USA > Maine > Lincoln County > Wiscasset > Wiscasset in Pownalborough; a history of the shire town and the salient historical features of the territory between the Sheepscot and Kennebec rivers > Part 58
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1822. The Baptist Church.
1824. The Lincoln County court house.
1827. The brick house of William Stacy was built, now incorporated in the Wiscasset Inn.
1828. Francis Cook built the house later owned by Benjamin Swett (brick).
1830. The house of John Hannibal Sheppard ... now Mrs. Rafter's.
1834. Richard Hawley Tucker house, built by John Stephens and Mellus.
1834-5. The Methodist Church.
1837. The house of Samuel Page, erected after October 11, 1837.
1838. Bailey's Tavern.
1840.
The Cushman house.
1844. The Patrick Lennox house.
1845. The Clark-Doane house. Samuel Boyd Doane bought it in 1858.
1850. No record found previous to this date for red brick house of Rodney Blagdon on Washington Street.
1852. Henry Clark and George Wood on High Street.
1853. Benjamin Gibbs house on Pleasant Street, later lived in by Charles H. Metcalf.
1853-4. House of L. Wilson Bragdon on Federal Street, later owned by Mrs. Bailey. 1854. House of James Smith on Federal Street, now known as that of Charles P. Knight.
1855. Isaac G. Williamson house.
1855. John Gibbs house on Hooper Street-Freeman D. Southard.
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XXV
Writers and Art
Madam Wood
L T is indeed a far cry from the peaceful homes and sun-shot townways of Wiscasset to the primitive cabins and savage Indian raids of old York, when the entire District of Maine was comprised in that county, but without this background the life story of the first writer of fiction in Maine, Sally Sayward (Barrell) Wood, cannot be fully told.
Madam Wood was the daughter of Capt. Nathaniel Barrell, whose father was a Boston merchant. Captain Barrell won his commission at the siege and capture of Quebec, where he was promoted for his gallantry. He married Sally Sayward, daughter of Judge Sayward of York, at whose home their child, Sally Sayward Barrell, was born October 1, 1759.
The story of the Sayward family is one of thrilling romance. The origi- nal Sayward came from England and settled in York. In the year 1692, while he was away from home, the Indians attacked the town. Twenty-six of the inhabitants were murdered and eighty-five were carried away into captivity. It was at this time that the wife and children of Rev. Shubael Dummer were massacred. Sayward's wife and all of his children with the exception of one daughter, Hannah, were killed. She was carried captive to Quebec, where her extraordinary beauty attracted the attention of a wealthy French woman, who, by paying a heavy ransom, rescued Hannah Sayward from her barbarous captors and had her educated in a convent, where she took the veil and later became the Lady Abbess.
The father of Hannah Sayward married a second time and had two sons, Jeremiah and Jonathan. The latter was the father of Judge Sayward, who was the grandfather of Sally Sayward Barrell. She lived with her grand- father until she was nineteen, when she married Richard Keating, Novem- ber 23, 1778. During their five years of married life two daughters and a son were born to them. Her husband died in 1783 and for twenty-one years Mrs. Keating continued to live in the house presented to her by her father as a wedding gift. It was during these years that she developed her talent as a writer. The tragic history of her family, the incidents of the war and the experiences of her own life furnished the motives of authorship.
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Her first book was Julia, the title page of which reads as follows:
Julia, and the Illuminated Baron. A Novel Founded on Recent Facts which Have Transpired in the Course of the late Revolution of Moral Principles in France, by a Lady of Massachusetts.
Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Printed at the United States Oracle Press by Charles Pierce (Proprietor of the Work). June 1800.
Her second book, Dorval, or the Speculator, a novel founded on recent facts, by a Lady, author of Julia, was published by Nutting and Whitelock, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for the author in 1801. The preface of this book is worth reading for the information it furnishes about the ideals and customs of that far-off day.
Her third novel, Amelia: or the Influence of Virtue, an Old Man's Story, by a Lady of Massachusetts, was printed at the Oracle Press, by William Treadwell & Co.
Mrs. Keating was married in October, 1804, to Gen. Abiel Wood, a prominent citizen of Wiscasset, whose first wife, the former Betsey Tink- ham, had died in November, 1802. Here Mrs. Wood enjoyed every com- fort that wealth and the best society could give, and in the companionship of friends of refinement and culture, whose tastes were similar to her own, she continued her literary work.
