed annually about this unsatisfactory situation, for Bishop Fenwick, starting in 1844, included in his statistics for the Catholic directory the fact that the two churches in the Madawaska district were attended by priests from Quebec. Both Bishop Fitzpatrick and Bishop Bacon continued to do so, and a reader of the annual would assume that Madawaska was under the jurisdiction of the Bos- ton and then the Portland see. This curious situation perdured until 1870 when all the interested bishops were in Rome for the Vatican Council. Then Rome finally assigned American Madawaska to the diocese of Portland. But from the start the Madawaskans living south of the St. John were Maine Catholics and they have remained an important segment of the Catholics in the diocese of Portland.
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