2019 Midcoast Region

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Maine’s History Magazine Volume 28 | Issue 5 | 2019

15,000 Circulation

Midcoast Region

Bowdoin’s Fred Tootell

Hammer throwing phenom

The 1866 Wiscasset Fire

Business district and wharves destroyed

Rockland’s Alton H. Blackington A photo for the ages

www.DiscoverMaineMagazine.com facebook.com/discovermaine

Midcoast Region

Inside This Edition

2 3

I t Makes No Never Mind James Nalley

4

Falmouth Actor Gary Merrill A self-professed Mr. Do Nothing James Nalley

8

Catherine Beecher’s Kitchen Domestic engineer made homes more efficient Charles Francis

16 Freeport’s Otis L. Coffin Civil War veteran lived to 100 years

Hannah Ostrye

Maine’s History Magazine

Midcoast Region Publisher & Editor Jim Burch

Layout & Design Liana Merdan

20 Bowdoin’s Fred Tootell Hammer throwing phenom

Charles Francis

Advertising & Sales Manager

24 Harpswell’s Ghostly ‘Dash’ Maine’s own Flying Dutchman

Jeffrey Bradley

Jennifer Bakst Dennis Burch Dan Coyne Tim Maxfield

27 The Blacksmith’s Henry Repeating rifle made its appearance in 1860

Charles Francis 30 The 1866 Wiscasset Fire Business district and wharves destroyed

Charles Francis 34 The Augusta State House

Magnificent new capital building rebuilt in 1910

Brian Swartz 38 Montville’s Ebenezer Knowlton Minister would rather preach than govern Brian Swartz 42 Boothbay’s Robert Hellens Unsung hero of nuclear power

Charles Francis 47 T he Sinking Of The Royal Tar And the tragic life of a circus elephant

Charles Francis 51 Rockland’s Alton H. Blackington A photo for the ages

Kenneth A. Clark 57 Belfast’s Ann Monroe Only a war could draw her from societal obscurity Brian Swartz 62 The Last Time Was A Charm Politicians “moved” Camden four times in seventy years

Brian Swartz 66 Searsport’s Franklin S. Nickerson He defied his superior to save a good soldier

Brian Swartz 68 Mary Claire Fuller

Silent screen actress wows the good people of Searsport

Brian Swartz

Tim Maxfield

Advertising & Sales

Field Representatives Jim Caron Don Plante

Office Manager

Liana Merdan

Contributing Writers Jeffrey Bradley Kenneth A. Clark Charles Francis James Nalley Hannah Ostrye Brian Swartz Published Annually by CreMark, Inc. 10 Exchange Street, Suite 208 Portland, Maine 04101 Ph (207) 874-7720 info@discovermainemagazine.com www.discovermainemagazine.com Discover Maine Magazine is distributed to town offices, chambers of commerce, financial institutions, fraternal organizations, barber shops, beauty salons, hospitals and medical offices, newsstands, grocery and convenience stores, hardware stores, lumber companies, motels, restaurants and other locations throughout this part of Maine.

NO PART of this publication may be reproduced without written permission from CreMark, Inc. | Copyright © 2019, CreMark, Inc.

SUBSCRIPTION FORMS ON PAGES 33 & 70

Front Cover Photo:

Gilbert E. Barker, president of Independent Lobster Co. in Rockland. Item #LB1992.301.311 from the Atlantic Fisherman collection and PenobscotMarineMuseum.org

All photos in Discover Maine’s Midcoast Region edition show Maine as it used to be, and many are from local citizens who love this part of Maine.

Photos are also provided from our collaboration with the Maine Historical Society and the Penobscot Marine Museum.

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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com

It Makes No Never Mind

by James Nalley

I

n general, weather-related discourses focus on either the extreme cold during the winter or the excessive heat during the summer. However, in 1816 Mainers experienced a summer with frigid temperatures.

Known as the Year Without a Summer, the entire state saw a rapid drop to below- and near-freezing temperatures. For example, in May temperatures in Brunswick dropped to 25 degrees, while snow fell in Hallowell for three days. According to the History of Penobscot County by W. Chase, “Water froze for several nights…and great numbers of birds were so benumbed that they could be taken readily in the hand.” These conditions persisted throughout the summer, with Augusta, Brunswick, and Rockland experiencing temperatures in the 30s, with frost and snow occurring on the Fourth of July.

This sudden climate change had wide-ranging effects on society. As stated by the New England Historical Society, “Crop failures caused hoarding and price increases for commodities. People went hungry. Farmers gave up trying to make a living and started heading west.” Meanwhile, citizens began to fear the end of

the world. For example, according to The National Register, “Religious processions were made to appease the heavens…and people started to believe that something extraordinary had taken place.” Naturally, farfetched theories emerged, such as witchcraft that had been performed en masse or that the Freemasons had somehow learned to control the weather.

Overall, there are two debatable reasons for that summer. First, in 1815 there was a massive volcanic explosion of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia, resulting in 15,000 immediate deaths. The volcanic ash entered the stratosphere and caused significant climate changes and crop failures around the world.

According to The Great Tambora Eruption in 1815 and Its Aftermath by Richard Stothers, “Longitudinal winds spread the fine particles around the globe, creating optical phenomena. Prolonged and brilliantly colored sunsets were seen in London between June and October 1815.” Second, as stated by Lee Foster, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) meteorologist, the climate data indicates that 1816 was part of a “mini-Ice Age” lasting from 1400 to approximately 1860. In either case, climate change and its long-lasting ef-

fects on the world are, in fact, real.

Well, on this theme of the End is Near, let me close with the following: There was a long line at the pearly gates, so St. Peter quickly asked the first man, “Tell me about the day you died.” The man said, “Oh, it was awful. I believed that my wife was having an affair, so I came home early to catch her with her lover. I searched all over the apartment but couldn’t find him anywhere. However, I went to the balcony and found this man hanging over the railing. I immediately grabbed a hammer and started hitting his hands and he fell. After noticing that he safely landed on some bushes, I pushed the refrigerator over the balcony, and it crushed him. Unfortunately, the strain gave me a heart attack and I died.”

St. Peter let the man in. The second man approached St. Peter and said, “Oh, it was awful. I was doing work on my balcony and I fell but managed to grab the balcony three floors below. However, some maniac hammered my hands! I luckily landed on some bushes, but he dropped a refrigerator on me, and I died.” St. Peter let him through.

The third man cautiously approached and said, “Well, you won’t believe this…I was naked and hiding in a refrigerator…”

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Falmouth Actor Gary Merrill A self-professed Mr. Do Nothing

by James Nalley

B

ack in the day when black-andwhite televisions and weekends at the movie theaters were the norm, male actors (especially lead actors) seemed to have the same characteristics - rugged handsomeness, a booming voice, and a certain swagger.

Gary Merrill, a Connecticut-born career actor who eventually settled in Falmouth, Maine, was one such example.

In addition to his appearances in more than 50 feature films and several television series, his “looks” caught the attention of leading ladies such as Barbara Leeds, Bette Davis, and Rita Hayworth.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, on August 2, 1915, Merrill eventually attended Bowdoin College and Trinity

College, after which he began his acting career in several regional theaters.

In 1939 he made his Broadway acting debut in the comedy See My Lawyer.

During World War II, while serving in the U.S. Army Air Force, Merrill appeared in both the stage and screen versions of Winged Victory (1944) by Moss Hart. After the war, his experience in the U.S. Army Air Force Radio Unit and his “booming” voice landed him many roles in radio dramas, including a recurring role as Batman in the popular Superman radio series.

Subsequently, a string of good fortune allowed his film career to take off. According to the New York Times, “Through a recommendation from

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Hart, Mr. Merrill was cast as a young, liberal reporter in Garson Kanin’s 1945 comedy Born Yesterday. After playing the lead in another Broadway hit, At War with the Army, he was signed by 20th Century Fox in 1949.”

Fresh off his new contract, Merrill played leading roles in two major films, Twelve O’Clock High (1949) (Col. Davenport) and All About Eve (1950) (Bill Sampson), opposite Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, and a then-unknown Marilyn Monroe. In 1950 Merrill and Davis got married in Mexico on the same day that his divorce to his former wife, Barbara Leeds, had become final. During their stormy 10-year relationship, Merrill and Davis adopted two children and ap-

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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com peared in several films together, including Another Man’s Poison (1952) and Phone Call from a Stranger (1952). As Merrill stated in a 1989 interview in The New York Times, “When I think of my marriage to Bette, I think we were playing at it the way we played roles in the movies…We fell in love in the movies. Subconsciously, we just went on after the movie was finished. As the demands of real life set in, we realized the premise was wrong.” After their bitter divorce in 1960, Merrill went on to have a long, highly publicized relationship with Rita Hayworth, the details of which he provided in his 1989 autobiography titled, Bette, Rita, and the Rest of My Life.

Despite to sudden stardom in film, he rarely moved beyond supporting roles, as shown in Decision Before Dawn (1952), The Wonderful Country (1959), The Savage Eye (1960), and Clambake (1967), with Elvis Presley.

He did, however, have more success in (cont. on page 6)

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(cont. from page 5) television, where he appeared as Jason Tyler on NBC’s Justice (1954-1956), as Joshua Newton in NBC’s Medicine Man (1958), and as editor Lou Sheldon in CBS’s The Reporter. In addition, his booming voice was heard in many television commercials and documentaries, including The Making of Liberty, a 1986 short film on the restoration of the Statue of Liberty in New York. Meanwhile, he continued to act on stage and starred in various productions such as Step on a Crack (1962), Rosebloom (1971), and Morning’s at Seven (1980) (his last stage appearance). Although he remained relatively busy throughout his career, Merrill, according to The New York Times, “frequently insisted that he had been only an adequate actor and never worked at acting.” As he stated, “I had no drive, really…I just liked to get by and have fun.”

Unlike other prominent actors who hovered around Hollywood or New

York, Merrill lived mostly in Maine the last forty years of his life. He even purchased a historic lighthouse at Cape Elizabeth in 1971. Moreover, he was very active in the community and was frequently seen at political events, both in Maine and across the country. For instance, he helped rejuvenate Maine’s Democratic Party by supporting Edmund Muskie’s successful bid for governor (1955-1959). He also participated in the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches in 1965. However, due to his disillusionment with President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War policies, he switched parties and ran an unsuccessful Congressional campaign as an anti-war, environmentally focused candidate.

By the 1980s, aside from his various roles as a narrator and the author of his autobiography, Merrill basically retired from the entertainment business. In 1985, despite his decade-long, stormy

relationship with Davis, it was apparent that Merrill had no resentment. According to the Washington Post, “Davis ended a 15-year silence in 1985 by writing a note to Mr. Merrill after he paraded outside a bookstore with a sign urging shoppers not to buy My Mother’s Keeper, a critical biography by her daughter. He stated that he didn’t want the actress to be ridiculed by a daughter whom he called ‘greedy.’”

During his retirement, Merrill spent most of his time playing golf and reading poetry in the local schools. As stated in the Washington Post, he also had a penchant for wearing skirts on hot days, for which he was known in the Portland area.” He died of lung cancer at his home in Falmouth on March 5, 1990. He was subsequently buried in Pine Grove Cemetery. Fittingly, the inscription on his tombstone reads: “A Self-Professed Mr. Do Nothing Who Did Everything for Everybody.” * Other businesses in this area are featured in the color section.

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Midcoast Region

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Catherine Beecher’s Kitchen Domestic engineer made homes more efficient

by Charles Francis

W

hat is the most important room in the home? The answer to that question can, of course, be argued. The majority of us would probably opt for the kitchen.

Certainly most women would. Naturally, I, as a male, have a bias. But then I like to eat. And, of course, it can be said that I, as a male, can’t speak for women.

I want to add another question to the above. Who is the most influential woman of recent times? This question is even more contentious than that relating to the most important room in the home. To make it a bit easier I will add a qualifier. What woman of recent times did more to change the lives of

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other women? My candidate here is Catherine Beecher.