The year of her marriage to General Wood she published her fourth novel, Ferdinand and Elmira: a Russian story by a Lady of Massachusetts; author of Julia, the Speculator and Amelia, printed for Samuel Butler, by John West Butler, Baltimore, 1804.
In 1811 General Wood died, and a few years later Madam Wood left Wiscasset and removed to Portland, probably on account of her son, who had become a ship captain and was sailing from that port. He married Miss Emerson of York, a sister of the first mayor of Portland. William T. Vaughan, the first clerk of the courts of Cumberland after the separation from Massachusetts, married Madam Wood's second daughter, Sally Keat- ing, September 7, 1807, at Wiscasset. She died a few years later leaving two children.
Madam Wood's last printed book was Tales of the Night, written in Port- land and printed and published by Thomas Todd, 1827.
While living in Portland, Madam Wood and her family occupied the western half of what is known as the Anderson house on the south side of Free Street. She was always spoken of as "Madam Wood" and was accorded
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Sally Sayward Barrell who married Gen. Abiel Wood. She was the first woman novelist in Maine.
H. Augusta Moore, 1824-1900. From an early photograph belonging to her niece Augusta Moore Neely of Warner, New Hampshire.
Alexander Johnston, Jr. Born, December, 1815; died, October, 1890.
Sarah Wadsworth Neal. Born, January 29, 1816; died, February 19, 1898.
Writers and Art
the place of honor at all social functions. She was, owing to her peculiar type of dress, a conspicuous figure in public places. She always wore the quaint fichu of her earlier days and the odd turban or cap made famous by Dolly Madison. When she went out she wore a plain black bonnet so far forward as nearly to hide her features. Although Madam Wood was a com- municant of the First Parish church under Doctor Nichols, she often at- tended the old brick church of St. Paul's, sitting in the Vaughan pew with her grandchildren.
Madam Wood left some manuscript works which were never printed, though it is said that when the Waverley novels appeared, and she had read some of them, she was so dissatisfied with her own works that she gathered what she could of them and burned them along with her autobiography.
Madam Wood, about 1830, removed with her entire family to New York, in order to be near to her son, Captain Keating, who was then sailing regularly from that port, where his family resided. Three years later an- other tragedy overshadowed Madam Wood's life, a sorrow so great that she regarded it as the most overwhelming experience of her seventy-three years. In January, 1833, her son Captain Keating was drowned. During the night the current hurled the drift ice against the anchored vessel with such force as to cut the ship in twain, and she sank immediately with all on board. Not a soul escaped, not even the captain.
The tie between mother and son had been of the strongest, and the sud- den shock of this calamity prostrated her both physically and mentally. The following summer she returned to Maine to live with a widowed grand- daughter and a great-grandson.
In her last years Madam Wood continued to write, at the earnest requests of her friends, papers and reminiscences which, due to her remarkable mem- ory and great age, were most valuable.
She died January 6, 1854, at the advanced age of ninety-five years and three months. She was buried in Hope Cemetery, Kennebunk village.1
John Huntington Crane Coffin
John Huntington Crane Coffin, the son of Nathaniel and Mary (Porter) Coffin was born in Wiscasset, September 14, 1815, and died in Washington, D. C., January 8, 1890. He graduated from Bowdoin College in the class
1. Biographical sketch taken by permission from The Maine Book, by Henry Dunnack. The pic- ture of Madam Wood was copied from her portrait in the possession of the Maine Historical Society.
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of 1834, and two years later was appointed professor of mathematics in the United States Navy.
In 1844 he was placed in charge of the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, which position he held until 1853. He was afterwards en- trusted with the department of mathematics, and subsequently astronomy and navigation in the United States Naval Academy. In 1866 he was ap- pointed to take charge of the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac then published at Cambridge, Massachusetts, but after 1867 in Washington. In this capacity he remained for ten years, when in 1877, he was placed on the retired list, having been senior professor of mathematics since 1848.
Mr. Coffin was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston, the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, and an orig- inal member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1884 he received the honorary degree of LL.D. from Bowdoin College. He has written a num- ber of papers on scientific subjects.
He married in 1845, Louise Harrison of Washington, who died in 1871, leaving two sons and three daughters.
Holman Francis Day
Holman Francis Day, the son of Capt. Randolph and Mary (Carter) Day was born in Vassalboro, Maine, November 6, 1865. When a mere lad he came with his father, mother and two brothers, William and Fred, to Wiscasset and located at Birch Point, where his parents kept a boarding- house for the men who worked in the Sturgis lumber mill. There the boys attended the Birch Point district school, and later Holman Day went to Colby College, graduating with the class of 1887.
During his brief sojourn in this community Mr. Day made many lasting friends, and although his later years were passed at Lewiston and on the west coast, he made frequent visits to Wiscasset in order to renew old friendships and revisit the scenes of his boyhood. He frequently stopped with Mr. and Mrs. William G. Hubbard, and so cordial were their relations that when Mr. Day wrote his two plays, The Circus Man and Along Came Ruth, he named the latter for Mrs. Hubbard, née Ruth Shirley Trott.
The first collection of poems, Up in Maine, by Holman Day, appeared in 1900. It was a great success and ran through many editions. In 1902 he pub- lished The Pine Tree Ballads, followed two years later by Kin O'Ktaadn,
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sixty or more poems interspersed with prose. These three volumes gave him a well-established place in American literature. His first novel, Squire Phin, was published in 1905; since then the works which have followed by this prolific writer are: King Spruce; The Eagle Badge; Mayor of the Woods; The Rainy Day Railroad War; The Ramrodders; The Red Lane; On Misery Gore; The Landloper; Blow the Man Down; and The Skipper and the Skipped, published in 1911, in which the author makes frequent use of names famil- iar in this vicinity. His description of the local fire department in that book is a burlesque of the bucket brigade of that ancient organization in this town known as the Wiscasset Fire Society.
Holman Day was at one time Rear Commodore of the Portland Yacht Club. He had two yachts, the Davy Jones, burned in a Portland fire, and her successor, Davy Jones, 2nd. His visit to Wiscasset in the latter on Saturday, July 26, 1913, is recorded in the local paper.
Holman Francis Day died at Mill Valley, California, February 20, 1935. His body was sent to Lewiston, Maine, for burial.2
Blanche Willis Howard
Blanche Willis Howard, the daughter of Daniel Moseley and Elizabeth Ann (Hudson) Howard, was born July 21, 1847, in Bangor, Maine, and educated at the Bangor High School. Later she attended Miss Ogden Hoff- man's private school in New York City. At an early age she showed a marked predilection for literature.
Her first novel, One Summer, was located at Wiscasset, at which place it was written while Miss Howard was visiting her sister, Mrs. Benjamin F. Smith, in the Governor Smith home on High Street. It was published by James R. Osgood Company of Boston in 1875, and at once placed her among the foremost novelists of the day. Soon after its appearance, Miss Howard, as correspondent of the Boston Transcript, went to Stuttgart, Ger- many, where she ever afterwards made her home. In that city she enjoyed a prominent social position and while there she received into her home and chaperoned young ladies who were studying art, music and languages. In 1886 she became the editor of a magazine published in the English language.
Blanche Willis Howard married, January 17, 1890, as his second wife, 2. The above information was furnished principally by Mrs. John E. McKenney of Birch Point.
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Baron von Teüffel, acting physician to the King of Würtemberg as well as an eminent practitioner in Germany. A honeymoon to America was planned but, for some reason, abandoned. They had no children, but her sister's son, Howard Bainbridge Smith, made his home with them.
Her husband was always in sympathy with her work and justly proud of her achievements. Her works succeeding One Summer were as follows: One Year Abroad, published in 1877; Aunt Serena, in 1881; Guenn, in 1884; Aulnay Tower, in 1885; The Open Door, in 1889; Tony, the Maid (first pub- lished as a serial in Harper's Magazine); A Battle and a Boy (the title of which was given by her young nephew, Harold E. Smith); A Fellow and his Wife, in 1891, in collaboration with William Sharpe; Seven on the High- way; Dionysius the Weaver's Heart's Dearest and The Garden of Eden were reviewed by her niece, Marion Stuart Smith, and published posthumously (1900) by Charles Scribner's Sons. All the books written by this authoress passed through large editions in the United States, and many of them were translated into French, German and Italian.
Frau von Teuffel died in Munich, Bavaria, October 7, 1898. According to her wish her body was cremated and her ashes brought to this country and interred in her father's lot in Mt. Hope Cemetery, Bangor.
Alexander Johnston, Jr.
Alexander Johnston, Jr., the second of the six children of Alexander and Mary (Barrett) Johnston of Baltimore, was born in Wiscasset, Maine, De- cember 20, 1815. He first attended Miss Mary Tinkham's school for boys and later the common schools of the town. He graduated from Bowdoin College in the class of 1835 and among his class-mates were Edward Welch Bailey and Edmund Flagg of Wiscasset.