Catherine Beecher is my choice for the most influential woman of recent history because she did more to change home design than anyone past or present. She did this from the prospective of a woman intent on making the lives of other women easier. The way to bring ease to the lives of women home makers was through making their immediate surroundings more efficient.

Some might call Catherine Beecher a domestic engineer. Others might refer to her as a home economist. She is, in fact, sometimes identified as the founder of home economics.

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Catherine Beecher lived in the nineteenth century. She is recognized as one of the great leaders in the field of formal, post-secondary education for women. She founded colleges for women. She is also recognized as an architect. She designed homes. Historians of architecture have described her as “a precursor of modern architecture.”

Catherine Beecher was the first to design homes with closets of the builtin variety. She had closets in bedrooms and in kitchens. The shape and location of Beecher’s closets has not altered since she first included them in her house plans. She had closets next to

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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com the front door and a broom closet in the kitchen. How handy are those? Prior to Beecher’s introduction of the closet, storage was in wardrobes, armoires, chests and cupboards. Beecher came up with linen closets in upstairs halls and medicine cabinets in bathrooms.

She was decidedly practical.

Just who was Catherine Beecher?

Her name should ring a bell. At least her last name should. She was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sister. To be exact she was the older half-sister to the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

You can find references to Catherine Beecher describing her as the founder of a line of domestic influences culminating in Martha Stewart. Martha Stewart has ties to Maine. She summers on Mt. Desert Island. Those who know their Maine history know Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in Maine, in Brunswick. Some of Stowe’s most famous work was composed here. The

Pearl of Orr’s Island is a Maine book.

Catherine Beecher wrote a book on home design and management with her famous sister, The American Woman’s Home. It came out in 1869. It should be noted that Catherine Beecher’s name appears first in the author’s credits.

Home management was “her” subject, at least one of them. The American Woman’s Home contains the design of a model home. The design is Catherine Beecher’s work.

Anyone who cooks in the home owes a debt to Catherine Beecher.

There isn’t a modern kitchen anywhere that doesn’t owe something to Beecher. This includes the kitchen of the traditional Maine home, so long as that kitchen doesn’t totally reflect Maine of a period before Beecher’s works first began appearing in the late 1830s.

Catherine Beecher was an advocate for small homes. She didn’t want small homes because they cost less than big

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ones, she wanted small homes because they were easier to care for. In short, small homes were more user friendly for women.

Prior to Catherine Beecher’s advocacy of homes that were user friendly for women, the home was a male preserve. It was designed for visual impact. This meant large and eye-catching. In a large house Beecher wrote “the table furniture, the cooking materials and utensils, the sink, the eating-room, are at such distances apart, that half the time and strength is employed in walking back and forth to collect the articles used.” Beecher’s concern in home design had little to do with the visual.

Her concern was comfort, the comfort of the individual who had to do most of the work in the home.

Beecher’s first major work was A Treasure of Domestic Economy. It should be noted that like most works of the nineteenth century, A Treatise (cont. on page 10)

Midcoast Region

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(cont. from page 9) and The American Woman’s Home have much longer titles. In A Treatise Beecher said “Every room in a house adds…to the amount of labor sweeping, dusting, cleaning floors, paint and windows, and taking care of and repairing its furniture.” She went on to say “Double the size of the house and you double the labor of taking care of it, and so vice versa.”

The above comments should not suggest that Beecher was simply interested in making life easier for the housewife. Beecher was a true architectural designer. Not only did her design always have the dining room next to the kitchen, they also included such innovations as ducted systems of heating and ventilating for supplying every room from a furnace in the basement.

In particular, Beecher homes did away with that decidedly male adornment, the fireplace. Fireplaces were messy

and smoky. Typical Beecher designs almost always included two bathrooms, a ground floor or basement bathroom and one on the second floor. It was with the kitchen, however, that Beecher showed her true genius.

Catherine Beecher was a child of her father Lyman’s first wife. As such she had a good deal of responsibility in rearing younger siblings and in caring for the home. That experience came out in her kitchen designs.

While books on home design produced by men usually had a room labeled “Kitchen,” Beecher designs indicated location of stove and sink. In her first major work, A Treatise, Beecher included drawers for towels and cleaning powders under the sink as well as a continuous work surface with shelves above and storage below. The American Woman’s Home recommended specific work areas for preparation

and clean-up. Built-in cupboards and shelves were standardized. In The American Woman’s Home sisters Catherine and Harriet showed they were concerned with teaching contemporary homemakers how to cope with newly invented ranges, stoves, refrigerators, and other utensils and gadgets. They even dealt with processed food preparation.

While it might be going a bit far to say that Catherine Beecher revolutionized domestic lifestyles, she did go far in changing attitudes and the understanding of comfort and domesticity.

That change of attitude is found in the dedication of The American Woman’s Home. It reads “To the women of America, in whose hands rest the real destinies of the Republic.” * Other businesses in this area are featured in the color section.

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Midcoast Region

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Freeport’s Otis L. Coffin Civil War veteran lived to 100 years

by Hannah Ostrye

O

tis L. Coffin, a Civil War Veteran, was one of Freeport’s more noteworthy citizens. The son of Ansyl B. Coffin and Rhonda Hill Coffin, he was born in Freeport on February 4, 1844. At the age of 17 he enlisted in the army for a three-year tour of duty and became a private in Company “E” of the 13th Regiment Maine Volunteer Infantry with Colonel Neal Dow commanding. The company was mustered the following year and Mr. Coffin was sent to Mississippi and later Louisiana, where he participated in a number of engagements including Cedar Creek (Sheridan’s ride). He was honorably discharged at Decroes Point, Texas in January of 1865 and immediately re-en-

listed to serve three more years.

This time he was mustered into Company “B” 30th Maine Volunteer Infantry under the command of George W. Randall. The 30th Maine was formed with a large group of experienced soldiers, many of whom were older men and previously discharged soldiers.

The regiment was initially sent to Louisiana where they were involved in several skirmishes. Mr. Coffin was taken sick during the Red River Campaign and confined to the Marine Hospital in New Orleans and then furloughed home. He received a discharge at Fort Pulanski, Georgia with the rank of Sgt. Major. A final honorable discharge was received at Portland, Maine on August

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20,1865, by reason of the close of the war. During his military career he won high commendation for bravery in action and “soldierly bearing.” In total he served four years and four months.

Otis Coffin listed his profession as blacksmith on his military papers, but in later interviews he stated that he had worked as a house painter for seven years and in a shipyard for eighteen years. After he was discharged from the military he took up photography for a short period of time, and worked in Winthrop, Augusta, and Greene.

In 1865 Mr. Coffin married Miss Harriet Harrington of Peaks Island and they had seven children. Their names were Ernest L., Arthur B., Lillian D.,

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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com Wellington B., Rose 0., Violet A., and Azalia B. The family moved to California where they lived for sixteen years while Otis managed a 350-acre dairy farm. He also operated a large fruit ranch in conjunction with the dairy business.

Although both he and his wife liked California, they decided to return to Maine and get back to familiar territory and friends. On his return he took up farming once again. In a newspaper article written when he was 97, Otis said he liked farming and believed he would have chosen the same occupation if he was a young man. His wife died in 1911, and in 1913, at the age of 69, he married Helena Tracy of Cornish.

Otis Coffin lived until he was 100 years and 10 months old. For many years he had the honor of having Freeport’s gold cane which was given to the community’s oldest citizen. As a member of the G. W. Randall Post, GAR, he attended many encampments

during his later years. At the age of 97 he and George F. Stuart, age 95, also of Freeport, traveled by train to Columbus, Ohio to attend the Diamond Jubilee Encampment. Their picture appeared on the front page of the Boston Post. When he was 99 he went to the State Encampment in Belfast. By 1930 he was the only survivor of his original regiment, the 13th Maine. In the last year of his life he was listed as one of two surviving members of the 30th Maine. In his home at Porters Landing he had many pieces of handmade furniture, reflective of the skill and craftsmanship he learned in one of his former trades, shipbuilding. He died on November 28,1944 and is buried in South Freeport Cemetery. His obituary was on the front page of the Portland Press Herald.

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Bowdoin’s Fred Tootell

by Charles Francis

Hammer throwing phenom

I

n the fall of 1919 a hulking bear of a youth enrolled at Bowdoin College.

His hometown paper would later describe him as “an overgrown schoolboy without a tithe of athletic ability.”

This “overgrown schoolboy” would go on to become one of the most respected college track and field coaches in the country. One of the reasons he garnered such respect was that year after year he turned marginal athletes into national class competitors. His career also included a gold medal at the Paris Olympics of 1924. Later he threw the hammer 230 feet, a distance far over the world record of the day. At the time he was a track and field coach, which made him a professional, so the mark didn’t

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enter the record books. The “overgrown schoolboy” was Fred Tootell.

Fred Tootell was a member of four of storied Bowdoin coach John Magee’s track and field teams. One tradition has it that Tootell had never thrown the hammer before he came to Bowdoin. Another has it that, while he threw the hammer, his form was so bad that Coach Magee had to change everything about it. Whatever the case, Tootell was not a natural athlete.

Nevertheless, John Magee saw something in him that told him to spend time developing the young man’s raw strength, and it paid off with an Olympic gold medal. It paid off in another ways too.

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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com Fred Tootell spent thirty-nine years as a coach and athletic director at the University of Rhode Island (URI). The University of Rhode Island, as the state university of the smallest state in the country, did not have the athletic budgets of the powerhouse colleges like Penn State or Indiana. Yet, during Tootell’s tenure there, the school routinely held its own in competitions with the larger universities and colleges.

One of the most intriguing stories about Fred Tootell has him throwing the sixteen-pound shot through the fence at Bowdoin’s Whittier Field during a practice. According to the Brunswick Record, in the spring of 1923, Tootell let go “with a tremendous heave that sent the metal sphere and its comet-like tail crashing like a shell from a Big Bertha through the fence that surrounds Whittier Field.” The Big Bertha reference is to Germany’s largest piece of World War I field artillery.

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Tootell’s throw was 181 feet. At that time Patrick Ryan of New York held the world record in the hammer throw at 189 feet. The 181-foot distance would have been the number two mark at that time if it had been recorded in a meet. According to the Brunswick Record article, Tootell felt he had longer throws in him that day, but Coach Magee wouldn’t let him continue for fear of Tootell hitting and killing someone beyond the fence.

Fred Tootell was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, was raised in Salem, New Hampshire and went to Methuen (Massachusetts) High School. Tootell’s father was a carpenter. Supposedly, Tootell once told Coach John Magee that while he had never thrown the hammer he had dropped a number of them while working with his father.

Tootell was big. He was 6’4” and weighed 240 pounds. He loved physical activity including weight lifting,

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a practice John Magee frowned upon.

Given the importance of weight training for today’s track and field men, Tootell’s use of weights would have been one of the things that put him ahead of the curve in the hammer competitions of the time. He could also long jump in the twenty-one foot range, and run the 40 in 4.8. Given his size, he would have been a natural as a professional football player. He was also smart and motivated. He went to Bowdoin to prepare for a career in medicine. He was attending Tufts Medical School at the time of the Paris Olympics.

Tootell’s best year competing at Bowdoin was his senior year. In the spring of 1923 he set hammer throw records at the Penn Relays and the IC4A. The records were also national collegiate records. Then he went off to Tufts and medical school and to prepare for the Olympics.

The fact that Fred Tootell even par(cont. on page 22)

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(cont. from page 21) ticipated in the Olympics much less won the gold medal is something of a miracle. During the Olympic trials, Tootell ripped a tendon in his right foot, necessitating a cast. Doctors told Tootell that competition was out of the question. Nevertheless, Tootell continued to work out, and just before his Olympic event had the cast removed.

Tootell threw 174’ 10” to win the gold medal. The throw was five feet off the Olympic record and fifteen off the world.

Tootell’s best mark in competition was 186’. At the time the world record was 189.6.

Coach John Magee was without doubt one of the most significant figures in Fred Tootell’s life. In part because of Magee, Tootell went into education and coaching rather that pursuing a career in medicine. His first teaching position was at Mercersburg (Penn-

Fred Tootell wins gold in the hammer throw.

sylvania) Academy. While there he set what would have been world hammer throw records had he not been a coach and therefore classified as a professional. According to Strange As It Seems, a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not competitor of the day, Tootell threw over 200 feet seven times in 1925 while at Mercersburg. One of the throws was 210 feet 10 inches. Later, according to Tootell’s brother, he threw 230 feet.

From Mercersburg, Tootell went on to the University of Rhode Island.

Among his accomplishments there was

a national championship cross country team and he coached and produced numerous individual national champions in track and field. He served as president of the National Track Coaches Association and the NCAA Cross Country Track Coaches Association. He also competed against John Magee and Bowdoin on numerous occasions. In 1950, at the end of Magee’s coaching career, Bowdoin won the New England Track and Field Competition. Tootell, who had also won it a number of times, was the first to congratulate the coach who had turned him into a hammer thrower and in whose footsteps he followed as a coach.

Fred Tootell died in 1964. The “overgrown schoolboy without a tithe of athletic ability,” who once sent a hammer through the fence of Bowdoin’s Whittier Field certainly had a remarkable career and life.

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Harpswell’s Ghostly ‘Dash’ Maine’s own Flying Dutchman

by Jeffrey Bradley

F

amous or infamous — depending on which side of the War of 1812 you happened to be on — the privateer Dash, by all accounts, was one lucky schooner. Right up until the time she became a ghost ship, that is. For, despite a knack for evading British warships while capturing and sinking their shipping, the Dash, one day, was lost with all her hands; and from that day to this she’s carried a reputation of doom, an apparition with dire consequences for those unfortunates who cross her wake.

Initially she led a charmed life. Embargos imposed by warring European powers during the early nineteenth century made maritime life for Amer-

icans difficult, especially for New Englanders, bound eternally to the sea.

Yet, the navy-strapped new United States could only stand by helplessly as marauding French and English navies routinely stopped and pilfered our vessels, impounding their crews, confiscating their cargoes, even seizing them

outright. In response, in 1812 the United States declared war on Great Britain.

But this was a time when Britannia ruled the waves. Really ruled them.

So, this bit of bravado struck them as somewhat comical. After all, though they possessed plenty of “Yankee ingenuity,” the Americans apparently hadn’t very much else. In the end, it proved enough — by equipping private armed vessels with letters of marque the fledgling nation turned them, essentially, into licensed pirates. Its gain was twofold; a small navy sprang into being where none before had existed (seizing even one well-laden enemy merchantman could mean staggering profits) and, anyway, everybody was doing it,

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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com and that made it legal. Soon fast little ships, hard-hitting and hard-to-hit, began sliding off the ways in shipyards all over the region. Not surprisingly, American privateers quickly mastered the art of buccaneering as pertains to “subdue, seize and take” enemy prizes.

Enter the Dash. Built in Freeport in 1813, this fast topsail schooner was designed to evade the fearsome but ponderous enemy warships that bottled up American shipping in ports from Canada to the Caribbean. She successfully dodged from Portland on several turnaround runs to the West Indies to exchange local products like timber for rum and coffee.

A typical manifest of the day might also include such offbeat items as the following —“Also picked up in ye Indies, 120 pieces Camblets; 100 Pieces Assorted Cambleteens; 20 Pieces blue Duffles; 50 Pieces Calamancoco; 300 Pieces each, Shendsoy and Humhums; 50 gallon Cyttles (kettles); 20 Warm’g

Pannes; 10 pr. Smke’g Tonges; 1 Sett of Awles; and 50 Reames prime Foolscap”—proving just how valuable these privateers were in supplying the local demand for goods of all kinds.

The Dash contained some artful surprises. Built on a composite “Hawk’s nest” model, her hull was pierced for sixteen guns, although ten were only wooden “Quaker” guns painted in a way to fool the enemy! Outfitted later as a brig with a “ringtail sail” to increase her speed, she was said to “schoon” through the water. Easily outrunning pursuing cruisers, Dash was refitted with a pair of heavy cannons and a deadly pivot gun enabling her seasoned complement of 60 hands to engage in offensive action. And she did so with specular results. On her second voyage, for instance, she recaptured an American sloop previously taken by the British and a merchantman filled with what turned out to be a most profitable cargo of rum. On returning to port, the Dash

crossed paths with a British schooner that wisely turned tail and fled. Other prizes fell to the audacious craft until, by the fall of 1814, she had racked up an impressive fifteen ships taken without suffering damage or injury.

Then tragedy struck. Following a layover in 1815, the Dash returned to sea beside the new privateer schooner Champlain. In a speedy race for bragging rights — the Dash was pulling away — they encountered an unexpected heavy squall. The Champlain hove to, the Dash did not; she was heard from no more. Most probably she foundered on the treacherous shoals of Georges Bank with all hands perished.

That legendary once-lucky ship (her record was never equaled during the entire war) had now become known as a vessel of death.

Since then, near the Harpswell area of Casco Bay, glimpses of a shimmery weed-draped ship with no one aboard that looms disturbingly against the (cont. on page 26)

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(cont. from page 25) backdrop of a darkening sky have long been reported. Many have observed it; some have chased it. But always the phantom vanishes.

The Dash, once so elusive to enemy warships, now forever haunts the environs round Lookout Point, Bailey Island, Orr’s Island, and Potts Point.

More ominously, some claim to have fallen foul of the belief that to sight this stricken ship — let alone pursue it — means that a calamitous event will shortly overtake a member of the family. Namely, someone, somewhere, is going to die.

Beware! There seems some justification back of this yarn. Sailing in the waters of Casco Bay near Harpswell there lies a beckoning but deadly specter that just might prove hazardous to your family’s well being.

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The Bailey Island ferry, ca. 1910. Item # 25568 from the collections of the Maine Historical Society and www.VintageMaineImages.com

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The Blacksmith’s Henry Repeating rifle made its appearance in 1860

by Charles Francis

T

he Henry repeating rifle made its appearance in 1860. Made by the New Haven Arms Co. in Connecticut, the Henry should have been — could have been — the gun that brought a speedy end to the War Between the States. This didn’t happen, though. It didn’t happen because the U.S. government purchased but a mere 1,731 Henrys.

What made the Henry special was that it was a fifteen-shot rifle. The U.S. government bought single shot Springfields almost exclusively. Some Union soldiers felt that if they had a Henry, they stood a better chance of surviving. Therefore, they bought one out of their own pocket. There are

stories about the prowess of the Henry in battle. One such tale tells of Henry-equipped Union riflemen saving the day at the Battle of Allatoona Pass in Georgia. According to a Major Ludlow a number of Henry “shooters sprang to the parapet and poured out such a multiplied, rapid and deadly fire, that no man could stand in front of it and no serious effort was made thereafter to take the fort.”

Even though the Henry was made in New England, not many New Englanders or easterners in general had one. Most were in the hands of Union soldiers from places like Illinois. One exception was the First District of Co-

lumbia Calvary. There were Maine men here. One was an officer by the name of Thomas W. Hyde. Hyde would go on to become a general. He was from Bath.

He went on to found and serve as President of the Bath Iron Works.

In 1864 Thomas Hyde was a staff officer of the Army of the Potomac’s VI Army Corps. One May day Hyde, then a Lieutenant Colonel, found himself leading a couple of hundred cavalrymen. The force was fired on by a small Confederate patrol. Hyde’s men responded. Some had Henrys. Their response was a fusillade. The Confederates faded away. Hyde, however, couldn’t get his men to stop firing (cont. on page 28)

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(cont. from page 27) back until their guns were empty. The noise so alerted Major General Horatio Wright that he brought forward an infantry brigade in support. AII Hyde’s men succeeded in doing was killing two Confederate horses. Hyde later observed it had been “quite lesson in the improper use of rapid-firing arms.”

Thomas Hyde would have a fascination with rapid fire arms in general, and Henry repeating rifles in all his life.

This fascination could have been the reason (or at least one of the reasons) he invited the 21st Maine Infantry Regiment Association to tour the Bath Iron Works in August of 1898. It was rumored one of the 21st, a blacksmith, had brought home a Henry.

There are a couple of Maine families with relatives who were in the 21st that believe they have connections to the soldier who brought back one of the fabled Henrys from the Civil War. That soldier’s name is Potter. Potter was a blacksmith. The thing is, though, there

Henry Rifle were two men named Potter in the 21st.

One was George Potter from Whitefield; the other was Adoniram Potter from Topsham.

Except for the time he was in the 21st, George Potter lived most of his life in Whitefield. He worked as a blacksmith in Whitefield and he is buried in Whitefield. He had a lot of relatives and extended family in the White field and Jefferson area and does to this day. Adonirum Potter lived in Bath before seeing duty in the 21st. He moved to Medford, Massachusetts shortly after being mustered out. That’s where he died and is buried and where he worked most of his life as a blacksmith.

George Potter was descended from Solomon and Jane (Leighton) Potter of Whitefield. The Whitefield Potters

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were connected to the Russells. Adoniram Potter was descended from Robert and Hannah (Reed) Potter of Topsham.

Most likely George and Adoniran Potter were related. The Whitefield Potters cane from the Topsham area. This really isn’t important, though. The point is that as blacksmiths both George and Adoniram Potter would have been capable of working on Henry rifles. And Henrys needed improvements. For one thing, Henrys didn’t have wooden stocks. This meant that they heated up during firing. A blacksmith would have been quite capable of rectifying this situation with a different stock.

The 21st Maine Infantry, George and Adoniram Potter’s regiment, mustered in for nine months’ service on October 14, 1862 at Augusta. It was assigned duty

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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com in New York until January 1863. In February it moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There it was attached to 1st Brigade, 1st Division, 19th Army Corps, Dept. of the Gulf. In May and June, it took part in the Siege of port Hudson.

There is an excellent history of the 21st Maine: Historic record and complete biographic roster of the 21st Me. Vols.: With reunion records of the 21st Maine Regiment Association by Joseph T. Woodward. Woodward was a 21st Maine veteran and a life-long member of the Regiment Association. Woodward’s work runs for over 750 pages.

It is highly detailed. Anyone with connections to the 21st would find it a valuable resource.

Thanks to the work of Joseph Woodward we know that George Potter was a color sergeant. We know that Adoniram Potter was a private. We know Ado iram fought in the Siege of Port Hudson. We know that George Potter did not. The latter was incapacitated, ill.

Patent drawing of the Henry rifle (public domain image)

Woodward does not mention, however, if either Potter acquired a Henry rifle.

The 2lst mustered out August 25, 1863. Intriguingly, it seems George Potter did not muster out with the rest of the 21st. At least that is what David Chase of Whitefield says. According to Chase, George Potter mustered out on October 13, almost two months after the rest of the 21st. Woodward makes no mention of this, though he mentions George Potter’s activities as a member of Regimental Association. It is a mystery that may never be solved. There is

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evidence that both George Potter and Adoniram Potter returned from the war with guns. A picture in the Medford Historical Society shows Adoniram with a group of other veterans at parade rest. Adoniram appears to have what can only be a single-shot Springfield.

One of George Potter’s Russell cousins swore that George had an old repeating rifle. The tradition that it was a Henry was passed on in the Russell family.

This brings us back to General Thomas Hyde’s invitation to members of the 21st Maine Regiment Association to visit Bath Iron Works. It seems the 21st stood the General up. According to Joseph Woodward, most Association members were too busy with Regiment Association business to respond to the General’s invitation. One of those so engaged was George Potter.

No mention is made of Adoniram Potter attending this meeting in 1898.