Directly after his graduation he was engaged with his father in shipbuild- ing. He had a natural aptitude for construction and taste to beautify every undertaking. He was a skilled and accurate surveyor and was frequently called upon by the courts to run lines in order to settle controversial boun- daries. He chained and mapped Sheepscot Farms and wrote an historical sketch describing that ancient settlement. It was Alexander Johnston, Jr., who projected the long wooden bridge between Wiscasset and Edgecomb and made it an accomplished fact; it was he who designed the bell tower of the Methodist Church on Garrison Hill near the site of Wiscasset's first
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Writers and Art
fortification; and it was he who made the plans for the Wiscasset custom house which was a smaller edition of that at Portland, both of which were burned in 1866. He was a book-lover, leaning especially towards those vol- umes which treated of agriculture and mathematics. He was an antiquarian and a horticulturist of no mean repute, and in his later years took up astron- omy and became also an amateur apiarist. Perhaps his versatility is best shown by the range of articles written by him on local subjects for local journals, several of which have been preserved in the Maine Historical So- ciety. The principal ones being: "Sheepscot Farms"; "Beaver Dams of Cornwall"; "Pot Holes of Georgetown"; "Great Oyster Banks of the Damariscotta"; "Ancient Pownalborough and its Environs"; "The Great Craze of 1834-6, and Bonded Properties"; "The Whales of Cornwall 200 Years Ago"; "A Night on the Sasanoa"; "The Corn Hills of the Early Settlers and their Gardens"; "Garrisons and Garrison Houses"; "Geologi- cal Features of Old Lincoln"; "A Voyage in the Stirling-Carnarvon Bay - Icebergs"; "The Peril of the Ship at the Close of the Voyage"; "A Drive into Pictou Coal Mine"; "Loss of the Tropic"; "The Small Comet with the Great Tail"; "The Indians and their Relics"; "A Sailor's View of the Early Voyages to Maine, and Effect of Westerly Current."
For more than fifteen years he faithfully kept a diary of the happenings in Wiscasset, a record which has furnished much of the data for the present history.
On October 20, 1843, Alexander Johnston, Jr., married Sarah Wads- worth, the daughter of Barker Neal, also of Wiscasset. In a description given by him of their wedding journey he states that there were then no cars this side of Berwick.
Alexander Johnston, Jr., died October 4, 1890, and his wife died February 19, 1898. There were no children.
The following lines of Whittier might have been as aptly applied to Alexander Johnston as to an abstract character in the Festival Ode:
For he who blesses most is blest And God and man shall own his worth Who toils to leave as his bequest An added beauty to the earth.
For by his exemplary life of high endeavor, a noble exponent of altru- istic living, he possessed a genius for calling forth the best that could be
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found in everything, were it flower or human creature, and, in its most meritorious sense, he left the world more beautiful than he found it.
Hannah Augusta Moore
Hannah Augusta Moore was born March 15, 1824, in the south part of the town of Wiscasset, in the old Boynton homestead on the Neck road to Chewonki, now the home of Walter C. Leavitt. Through her mother, Han- nah Boynton, the daughter of Capt. Alden and Hannah (Nutter) Boynton she was related to many of the oldest families in town. Her father was Herbert Thorndike Moore, son of Col. Herbert T. Moore, who, during the War of 1812, raised a regiment in Waterville, Maine, and was placed in charge of the blockhouse.
Both of her parents claimed descent from prominent English families and both were poets of no mean ability, possessing a rare love of nature and an appreciation of their picturesque surroundings. Lord Herbert Thorndike was the great-uncle of Mr. Moore and Sir Hugh de Boynton was the founder of her mother's family. Henry Humphrey Moore, the renowned dumb artist, who married a cousin of the ex-Queen Isabella of Spain, was her cousin.
While Augusta Moore, as she preferred to call herself (lest she be sup- posed to consider herself a second Hannah Moore), was still quite young, the family moved from Wiscasset to Philadelphia, thence to New York. Her mother died when she was but thirteen years of age and two younger brothers, George and Julius, were left to her care-a charge which she ful- filled bravely and tenderly.
Before leaving Maine a party of Indians passed through Wiscasset and her fortune was told by an Indian woman. "You shall be called Wanona, wandering bird,"3 said the fortune-teller, and her prophecy was verified in that Augusta Moore during most of her long life led a nomadic existence traveling from east to west, but having nowhere a permanent home. The name of "Wanona" she occasionally used as a nom de plume.