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The 1866 Wiscasset Fire Business district and wharves destroyed

by Brian Swartz

A

lmost five years to the day before Chicago went up in flames, Wiscasset suffered its version of fiery urban renewal.

Residents of Wiscasset went to bed on Wednesday, October 10, 1866 without giving much (if any) thought to the latent fire hazards found in the wooden buildings clustered along the Sheepscot River and the village’s adjacent streets.

By dawn, much of the village lay in ruins.

According to Boston Journal correspondent Toby Candor (possibly a pseudonym), the fire broke out about 3 a.m., Thursday, “in an old three-story wooden building known as the Taylor Block on Water Street.” The basement

contained three stores; “several families” lived in apartments on the upper floors, he indicated.

While a Windy City newspaper reporter falsely pinned the cause of the 1871 Great Chicago Fire on Mrs. O’Leary’s kicking cow, no one ever knew “how the fire originated” in Wiscasset, Candor wrote Thursday amidst the town’s glowing embers. Witnesses concurred that the fire did start on the northwest corner of the Taylor Block, on the top floor; a northeasterly wind caught the initial flames and swept them along the dry exterior siding.

“The entire structure was immediately enveloped in flames,” Candor wrote.

Possibly carried by the wind, “the extreme heat” (more likely sparks) from the Taylor Block flames ignited “another building of the same description” across Water Street, he noted. By now the general alarm had sounded across Wiscasset; volunteer firefighters rushed the town’s two hand-operated fire engines to the scene, and the spreading fire attracted many onlookers.

Unrolling their hoses over the river bank, firefighters suddenly realized their bad luck. Like many Maine towns, Wiscasset lacked a reliable municipal water supply in the post-Civil War years; with buildings burning merrily nearby, firefighters had planned to pump water from the Sheepscot River (cont. on page 32)

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(cont. from page 30) — but the tide was out.

Long before the firefighters could couple together enough hose to reach the receded river, the fire “soon got under such headway as to be uncontrollable,” Candor reported.

Flames snapping and crackling, the fire “swept along, carrying through the air large embers, which fired buildings beyond the Custom House at a distance of at least fifty rods (825 feet),” he scribbled.

By Chicago standards, the fire was not that large; by Wiscasset and Lincoln County standards, the blaze was a disastrous conflagration that, at its height, consumed “some twelve acres,” Candor said. Buildings caught “on fire at various points at the same time,” and individual fires merged into “one sea of flame.”

Awed onlookers clustered safely upwind from the fire; eyewitnesses talking to Candor on Thursday morning

admitted “the spectacle was a mesmerizing one.” They had watched firefighters and volunteers attack the fire’s perimeter; although the affected acreage revealed the inability of firefighters to battle the fire directly, their “strenuous efforts” confined the blaze “to its present limits” and prevented a disaster.

“Nearly the whole village would have been laid in ashes,” Candor believed.

As “the firemen and citizens worked nobly in saving property and quenching the fire,” people who lived in the burning buildings removed as much furniture as they could. About 30 displaced families needed shelter elsewhere

by Thursday night; the poor families among them “saved nothing of their effects,” Candor noted.

Despite the opportunities that the fire presented looters, “there was but very little thieving, to the credit” of Wiscasset, he said.

Rushing to assist their Wiscasset colleagues were the men and equipment of “Fire Company No. 1 of Bath,” summoned “by a special messenger,” he reported. Taking a few hours to travel roughly the same stretch of Route 1 that motorists can drive in 10-15 minutes today, the Bath firefighters “arrived on the ground at about 7 o’clock” Thursday morning.

Its fuel supply exhausted, the blaze died down after 2½ hours, dawn found hot spots spitting dark smoke into the atmosphere. Wide-eyed bystanders explored the debris and expressed their shock at how fast and how much their town had changed.

Before the War of 1812, Wiscasset had been “one of the wealthiest and most important commercial places” along the Maine coast, Candor said.

But “this beautiful seaport” was no more, not with some “two-thirds of the business portion, including wharves

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and shipyards” flattened by the fire.

It had chosen its targets willy nilly, consuming “all the buildings on both sides of Water street, excepting four buildings on either side next to Main street,” Candor reported. Flames took out all the “dwelling houses excepting two on the eastern side of Middle street” and destroyed “all the buildings on that part of Fore street southerly of Main street and Middle street.”

Officials figured that between 50 and 60 buildings were lost. Valued at $8,000 (a princely sum in 1866), the brick-built Custom House had collapsed as flames ate its interior. Gone was the Wiscasset House, valued at $4,000.

Three prominent local businessmen — Arnold Greenleaf, Alexander Johnston, and William Lennox — and Boston businessman Minot Tyrrell lost their “large warehouses,” according to Candor.

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A schooner and two yachts moored at local wharves suffered significant damage; workers saved a ship being loaded with hay “at Johnston’s wharf,” but that vessel suffered damage, too, Candor said.

He reported only four casualties, two of them serious; a falling chimney literally flattened Thomas Crowell, leaving him with “injuries … considered dangerous,” and Edward Hubbard suffered bad burns on his face.

The fire’s accumulative damage varied between $90,000 and $150,000, depending on who did the estimating.

Candor thoroughly investigated whose property had suffered what dollar-value damage before filing his report later Thursday by telegram; of all the buildings burned, insurance coverage amounted to “not over thirty-five thousand dollars,” he reported.

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The Augusta State House Magnificent new capital building rebuilt in 1910

by Brian Swartz

F

ed up with the “fire trap” condition of the original State House, the members of the 74th Maine Legislature voted on March 16, 1909 to appoint a commission and appropriate $350,000 over the next two years to either enlarge the existing State Capitol or build “a suitable State Office Building adjacent thereto.”

Identified as “Chapter 156,” that law resulted in the magnificent domed State House that dominates State Street in Augusta to this day.

After legislators voted in the 1820s to move the state capital from Portland to Augusta, architect Charles Bullfinch designed a domed State House, for which a fitting ceremony took

place when the cornerstone was laid on Weston Hill on July 4, 1829. Completed in late 1831, the two-story, granite-faced, and cupola-capped building measured 136 feet from north to south.

According to the 1911-published Report of Commission on the Enlargement of the State House, the original building “was, in its interior, of wooden construction,” except for the granite incorporated into the rotunda’s floor “and the floor of the Department of State with the ceilings over it.”

The State House had served Maine well since the legislators first met there in January 1832, but by early 1909, “the old wooden floors, partitions and roof, were in a bad condition.” State govern-

ment had outgrown the overcrowded building, viewed as “a fire trap of the most pronounced type.”

Chapter 156 became a state law on July 1, 1909; Governor Bert M. Fernald and the commissioners — Charles S. Hichborn of Augusta, Charles W. True of Bangor, Don A.H. Powers of Houlton, and Frank D. True of Portland — first met in the governor’s office 12 days later. The commissioners issued an Invitation to Architects on July 15.

Reviewing sketches sent by several architects, the commissioners unanimously asked Bostonian G. Henri Desmond to submit more detailed plans.

Carefully reviewing these to determine their financial feasibility, the commis-

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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com sion published a Notice to Contractors on September 27.

Events were moving fast, because the state government needed its new home as soon as possible. Forty-eight contractors submitted bids by the October 28 deadline. The contract went to the lowest bidder, the George A. Fuller Company of Boston.

With the contract signed on November 6, work started on Desmond’s architectural plans on November 10, with Sherman P. Troy as the superintendent of construction and J.E. Fuller in overall charge of the project.

Rather than flatten the original State House, the project “involved the practical demolition of the old main building, save its front and rear walls” and “a very considerable rebuilding of the West wing.” Time was tight, and “the appropriation small.”

Construction workers swarmed over Weston Hill, substantially excavated “to build the new” State House “entire-

ly out of ground, so that there are now four full stories.” Workers excavated until they reached solid ledge, upon which rested the building’s center, the supports for the new dome, and the east side of the North Wing.

The rest of the thick foundation walls were “under-laid with a heavy body of concrete.”

Lengthening the State House to 300 feet, workers added 65-by-75-foot cross-wings to the North and South wings, installed two “plunger type” elevators, and constructed “two flights of marble stairs” to connect the four floors.

About 14,000 feet of iron conduit hidden “in the floors and walls” concealed the modern wiring, and an electrical contractor installed transformers “in a vault under the North entrance of the West wing.”

Recalling the occasional close calls with fires inside the State House in the past, plans called for everything to be made from fire-proof materials: “steel,

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concrete, and hollow tile.” Gone were the wood floors, replaced on the upper three levels by “white marble with colored marble base and border.” Even the bathrooms sported “terrazzo floors and slate partitions.”

Workers cut tunnels through solid ledge for the duct work and water and sewer lines. A massive fan installed “on the lower floor of the West wing” blew “fresh warm air” to the House and Senate chambers, and the offices and corridors were “supplied with direct heat.”

Into the building went granite from the H.L. Brown Company quarry in Hallowell, plus “hundreds of tons of steel, every piece … calculated to bear six times the strain that can possibly be put upon it.”

Outside, lumberjacks annihilated “the forest which surrounded and hid the old State House,” the commissioners noted. An early painting by Charles Codman shows the State House with

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(cont. from page 35) only a few small shade trees growing nearby; a late 19th-century photograph taken from the west reveals “the forest” to which the Report of Commission referred.

In the end, $350,000 bought Maine an outstanding State House, with every dollar of its construction closely watched by the commissioners. “The great new dome” rose “to a height of 185 feet above the lower or first floor.”

The statue of Wisdom, “a draped female figure” with its “right upstretched arm” holding a pine bough shaped like a torch, rose almost 15 feet above the copper-covered dome.

Temporarily relocated elsewhere, the various state departments, the state museum and library, and the House and Senate swiftly moved into their assigned rooms inside the “new” building. The House was 70 percent larger, the Senate 60 percent larger.

On December 30, 1910, the commissioners reported to the Legislature

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And looking to the future, the commissioners described the Maine State House as “a building that will stand while the ages roll; and be, we believe, a source of pride to all our people.”

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Montville’s Ebenezer Knowlton Minister would rather preach than govern

by Brian Swartz

S

o strong was his desire to serve God, that when offered the choice, Rev. Ebenezer Knowlton decided that he would rather preach than govern.

Born in early December 1815 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, Knowlton hailed from a ministerial line that included his father, Ebenezer, and grandfather, David. Born in Pittsfield in 1782, the elder Ebenezer Knowlton “was converted” and baptized “… under his father’s preaching” during a religious revival that occurred in September 1799, reports the Free Baptist cyclopaedia.

The Rev. David Knowlton pastored at a Free Will Baptist church and welcomed Ebenezer’s decision to follow in his ministerial footsteps; after his 1805

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ordination, the 23-year-old Ebenezer “soon took the church which his father’s failing health compelled him to relinquish.”

His career initially focused on New Hampshire, but in 1828 he moved his family to South Montville, Maine. Several years later the younger Ebenezer attended private schools in China and Waterville and became a teacher.

He also became a Christian “and united with the [Free Will Baptist] church in Montville.” Residents evidently viewed him as a wise man; they elected him as a Democrat to the Maine Legislature in 1844 and returned him to the House of Representatives again in 1846 and 1848. Legislators named him Speaker of the House in 1846 on “the

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day that he decided to preach the gospel” rather than remain an educator.

Preaching “his first sermon at Hallowell” on August 9, 1846, Ebenezer Knowlton studied for the ministry until his ordination in mid-December 1848, only 11 months before his father died.

Now the only Rev. Knowlton living in South Montville, Ebenezer “went far and near to solemnize marriages, attend funerals and devote himself to the work of the ministry and to work for the Maine State Seminary,” reports the Free Baptist cyclopaedia.

Established by Protestant abolitionists, the Maine State Seminary in predominantly Catholic Lewiston would evolve into Bates College, which Ebenezer Knowlton would serve for a

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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com few years as a trustee. He would hold a similar position at Colby College in Waterville, but for all his involvement with higher learning, Knowlton would focus his life on ministering at Montville’s Free Will Baptist churches (there may have been four circa 1840-1850).

Urban church congregations in Auburn, Augusta, Boston, New York City, and Portland sought him as pastor, but he declined the multiple requests.

Then in 1854, an Opposition Party convention in Maine nominated Knowlton to run for a seat in the 34th Congress. “He informed the convention … that if elected, he should go to Congress as a Christian minister devoted to the interests of humanity,” reports the Free Baptist cyclopaedia. If elected, Knowlton would let “no allegiance to any clique or party in any way … interfere with a strict adherence to freedom, county, and God.” Sworn into office on March 4, 1855, Knowlton served one term in

Washington, D.C. before returning to Montville. Even political responsibilities did not deter his ministerial duties; already an ardent abolitionist, Knowlton “preached the gospel” at African-American churches in the District of Columbia and averaged at least one sermon every two Sundays during his 24 months away from Maine.

He left office on March 3, 1857 and returned home as a Republican.

Knowlton set politics aside until 1869, when “there was a general desire among the Republicans of Maine that he should be their candidate for governor.” Friends and political allies pressured Knowlton to accept the nomination, and he initially considered doing so because, as governor, he could influence the temperance battle then brewing in Maine.

According to the Free Baptist cyclopaedia, Rev. Ebenezer Knowlton “had all the mental and moral qualities that go to make up the real statesman, such

as ability, strength, foresight, decision, honesty, integrity, love of humanity, and fear of God.” Despite the political and personal pressure to run for office, Knowlton finally “declined to do so” because “as a minister of Christ, he was holding the highest office on earth.”

Writing to “a leading religious politician” that year, Knowlton explained that “you urge me to be Governor to enforce prohibition. I know rum-selling is a crime and grog-shops are a nuisance.

A radical law with front teeth and grinders should be kept on the statute book and be lived up to.

“But a correct moral sentiment among the people is the only means to secure this end,” Knowlton wrote.

“This moral sentiment grows only out of the gospel. So, do let me alone, that what there is left of me may be devoted to the appropriate work of my profession.

“I would rather see one young man (cont. on page 40)

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(cont. from page 39) in my congregation soundly converted to Christ than to have any office in the gift of man,” Knowlton wrote while dismissing his last opportunity to rejoin the political realm. With that one sentence, he indicated that he would rather preach than govern, and while Maine history can never reveal how effectively Rev. Ebenezer Knowlton might have served as governor, his parishioners in Montville welcomed his decision to stay there.

Knowlton loved the rolling hills of Montville, and he often fished and swam in a pond not far from his home.

On Thursday, September 10, 1874, only five years after opting to preach rather than govern, he suffered a heart attack and died while bathing in that pond.

His funeral attracted religious and political acquaintances from across central Maine, and Bates College endowed the Knowlton Professorship of History and Economics in his memory.

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Boothbay’s Robert Hellens Unsung hero of nuclear power

by Charles Francis

I

n 1971 Brookhaven National Laboratory proudly announced that Dr. Robert Hellens was one of five winners of the E. O. Lawrence Award for that year. Each of the five winners received a gold medal, a citation and $5000.

Today Brookhaven falls under the umbrella of the Department of Energy. Originally its governing agency was the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Those who know anything of Brookhaven generally associate it with nuclear energy. The association relates back to the original mandate of the AEC and the development of atomic power. Broodhaven’s motto is “Passion

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for discovery.” The words definitely apply to Robert Hellens.

Dr. Hellens’ E. O. Lawrence Award cited a number of his contributions to his chosen field of endeavor. These contributions included pioneer work in the field of light water reactor physics, work in reactor statics, work on light water moderated power reactors and naval reactors. The award emphasized that Hellens contributed greatly to the understanding and improvement of design procedures for light water reactors.

It is too bad that Dr. Hellens’ E. O. Lawrence Award did not go into some detail as to the exact nature of some of Hellens’ work, especially his work on

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naval reactors. Naming one of those reactors would catch a good many eyes.

Robert Hellens passed away in 2008.

Most Maine newspapers mentioned his passing. Part of the reason for this is that Hellens was a nuclear physicist and there were never that many nuclear physicists with Maine connections.

That wasn’t enough, though, for the commentary on Hellens’ death. Most Maine newspapers mentioned that Hellens helped design the reactor for the United States Navy’s first nuclear-powered submarine. Oddly, most papers calling attention to this fact failed to mention the name of the submarine. It was the Nautilus. This point aside for

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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com the moment, the other reason Maine newspapers carried Robert Hellens passing had to do with the fact that he was a resident of Boothbay Harbor.

Nuclear power has a controversial history. Without going into the specifics of the controversy suffice it to say that if one were so inclined, they could find all sorts of commentary damning its use and development. One might also find commentary alluding to the fact that those who were and are involved in the nuclear power industry are little better than devils. A close look at Robert Hellens’ involvement with nuclear power would show that he was not one of the latter. I cite a few points from Hellens’ biographical information to back this up.

Robert Hellens was a United States delegate to all three of the Atoms-forPeace Conferences in Geneva, Switzerland. Hellens is described as a prudent and cautious man. Those who worked with him emphasize that the safety of operators and the general public was

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always foremost in his reactor designs.

Hellens’ concern with nuclear reactor safety and his contributions to reactor safety are often linked to the Boltzmann Transport Equation.

It is not within the scope of this piece to comment on the intricacies of the Boltzmann Transport Equation.

The equation describes the distribution of particles in a fluid. It relates to how a fluid carries physical quantities such as heat and charge. It relates to thermal conductivity. Robert Hellens worked on pressurized water reactor design. In doing this he became a major contributor to the solving of the Boltzmann Transport Equation, a key component in reactor design in general, and in the design of reactors such as the one that powered the Nautilus.

The development of the Navy’s nuclear power program was just as controversial as the continued development of nuclear power is today. In July 1951 the United States Congress authorized the construction of a nuclear-powered (cont. on page 44)

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(cont. from page 43) submarine for the Navy. It was planned and personally supervised by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the “Father of the Nuclear Navy.” That submarine was, of course, the Nautilus.

The reasoning behind the need for a nuclear-powered submarine has to do with the fact that nuclear power has a crucial advantage in submarine propulsion. It is a zero-emission process that consumes no air.

The Nautilus was powered by the S2W naval reactor. The S2W was a pressurized water reactor produced for the Navy by Westinghouse Electric Corporation and Argonne National Laboratory. The two developed the basic reactor plant design used in the Nautilus. Robert Hellens’ contributions to the reactor were significant.

Following his work with Westinghouse on the Nautilus, Hellens worked at Combustion Engineering and then

at Brookhaven National Laboratory on nuclear power plant design. While at Brookhaven he was the first American to participate in the exchange of scientists between American and British national laboratories, spending two years at the Winfreth Laboratory in England.

Hellens was also a professor in the Nuclear Engineering Department at Columbia University. In addition, he was a fellow of the American Nuclear Society (ANS) and a member of the first ANS delegation to visit and survey the nuclear power program of the People’s Republic of China.

When Robert Hellens left the nuclear power industry, he settled in Boothbay Harbor. There he had time to devote himself to a wide variety of interests, including sailing. One wonders what sorts of thoughts went through the mind of the man who had so much to do with the development of the Nau-

tilus as he sailed towards Monhegan Island or off Southport. Did his imagination come up with the possibility that below his sailboat there just might be a nuclear submarine, one using some of his designs?

The Nautilus was decommissioned in 1980. Today she is a National Historic Landmark in Groton, Connecticut. She set records and she served as a model for today’s nuclear submarine fleet. That she set records and her design records continue to serve a function today has much to do with Robert Hellens.

Robert Hellens died of Wegener’s disease at age eighty-two. One of his last requests was that contributions at the time of his passing be made to Heart-to-Heart Health Services at St. Andrew’s Village in Boothbay Harbor.

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The Sinking Of The Royal Tar And the tragic life of a circus elephant

by Charles Francis

M

ongul the elephant jumped into the ocean from a burning ship and swam for his life. If that sounds a bit odd, it’s more of an oddity that he was able to do so.

Mongul spent most of his life in shackles. It’s more than likely Mongul still wore some iron when he jumped. Its weight would have worn him down as he swam.

Mongul jumped from the Royal Tar. The loss of the Royal Tar is one of Maine’s most famous marine disasters.

This isn’t the story of the Royal Tar, though. It’s the story of Mongul and to a lesser extent the other animals that made up the circus menagerie of which

Mongul was a part. It’s not as good a story as an animal fable with a moral is, because it’s one of abuse and neglect.

Mongul would have found swimming difficult not just because he wore iron, he had also been deliberately underfed to keep him as manageable as possible.

The earliest reference I have come across relating to Mongul and the sinking of the Royal Tar is the Bangor Commercial of October 31, 1836. The Commercial gives the date of the disaster as October 24. It gives Isle au Haut as the nearest place name of reference.

According to the above-mentioned piece, the Royal Tar, a side-wheel steamer, was en route from St. John,

New Brunswick to Portland. The vessel had been in Bangor. She is described as carrying “a caravan of animals and ninety-two passengers.” The report says thirty passengers and crew drowned and two burned to death. An elephant and six horses jumped overboard. The elephant is said to have reached land.

The fire started when the Royal Tar was at anchor. The anchor was raised with hopes of running her ashore.

Other points in the Commercial include a “revenue cutter came from Castine to offer assistance” and “all property being lost.” Total loss was estimated at $260,000. The Royal Tar’s captain, Thomas Reed, is said to have garnered (cont. on page 48)

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(cont. from page 47) “great sympathy” for his efforts to save passengers. The article concludes with the statement that “There were several cases of individual heroism, that of the captain in particular, and several instances of contemptible meanness and cowardice.”

The Bangor Commercial article implies but does not state that Mongul the elephant swam to Isle of Haut. There are sources that say some of his bones or other remains such as teeth were found on Widow Island and on Brimstone Island. Widow Island is to the east of the Fox Island Thoroughfare separating Vinalhaven and North Haven. Brimstone Island is in the outer reaches of Isle au Haut Bay, not far from Saddleback Ridge Light. There is also a Little Brimstone.

The sinking of the Royal Tar has been written about on numerous occasions. There are books on the disaster.

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Few writers have taken Mongul as a subject, exceptions being artist and illustrator P. John Burden with the young people’s work Mongul an Me and poet Richard Outram with Mongul Recollected. Burden’s art work is very good, but one reviewer has termed the accompanying text “sentimental.” Backing up the sentimental designation is the Burden illustration showing Mongul on a rocky shoreline gazing out to sea with a new-found human friend leaning on his left front leg. In the opinion of this writer Outram’s approach is by far the more realistic. In fact, Mongul Recollected is best described as significant.

One critic has stated the work “delineates with startling clarity man’s betrayal of beast.”

Mongul was part of the circus menagerie managed by the Fuller family: Henry, Andrew, and Charles Fuller.

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as manager. The Fullers are listed as surviving the Royal Tar disaster in the New Brunswick Royal Gazette of November 2, 1836. The Gazette provided a partial listing of other Royal Tar passengers and crew and whether they survived. It made no mention of Mongul or other animals.

Of interest is an account by an unnamed source. The unnamed witness has Mongul standing with his forelegs on the rail of the ship. He jumps, landing on a raft below, smashing it and killing two unfortunates.

There is also a fanciful painting of the Royal Tar disaster and Mongul in the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. It shows the elephant, three horses, two black and one white, and several distraught passengers fighting for their lives in heavy seas. The backdrop is the burning Royal Tar. The message of the painting is clear —

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someone released the animals to give them a chance to survive. This brings us to Richard Outram.

Richard Outram’s Mongul Recollected is a recasting of the Noah’s Ark story. It is an inversion of the tale; the animals are not saved.