After the death of her mother she went to school in Waterville, and it was Ephraim Maxham, the editor of the Waterville Mail, who published her first verses, though it was N. P. Willis who later brought her before the public. Her best-known work is Notes from Plymouth Pulpit, forty thousand
3. There seems to be no Indian authority for this meaning.
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Writers and Art
copies of which were sold in Europe during the book's first year. Her poem "Lehigh, the River" was published in his Book of Places by Longfellow.
Among her best known poems are: "June in Maine, Spinning and Weav- ing in the Birds' Home"; "Earth's Vigil"; "The Life Savers"; "The Sen- trys Hymn and The Watcher"; "After the Storm"; "Song of the Sultry Days"; "Niagara"; "The Rape of the Bell"; "The Chimes"; "Calling of the Cows"; "My Friend and I"; "Ready, Aye, Ready"; and "The Con- summation." Of local interest are the "Last Pine of Sweet Auburn," written in 1863, the inspiration for which was that sentinel of the forest, the lone pine which still stands on the hill west of Churchill Street, known as Sweet Auburn, just south of the standpipe of the Wiscasset Water Company; "The Nine O'clock Bell," the curfew rung from the bell tower of the first Parish Church by the Paul Revere bell; and "Wiscasset," October, 1882.
Augusta Moore was a contributor to journals and magazines, among which were The Ladies' Wreath, 1856, Scribner's, Littell's Living Age, and others.
When in 1880 her brother, George Moore, who was president of the Pacific Mutual Insurance Company of San Francisco, obtained a divorce from his wife and remarried, this blow caused Miss Moore to espouse the cause of divorce reform with a zeal that became an obsession. The New York Journal of Commerce (February 3, 1888) says:
The credit of having originated the agitations which resulted in the establishing of the present League [National Divorce Reform League ] is due to her. She wrote many stirring appeals, some of which were published in our columns, long before any other pen was devoted to this much needed reform.
As time went on Miss Moore became more and more deeply engrossed in having a law passed to prevent the marriage annulment. Her onslaught against what she regarded as a flagrant national evil did not cease with her death, for in 1888, she left with Sidney Heath, the city clerk of Waterville, a mystery package, doubly wrapped in thick paper, tied with heavy cord, sealed with wax and placed in a linen bag which had been securely sewed, with instructions that it was not to be opened for fifty years. On January 3, 1938, when the half century had elapsed, Maj. Robert M. Jackson and the present city clerk, George C. West, in the presence of more than one hun- dred onlookers, broke the seals of the enigmatical package to find that it contained a lengthy treatise on divorce written on ten different kinds of paper, in three volumes numbering 1,004 pages. Miss Moore declared in
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Wiscasset in Pownalborough
her records that she had battled with clergymen, legislators and leaders of various communities to have a law enacted in Maine which would suppress divorce. She wrote of her many trials and tribulations alluding in a verbose manner to various conferences with justices of the Supreme Court, the gov- ernors of several states and many leading professional men. No one knows the reason for this mystery package unless it were designed to emphasize her prejudice against divorce and to place herself squarely with the faction which opposed it. That she was tenacious of her rights and opinions and loyal to her friends was exemplified in her whole life.
In the south part of the town where she was born there lived Nathaniel Coffin who was a prominent lawyer in Wiscasset and whose home was a ren- dezvous for the youth of the town. His daughter Harriet had married Prof. William Smyth of Bowdoin College and their son, Egbert Coffin Smyth, was long identified with the Andover Theological Seminary. Rev. Edward Beecher, who had married Isabella Jones, a niece of Mrs. Coffin, also came hither for visits as did Harriet Beecher Stowe; and in this literary coterie Augusta Moore became acquainted with the Beechers and remained a close friend of the family until death. In 1876, she was a witness at the trial of Henry Ward Beecher, poet and evangelist. She knew the Tiltons also. In her History of Plymouth Notes she says:
The falsehoods that were caused to be circulated regarding Mrs. Tilton and her hus- band at this time deceived the people, for many of them wished to be deceived. But the little church understands the motive for them, and the time will come when the truth will be known to all.
Augusta Moore returned to Benton, the former Sebasticook, in 1886 and spent the rest of her life in that town. She was a woman of deep religious convictions who was thought by some to be psychic. She was tall, with much dignity and poise, and her brilliant dark brown eyes and well-formed fea- tures made a lasting impression. She died September 1, 1900, and was buried at Sebasticook Falls Cemetery, Benton Falls.
"Last Pine of Sweet Auburn"
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