Richard Outram died in 2005. He was a poet. Mongul Recollected is a book of poetry. Outram recreates the dismal conditions of Mogul’s existence before he plunges into the sea from the Royal Tar. Individual poems of Mogul Recollected are written as single episodes. The episodes present viewpoints: those of animal trainers, the menagerie manager and Mongul himself. The work follows narrative form.

In other words, it is a story and a very readable one.

Richard Outram is not a well-known writer, but then few poets are wellknown. His notoriety or lack thereof

does not mean Outram was not an important figure in the world of letters.

He was. We are not discussing Richard Outram here, though. However, it is necessary to put him in perspective in order to better appreciate Mogul Recollected.

For critic and scholar Alberto Manguel, Richard Outram was the best poet writing in English in 1980s and 1990s. Manguel knew Outram from 1983 until his death. He has said “he was surprised... that a poet of Richard’s magnitude was not celebrated around the world. He describes Outram’s poems as “very serious and complex, and in many cases... [requiring] a lot of time and patience from readers.” “You had to disentangle the references and look up the words, but it was always worthwhile. When you discovered what he meant, the poem built to a different level.” Outram’s treatment of Mongul the

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elephant is clearly of another level. It is otherworldly.

Mongul Recollected resonates. This is so even though it describes events and attitudes of some 200 years in the past. Richard Outram chose a subject that sensitive readers of today can relate to, the subject of animal abuse in general, and circus animals of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Here is a brief summary of a few Richard Outram’s poetic episodes or descriptions. Horses go through rigorous training. As they practice their tricks, trainers kick cans, fire off guns, or tie five-gallon water cans to their tails. If the horse stays focused, the methods make sure that the creature would listen and respond to the trainer.

Animals are routinely beaten into submission with crowbars. Elephants like Mongul spend the greater portion of (cont. on page 50)

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(cont. from page 49) their lives malnourished and in heavy shackles. It is a man verses beast philosophy.

Richard Outram chose to leave Mongul with his carcass floating in the sea. You can find this description in another account of the tragedy. It’s about as far removed from the story of Noah and his Ark as one can get.

I have not chosen to comment on the nature and style of Richard Outram’s poetry in this piece. If you like superb technical poetry you will enjoy Mongul Recollected. I also recommend the work for its narrative quality and sobering subject. Mongul’s world is a world that has yet to be fully dealt with and apprehended.

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Rockland’s Alton H. Blackington

by Kenneth A. Clark

A photo for the ages

F

wife, Grace, Amelia Earhart, and Franklin Roosevelt. Photos of New England farm life, traditional clambakes and quaint parades lived in his large collection alongside negatives of darker urban cityscapes and the nearly-forgotten Native American culture of the Southwest. He wrote in the Foreword of his 1954 book, also called Yankee Yarns, “I covered fires, floods, shipwrecks, and celebrities, always watching for the unusual human-interest angle.”

It’s no surprise, then, that he accepted an invitation to photograph one of the larger family gatherings in Rockland in the summer of 1915. Heman Loring Seavey, Sr. and wife, Deborah Lavina Cates Seavey, were celebrating (cont. on page 52)

or many decades of the twentieth century, New Englanders regarded Rockland’s Alton Blackington as one of the region’s foremost folklorists. From 1933 to 1951 he spun weekly radio broadcasts called Yankee Yarns, sent out by Boston’s WBZ-AM radio, and his best stories were later compiled into two published books. His first career, however, was not as a storyteller, but as a photographer. Blackington grew up in a house on West Meadow Road and graduated from Rockland High School in 1912. After serving in the Navy during World War I he went to work for the Boston Herald, later capturing some of the most famous images of President Calvin Coolidge and his

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(cont. from page 51) their Golden Wedding Anniversary at their home on 36 James Street in Rockland’s “North End.” The couple had been married at Cutler, in Washington County, fifty years earlier and were the proud parents of nineteen children, eleven of whom survived to adulthood.

In 1893 Seavey relocated his family to the hub of Knox County to ply his trade as a master carpenter. For years, he helped construct boats at the Cobb Shipyard at the corner of Atlantic and Mechanic Streets, where today Rockland Marine is located, and later built trestles for the North Marine Railway and the Lime Rock Railroad Company.

Blackington’s job seemed straightforward enough — arrive midway through the gathering of a projected thirty people, arrange them in the backyard into a suitable configuration and capture the moment for the ages.

While a soft gray day would be ideal, a nor’easter would not be. Sure enough,

when a light drizzle increased in intensity, Blackington’s task soon grew in complexity as the group moved indoors. He directed a select number of celebrants into the poorly-lit dining room and positioned them in two rows.

Indoor flash technology — primitive, cumbersome, and dangerous — would have to be utilized. Just twenty-one years old and hoping to advance his fledgling career as a professional photographer, Blackington was in a challenging spot.

The result was a picture for the ages.

The honored couple sat in the front row, middle, but the patriarch, extremely hard of hearing, seemed to ignore the photographer’s cue. The flash-light clearly went off to Blackington’s left, illuminating the period wallpaper and creating wide eyes and a distraction among some of the subjects. Heman L. Seavey, Jr. (back row, far left), was a lineman on the Rockland, Thomaston

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& Camden Street Railroad, a transportation system that at one time provided daily passenger and freight service on twenty-one miles of track from Camden through Rockland out to Warren.

He later retired as an electrician for the Dragon Cement Plant in Thomaston.

Next to him stood Frank Seavey, who spent most of his working career as the foreman at the Gas House on Power House Hill along Route 1 in Glen Cove, a facility that generated the initial electricity for the RT & C Street Railroad.

Will Seavey (back row, fourth from left) served in Company H, First Maine Infantry during the Spanish-American War, also raised his family on James Street in Rockland, and attended Odd Fellows meetings for over fifty years. In the early 1890s, Philena Seavey (back row, far right) met her husband at the Northport Wesleyan Methodist Camp Meeting, where the community of Bayside can now be found. Front row, far

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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com left, sat Mabel Seavey, a staunch member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union who lived to see her 106th year. When she died in 1989, she was, by far, the oldest congregant at the Littlefield Memorial Baptist Church on Waldo Avenue, having joined that faith community 90 years earlier.

July 3, 1915 marked a time of transitions. Alton Blackington captured a classic American moment using some of the latest technology available. Hailing from one of Rockland’s oldest families, he would soon leave to serve his country in The Great War. Heman Loring Seavey had been born at the dawn of telegraphy, rail travel, and photography. He oversaw construction of the final two boats to leave the shipyards of Cutler, before moving to Rockland, where, by 1915, homes were electrified, telephones jangled, and a six-town trolley service connected people as never before. Alton Blackington later

1915 Seavey anniversary photo, author’s collection recorded on film some of the nation’s most iconic people. His work on James Street that July 3 froze in time the image of a family who, in their own small

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Belfast’s Ann Monroe Only a war could draw her from societal obscurity

by Brian Swartz

P

olite society identified Ann Sarah Monroe of Belfast only as her husband’s wife, except for four years during the early 1860s.

Born in Belfast on December 21, 1821 to Alfred and Nancy (Atkinson) Johnson, Ann was the third of at least eight children, of whom two brothers died in infancy. The surviving children grew up in relative affluence; a respected Waldo County attorney, Alfred Sr. owned real estate worth $12,000 (a considerable sum) according to the 1850 census.

The Johnsons even employed household servants.

Moving comfortably in the middle-

and upper-class circles of Belfast as she grew up, Ann met Dr. Nahum Parker Monroe, almost 13 years her senior.

Born in New Hampshire, Nahum had followed Dr. Hollis Monroe (his older brother) to Belfast and established a medical practice there after graduating from the Albany Medical School in 1839.

He married Ann in 1843; they lived with their children (4-year-old Frances and 1-year-old Alfred) next door to Ann’s parents by 1850. Now a practicing surgeon, Monroe developed sufficient income to keep Ann in an accustomed lifestyle; the Monroes’ also had live-in servants.

Ann Monroe lost a new-born son in 1852 and an infant daughter in 1857.

Her pain at such losses is lost to Belfast history, which remembers her as a woman with “an active and cultivated intellect” and “a natural disposition to do good.”

That characteristic brushed against history before the Civil War. Up and down Penobscot bay and river, local lore identifies certain buildings with the Underground Railroad. Hollis Monroe was “reserved” and evidently did not adhere to New England’s brand of boisterous abolitionism.

However, his house at Main and Market streets in Belfast was affiliated (cont. on page 58)

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(cont. from page 57) with the Underground Railroad, according to Belfast Historical Society President Megan Pinette.

A local history indicates that Ann Sarah Monroe “assisted in carrying on the underground railway for aiding fugitive slaves to escape to the North.”

That’s about all that’s known about that time in her life.

Like so many other Maine women of that era, Ann Monroe was almost invisible, identified as “Mrs. N.P. Munroe” in local newspapers. Then came the attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Afterwards Ann emerged from societal obscurity and wrote her own pages in local history.

Patriotic fervor swept Belfast that spring, and local women wondered what roles they could play. Drawn from the cream of local society, women gathered inside the second-floor social hall of Pierce’s Block in Belfast on Saturday, April 27, 1861.

The women talked not long before Ann Monroe offered two resolutions unwavering in their support of the boys. The first resolution created the Ladies’ Volunteer Aid Society, and the second resolution promised that LVAS members would assist the families of local soldiers.

Indicating their trust in Ann, LVAS members appointed her treasurer of a 13-member “Committee of Arrangements.” Its members met at the Monroe home on April 30 to determine what items the LVAS would immediately provide local soldiers.

The women sewed pants, shirts, and handkerchiefs and made traveling cases that were shipped to the 4th Maine Infantry’s camp in Rockland.

In late August 1862, Dr. Nahum Monroe was appointed surgeon of the new 20th Maine Infantry Regiment.

He cared for mangled soldiers during the December battle of Fredericksburg

and wrote detailed letters to Ann. The Republican Journal occasionally published (with permission) extracts from those letters.

Ann left Belfast in late February 1863 to visit her husband at the 20th Maine’s camp in Stafford County in Virginia. Arriving around March 1, she spent more than two weeks touring other Maine regiments.

An official male escort always hovered nearby as Ann met soldiers, talked with respectful officers, surgeons, and hospital stewards, and studied her surroundings. Her eyes missed nothing, her mind registered everything, and her cursive penmanship supplied details to the Ladies’ Volunteer Aid Society members worried about the sanitary conditions of the Union camps and hospitals.

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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com ditions while publishing the names of men killed or disabled by disease; LVAS members speculated about “the sanitary condition here” in Stafford County, Ann admitted.

“After a fortnight spent” in the camps, “I shall … tell you, who are so constantly contributing to the comfort of the sick soldier, be of good cheer, for you have done and are still doing great good,” she noted in a meticulously detailed March 17, 1863 letter.

Ann circulated among the enlisted soldiers because “my heart is with the privates, and I look upon them with great earnestness.” She watched “the boys enter their sports,” heard the resulting “peals of laughter,” and listened to “the many bands of singers who enliven the long evenings.”

Soldiers treated Ann and other women (many officers’ wives visited the camps that winter) with surprising civility; “their gentle, respectful man-

ners to all ladies is truly delightful,” Ann told her LVAS comrades, some with husbands or sons or nephews in the army.

The doctor’s wife particularly wanted to see the hospitals for which the ladies of Belfast had sewn blankets and rolled bandages. “The hospitals I have seen are well arranged, and all comforts the sick could have from home and dear friends, they have here,” Ann observed.

Soon returning to Belfast, Ann resumed her activities with the LVAS. Discharged from the 20th Maine, Nahum Monroe came home in late spring 1863. The Monroes’ moved to Baltimore in 1871; Nahum died there on April 23, 1873.

Ann Monroe died in Baltimore on July 6, 1889.

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The Last Time Was A Charm Politicians “moved” Camden four times in seventy years

by Brian Swartz

F

or a town that has moved nowhere geographically, Camden has moved four times politically — and the last time was a charm.

First settled by James and Elizabeth Richards and their family in early May 1769, Camden initially was part of Lincoln County, which encompassed much of central and eastern Maine. The Pine Tree State was called the District of Maine to set the region off from Massachusetts proper; until the American Revolution decided whether the United States or Great Britain owned Maine as far as the St. Croix River, the small population living east of the Kennebec River made one huge Lincoln County

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The country seat was at Waldoboro, not that far from Camden.

After the British lowered the Union Jack at Castine and sailed away to Halifax, settlers poured into that section of Lincoln County east of Penobscot Bay. To make governance easier, the General Court of Massachusetts (that state’s legislature) carved Hancock County out of Lincoln County in 1789.

When their plantation “moved” to the new county, Camden residents were not happy. The Hancock County seat was at Castine, across Penobscot Bay. Conducting business on the county level was not so easy for Camdenites.

The next year, they petitioned the General Court to change “the Plantation of Cambden” (as spelled in legislative documents) “into a Town by the name of Cambden.”

Bay State legislators were only too happy to grant the request. In a loosely governed plantation, tax revenue might slip through the cracks; a town represented tighter governance and fewer opportunities for scofflaws to avoid paying taxes.

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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com David Cobb, the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and Samuel Phillips, the president of the Massachusetts State Senate, signed the bill approving Camden’s conversion from a plantation to a town on February 17, 1791. The legislation authorized an expansive boundary for the new town; its southern boundary began “at a rock marked A.X. on the seashore at the north side of Owl’s Head Bay at the southeast corner of Thomaston line.”

Everyone knows that Rockport and Rockland separate Camden from Thomaston today. Just what was going on in 1791?

Owl’s Head Bay was later renamed Rockland Harbor; Camden’s southern border is now the southern border of Rockport.

The legislation also directed “Oliver Parker Esqr. of Penobscot … to notify the Inhabitants [of Camden] … to meet

at such time and place as he shall therein appoint” to elect town officers at an “annual meeting in the month of March or April.”

Responding immediately to the General Court’s instructions, Parker wrote the first Camden town warrant on March 12, 1791. Addressed “to Mr. William McGlathry of Cambden in said County of Hancock,” the short warrant scheduled a town meeting to start at 9 a.m., April 4. Parker recognized McGlathry as “one of the Principle Inhabitants of said Town.”

The gathered voters (only men) elected John Harkness as first selectman and town clerk, William Gregory as second selectman, and McGlathery as third selectman. After choosing other municipal officials, voters cast 32 votes for William Lithgow, who was running for Congress.

John Hancock — yes, that John Hancock — garnered 26 votes for gov-

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ernor. Sam Adams received 26 votes for lieutenant governor. At their first town meeting, Camden voters were casting ballots for renowned Americans.

Camdenites kept expressing to the Massachusetts General Court their displeasure at being “moved” to Hancock County. Tired of hearing from the voters living in the shadow of Mount Battie, Boston finally “relocated” Camden (the intended spelling) “back” to Lincoln County.

That situation continued past Maine’s creation as a state in 1820. As more people moved into the nation’s newest free state, the population increased along the western shore of Penobscot Bay; inland towns gained residents, and on July 4, 1827, the Maine Legislature (then meeting in Portland) set off Waldo County from Lincoln County.

Camden went with Waldo County. (cont. on page 64)

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(cont. from page 63) Now local residents had to troop to Belfast to conduct official county business, including registering land deeds and administering justice.

Belfast was at least a palatable choice when compared to Castine, but political agitation along the coast from Camden south increased by mid-century. People living on the east side of Thomaston got their collective wish to govern themselves when the Maine Legislature created East Thomaston in July 1848.

For some reason, the perceived affiliation with Thomaston was not acceptable; East Thomaston became Rockland in 1850.

Meanwhile, the incredibly shrinking Lincoln County kept shrinking.

Once among Maine’s larger counties, Lincoln lost its eastern half when the Maine Legislature created Knox County on April 1, 1860.

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The official action was no April Fool’s Day joke. Augusta also tossed in part of Waldo County to flesh out the county named for Henry Knox, George Washington’s artillery chief.

Camden was among the Waldo County towns added to Knox County. “Moved” for the fourth time in 70 years, Camden was finally “home.”

The county line now separates Camden from Lincolnville in Waldo County.

One more physical change awaited Camden. On February 25, 1891, some 75 percent of the town’s land mass was lost as the town of Rockport was incorporated and split off from Camden.

But at least Camden did not “move” yet again.

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Midcoast Region

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Searsport’s Franklin S. Nickerson He defied his superior to save a good soldier

by Brian Swartz

O

rdered to give a valuable soldier the official “heave, ho” from the 14th Maine Infantry Regiment’s ranks, Searsport attorney Franklin S. Nickerson went insubordinate instead.

History remembers him as “Frank.”

Born in Swanville in the late 1820s to Seth and Polly (Haynes) Nickerson, he was a third-generation Waldo County resident.

After studying law, Nickerson passed the Maine bar and opened a practice in Searsport. He married Augusta Ann Pitcher on December 30, 1849.

The Searsport census of 1850 found the Nickersons living in the house owned by butcher Joshua Black. Frank was 22, Augusta 16, but her youth raised few eyebrows. Ten years later, when Frank was 32 and Augusta was 26, they lived in their own house with 19-year-old Rachael Patterson, evidently a servant.

By 1860 Frank Nickerson was financially comfortable, with real estate worth $3,500 and personal property valued at $5,000, an astounding sum in most of Waldo County. When the

Civil War began, Nickerson could have stayed home and enjoyed his wealth; instead he accepted a commission with the 4th Maine Infantry.

In autumn 1861, Governor Israel Washburn Jr. named Nickerson colonel of the new 14th Maine Infantry Regiment. When Union General Benjamin Butler organized an expedition to capture New Orleans, the 14th Maine sailed from Boston and ultimately arrived in New Orleans after the Navy captured the city in spring 1862.

Diseases sickened and killed many Maine soldiers in Louisiana. Needing replacements unavailable from home, Nickerson ordered a 14th Maine Infantry recruiting shingle hung out in the Big Easy.

Local white Unionists started joining the regiment. Sometime in midJune, “Calvin McRae was enlisted in Co. C, in the usual manner, by the recruiting officer of that Company,” Nickerson wrote Maine state senator B.M. Roberts on February 21, 1863.

Captain George Scott of Co. C picked up at least 44 southern Unionists, including the 24-year-old Calvin

“McRea” (as spelled on the company rolls). He mustered on June 12 with a few other recruits. The fact that some Big Easy recruits soon deserted does not reflect on McRae (Nickerson’s spelling), who stayed with the colors.

Meanwhile, New Orleans businessman B. Bronson discovered in midJune that “my slave, Calvin, a light mulatto,” had “absconded.”

An enigmatic character, the 54-yearold “B. Bronson” recorded in the June 28, 1860 census of “free inhabitants” of the Third Ward of New Orleans worked as a “Trunkmaker.” His personal estate worth only $100, and he lived with his wife, Isabella, and their children Alfred and Ava. By spring 1862 Bronson had moved his business to a “carriage repository” at 74 Carondelet Street in New Orleans.

On Saturday, June 21, “as I was passing Lafayette Square, I found the said slave [Calvin] with a United States uniform on, standing guard just above the Brooks House, on Camp street,” Bronson informed Nickerson on June 23.

Calvin had “enlisted as a United States soldier, assuming to be a white

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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com man,” Bronson complained. “I have the documents to prove him a slave.”

Nickerson raised an eyebrow when Bronson’s “demand for his [McRae’s] surrender” arrived. And rather than deliver the demand himself, Bronson dispatched it via his agent, E.W. Herrick.

Going with Herrick to locate McRae, “I … found him to be a white man—as white as I am,” noted Nickerson. “Therefore, I required the proper proof that he was a slave.”

Bronson’s ownership papers stated that McRae “was so white that a stranger would not suspect him of being a black man,” Nickerson later informed Senator Roberts.

Most white Northerners believed southern slaves universally had dark pigmentation. Generations of ill-use of women slaves by white men had bred lighter shades of slavery, however, and terms like “mulatto” and “yellow” described such skin tones, especially in laissez-faire New Orleans.

Many Union boys were realizing that the South’s antiquated slavery laws cast a wide miscegenetic net. In late autumn 1862, Corporal John A. Dicker of Orono and Co. F, 12th Maine Infantry watched the black men joining the colored regiments then forming in New Orleans.

Escaping blacks “are coming in here every day in squads of from ten to thirty at a time,” Dicker said, noticing the

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diverse epidermal hues ranging from deep black to skin as light as that of most Mainers.

“Some of them (blacks) are as white as I am, and could walk the streets of Orono, and you would not suppose they were negroes for a moment,” Dicker said. “If they fail” to qualify as Caucasian, “it will not be for the want of white blood in their veins.”

Dithering and dallying, Frank Nickerson delayed releasing McRae to Bronson, who soon appealed to Ben Butler. On July 7 he dashed off a terse order concerning McRae. “You will forthwith discharge him” to Bronson, Butler informed Nickerson.

That order “was not obeyed,” Nickerson told Senator Roberts months later. The 14th Maine went upriver to fight at Baton Rouge in August 1862, and “Calvin did not return.

“He still serves with us as a soldier and distinguished himself at Baton Rouge and is one of the best soldiers in the 14th Regiment,” Nickerson reported. “I say without fear of contradiction, that he [McRae] is one of the best drilled, and the best soldier in every respect, in the Regiment.

“There is not a man who knows him who would not forcibly resist the attempt to take him out,” Nickerson stated. “This is but one instance of negro soldiers.”

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Calvin McRae served capably with the 14th Maine until he was killed in action at Port Hudson, Louisiana on July 1, 1863.

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Midcoast Region

68

Mary Claire Fuller Silent screen actress wows the good people of Searsport

by Brian Swartz

T

er took her physical attributes and acting skills to Brooklyn-based Vitagraph Studios. The aspiring film company specialized in action plays and comedies all “shot” with one reel of film; these short films, called “photo-plays,” were all the rage in American theaters.

Recognizing Fuller’s acting abilities and sex appeal, the Vitagraph producers cast her in different roles. In 1910 she signed on with the Edison Kinetoscope Company; in early July 1913 that studio sent Fuller and a film crew to Searsport to “work daily on the scenarios of several photo-plays requiring outdoor scenes,” the Bangor Daily News reported on Saturday, July 26.

By then Fuller had performed in more than 500 Edison films, many of

he film star who suddenly appeared in Searsport in July 1913 favorably impressed the town’s startled residents and caused a newspaper reporter to swoon.

Born October 5, 1888 in Washington, D.C., Mary Claire Fuller took to acting as a teenager. She initially worked the stage with the Toledo, Ohio-based Lyceum Stock Company.

Unlike modern community-based theaters, early 20th-century theatrical troupes traveled across the country to appear on multiple stages. Briefly stopping in New York City on one such excursion in 1907, Fuller’s troupe suddenly disintegrated, and the aspiring actress found herself unemployed.

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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com which had run at theaters in Belfast, Bucksport, and Bangor. Her face, wellknown around Penobscot Bay, had appeared often in the recent What Happened to Mary film series.

Conceived in 1912 by The Ladies World editor Charles Dwyer and Edison Kinetoscope Company manager Horace Plimpton, What Happened to Mary featured 12 episodes released monthly to coincide with corresponding chapters in Dwyer’s magazine.

Plimpton wrote the scripts; Charles Brabin directed the films, which led off with the racy title, The Escape from Bondage.

Other titles included Mary in Stageland and The Affair at Raynor’s.

America’s first motion-picture series, the wildly popular What Happened to Mary, was followed by the 1913 sequel, Who Will Marry Mary? Fuller may have been filming one-reel footage for that series while in Searsport.

Besides appearing in the first film version of Frankenstein, Fuller performed in such titles as A Daughter of the Nile, Under Southern Skies, and The Witch Girl. She also wrote the scripts for The Prophecy, When Greek Meets Greek, and other films in which she appeared.

No matter the film, Mary Fuller was “one young lady who has not been heard to complain of ennui” while working “in little old Searsport town,” the star-struck Bangor Daily News reporter gushed. “The most versatile actress in the photo-play world,” Fuller “is just a girl, winsome and unassuming, bubbling over with enthusiasm for her profession.”

Anxious to develop her film career, Fuller worked hard and played many roles that usually involved a pretty young woman in serious trouble, similar to an actress appearing in Lifetime Network movies today. “If she isn’t shot, stabbed or poisoned, doesn’t suicide (on screen, of course), isn’t rescued from a fiery or watery death, doesn’t figure as a villain’s victim or lover’s despair, or some such trifling incident

Mary Claire Fuller, ca. 1914 all before lunch, it must be Sunday or a rainy day,” the reporter described Fuller’s roles.

He alluded to footage shot around Searsport. Fuller “wouldn’t even bat an eyelash” if “booked for a trip in a motor boat that was to blow up out in the bay and it was to her to jump overboard in time,” the reporter believed.

Fuller would “climb a big pine and rob a crow’s nest” or “do the curfew-shallnot-ring-tonight in the village church belfry (sic)”; she would “do just as she was told to do.”

The Edison film crew and Fuller seemed to appear everywhere in Searsport — and probably elsewhere on Upper Penobscot Bay. Members of the film crew (and evidently Fuller) “are delighted with the place and the scenery which offers, close at hand, almost anything desired — sea and shore, forests, mountains, country roads, fields and meadows,” the reporter claimed.

All too soon Mary Fuller and her film crew left Searsport. She remained an A-list actress for the next few years,

but soon her movie career rivaled a shooting star in its flaming glory and brevity.

By 1917 Fuller had lost her appeal as fickle audiences and directors sought younger faces; even a century ago, an actress could be considered “washed up” by her 30th birthday. Having a fling with an opera singer who happened to be married did not endear Fuller to fans, and as the film industry shifted to Hollywood, much younger (and aspiring) actresses discovered the high price of joining a director or producer on the “casting coach.”

Fuller slipped into obscurity after suffering nervous breakdowns some 20 years apart. Admitted to a Washington, D.C. mental hospital in 1947, Fuller lived there until her death on December 9, 1973. She was buried in a pauper’s unmarked grave in the Congressional Cemetery.

But 60 years earlier, Mary Fuller had been the top billing among the folk spending summer 1913 on Penobscot Bay. 414 Lakewood Rd, Rt 201 | Madison ME

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The old high school in Wiscasset, ca. 1900. Item # LB2007.1.102981 from the Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Co. Collection and www.PenobscotMarineMuseum.org

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3D Home Improvements........................................................59 44 Degrees North Architects, LLC...........................................40 A Cut Above..........................................................................64 ACV Enviro............................................................................23 Affordable Well Drilling , Excavation & Forestry .......................15 American Awards Inc. ...........................................................36 Ameriprise Financial ..............................................................36 Andy's Auto Repair & Towing.................................................68 Augusta Civic Center Inn .......................................................37 Augusta Tool Rental...............................................................35 Bailey Island General Store...................................................26 Balmy Days Cruises...............................................................61 Bart Flanagan Tree Service....................................................7 Barter Building Construction..................................................62 Bay Wrap/The Hub Espresso Bar & Coffee House ...................64 Bennett's Gems & Jewelry.....................................................58 Best Western Plus - Augusta................................................37 BFC Marine..............................................................................9 Big House Sound LLC............................................................59 Bisson's Center Store..............................................................8 Black Bear Media Blasting & Construction............................60 Blood's Garage......................................................................58 Bolster Builders, Inc. .............................................................43 Bolster's Rubbish & Recycling...............................................66 Bowens Tavern.......................................................................58 Brillant & Son's Inc. Auto Repair & Restorations........................7 Bryant Stove & Music, Inc.....................................................65 Bucksport Golf Club...............................................................67 Bucksport Motor Inn..............................................................68 Bucksport Regional Health Center........................................59 Busted Knuckle Tires & Repair ..............................................62 C&J Chimney & Stove Service, LLC.....................................4 C&S Market...........................................................................11 Cahill Tire Pros.......................................................................28 Camden Harbor Cruises........................................................53 Cameron's Lobster House.....................................................23 Camp Security Plus Property Management & Construction....39 Cantrell Seafood....................................................................19 Canty Construction................................................................34 Cap 'N Fish's Whale & Watch & Scenic Nature Cruises...........42 Carl M. P. Larrabee Insurance...............................................10 Carter's Citgo ........................................................................68 Cayouette Flooring, Inc. .......................................................63 Cedar Haven Family Campground..............................17,41,60 Cedar Mountain Cupolas.......................................................16 Central Tire Co. Inc. ...............................................................46 China by the Sea...................................................................61 Clark Auto Parts....................................................................41 Classic Harbor Cottages........................................................28 Clayton's Cafe .........................................................................5 Coastal Maintenance Painting...............................................43 Coggins Road Auto................................................................45 Comfort Inn Brunswick..........................................................22 Comfort Inn Augusta .............................................................37 Cook’s Lobster & Ale House .................................................27 Copp Excavating....................................................................18 Cornelia C. Viek, CPA...............................................................7 Cote's Hardware......................................................................6 Cote's Transmission.................................................................6 Creamer & Sons Landwork, Inc. ............................................30 Cribstone Guide & Charter......................................................25 Crosby Center Arts & Events ................................................55 Custom Carvings by Josh Landry..........................................15 Cuzzy's Restaurant................................................................53 D.C. Thomas Logging & Firewood..........................................58 Daffy Taffy Factory & Fudge Factory.....................................42 Dan's Towing..........................................................................56 David Murray Home Repair & Cottage Care........................41 Deb's Bristol Diner.................................................................43 Dews Door Garage Door Services ......................................16 Doherty's North Freeport Store................................................5 Donald E. 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Gray's Homestead Ocean Campground.................................42 Griffins - The Other Place.........................................................64 Grimaldi Concrete Floors & Countertops..............................15 Gulf of Maine Books.................................................................7 Haggett Hill Kennels...............................................................12 Hair Frolicks............................................................................41 Haley Power Services.............................................................59 Hammond Lumber Company..................................................24 Hampton Inn by Hilton - Bath.................................................29 Harbour Towne Inn..................................................................43 Harraseeket Inn......................................................................17 Harraseeket Lunch & Lobster Company................................18 Hartford Construction.............................................................61 Harvest Time Natural Foods....................................................36 Hatch Well Drillers...................................................................61 Hide and Seek Child Care.........................................................5 Indian Trail Antiques...............................................................41 Insulation Systems of Maine, LLC.........................................19 Island Candy Company..........................................................26 Island Teak Company..............................................................31 J&H Marine.............................................................................62 J. Edward Knight & Co. ...........................................................5 Jack's Property Service..........................................................17 JD Canvas..............................................................................32 Jensen's Pharmacy.................................................................51 Jerry's Hardware.....................................................................67 Jess's Market..........................................................................50 JMH Excavation......................................................................16 John's Handmade Ice Cream Factory....................................54 JW Awning Co. .......................................................................6 K.V. 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Excavation..................................................38 Ladd's Plumbing.....................................................................34 Lake Pemaquid Campground................................................39 Lakeview Lumber Co. ...........................................................12 Lincoln County Historical Society..............................................9 Linda's Home Care Planning & Staffing ..................................6 Lively Lady .............................................................................53 Macomber, Farr & Whitten Insurance .....................................12 Mac's True Value.....................................................................65 Maine Art Gallery....................................................................10 Maine Dept. of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife ............................17 Maine Forest Service.............................................................54 Maine Fuels............................................................................60 Maine Historical Society............................................................4 Maine Instrument Flight...........................................................34 Maine Lighthouse Museum.....................................................50 Maine Lobster Festival...........................................................50 Maine Lobstermen’s Association ......................................46,60 Maine Maritime Museum........................................................28 Maine Pellet Sales LLC ...........................................................6 Maine State Music Theatre.....................................................21 Maine State Prison Showroom Outlet.....................................47 Maine Veterinary Medical Center............................................14 Maine-ly Pawn Antiques, Furniture & More.............................40 Mainely Pottery.......................................................................65 Mama D's Café.......................................................................42 Marsh River Electrical LLC.......................................................8 Masters Machine Co. ............................................................44 McNaughton Bros. 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Glidden Auto Paint & Body Specialists...........................46 Ralph's Café...........................................................................58 Rapid Ralph & Son Inc. .........................................................15 Raymond's Barber Shop..........................................................8 Red's Automotive...................................................................60 Red's Eats..............................................................................30 Regional Rubbish Removal, Inc. ...........................................40 Relax Inn...................................................................................8 Reunion Station .....................................................................61 Richard's Restaurant..............................................................23 RidgeRock..........................................................................64 Riverfront Barbeque & Grille / The Gin Mill.............................35 Robert's Auto Center................................................................6 Rocky Ridge Motel..................................................................60 Rocky's Ace Hardware...........................................................27 Rocky's Stove Shop...............................................................35 Rolfe's Well Drilling Co. ..........................................................36 Safe Harbour Property Management.....................................25 Sail Actress.com ....................................................................57 Salt Cod Café.........................................................................25 Santana Excavation/Foundations ..........................................64 Sarah J. Dunckel Financial Advisor .......................................36 Scarborough's Collision..........................................................39 Scrummy Afters Novelty Candy Shoppe.................................35 Shawn Thyng Paving...............................................................56 Shaw's Fish & Lobster Wharf Restaurant...............................44 Sheepscot Links Golf Course.................................................30 Ship 2 Shore Store.................................................................25 Skip Cahill Tire Pros...............................................................41 Southern Midcoast Chamber of Commerce...........................20 Spinney's Restaurant.............................................................29 Sprague & Curtis Real Estate..................................................36 Sprague's Lobster..................................................................32 St. Pierre Concrete Services..................................................20 Steve Brann Building .............................................................18 Strong-Hancock Funeral Home..............................................40 Thai Garden Restaurant.........................................................19 The Anchor ............................................................................45 The Birches Resort....................................................back cover The Cabin Brick Oven Pizza......................................................9 The Chimney Doctor.................................................................8 The Craignair Inn & Restaurant...............................................47 The Driftwood Inn...................................................................26 The East Wind Inn...................................................................48 The Gin Mill ............................................................................35 The Good Table......................................................................56 The Great Impasta..................................................................22 The Harbor Room..................................................................44 The Miss Wiscasset Diner.......................................................30 The Seagull Shop Restaurant & Gift Shop .............................45 The Tidewater.........................................................................51 Thomaston Grocery................................................................46 Tom Finn Shoe Repair.............................................................11 Townline Video Plus................................................................49 Treats of Maine ......................................................................30 Tri-State Staffing.....................................................................11 Turtle Rock Farm....................................................................20 Two Hogs Winery....................................................................38 Union Area Chamber of Commerce.......................................63 Unique Spiral Stairs................................................................53 United Bikers of Maine, Inc. .....................................................11 Vancil Vision Care...................................................................66 Vasvary Electric......................................................................10 Vinalhaven Smoked Lobster...................................................51 VintageMaineImages.com ........................................................4 Viola Ventures........................................................................16 Warren Auto Barn...................................................................48 Waterfront Flea Market.............................................................7 Water's Edge Carpentry..........................................................51 Weaver's Roadside Variety.....................................................65 Whitecap Builders...................................................................56 Wilson's Drug Store..................................................................9 Windsor Chairmakers.............................................................54 Windsor Preventive Dental Care............................................39 Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington Railway Museum............30 Yankee Lanes.........................................................................23 Yankee Traveler Motel ............................................................49 Yankee Yardworks..................................................................18 Yarmouth Chamber of Commerce............................................5 Yarmouth Clam Festival ..........................................................5

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