A Comment about The Maine Spirit Blog

Historians and horse lovers owe a great debt of gratitude to Stephen Thompson for his thorough and fascinating survey of Maine’s tie to the magnificent beast that, in both work and sport, was a principal means of tying this vast state together in the long era before the automobile. Water Village, my history of Waterville, only touches on the horse, most particularly the astonishing creature named Nelson. Thompson’s work reveals the full tale of the impact of these beloved animals in this area, and in celebration of the horse, future generations will be grateful to know a story that otherwise might have been lost in the mists of time. -- Earl Smith, Dean of College, Emeritus, Colby College

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

1802 Documents Associated with the Separation of Waterville, Maine from Winslow, Maine -- Source: The Archives of the State of Massachusetts -- Links to Books with Greater Details

Introduction by Earl Smith
Dean of College Emeritus, Colby College
Author of Water Village: The History of Waterville, Maine

In April of 1771 the English settlement at Teconnet, first called Kingfield Plantation, was incorporated by the General Court of Massachusetts as the fourth town in the District of Maine and re-named it in honor of General John Winslow. Four years later, almost to the day, the first blood of the American Revolution was spilled at the Concord Bridge.

            The town’s only real brush with war came in the fall of 1775, when the central house of the unmanned garrison at Fort Halifax, by then a town hall and tavern, greeted Benedict Arnold’s doomed expedition on its faltering way to Quebec.

            The river place that confounded Arnold’s troops also hindered the governing of the growing town of Winslow. It was difficult to collect taxes and hard to provide teachers and preachers, and in 1791 town fathers petitioned the Commonwealth to be rid of the bothersome west bank place they called Ticonic Village. Although the cross-river land had never been at the center of things (the Indians used it only as a burial ground) townspeople were reluctant to give it up, and the petition was delayed five years while they experimented with alternating town and religious meetings in the Lithgow meetinghouse on the east bank and at the home of Elnathan Sherwin (Sherwin Street, later home of Silas Redington) across the river. It was impossible. Petitioners claimed that “in the spring season, at the annual meetings held in said Town, the Inhabitants thereof living on the opposite side from where the said meeting is to be held are frequently prevented by the particular situation of said River from crossing the same to attend said meeting.”

            In 1801, with 800 of Winslow’s 1250 inhabitants now living west of the river, the ruling court was again asked to cut the town in two. At a special town meeting on December 8, voters adopted a petition that read, in part: “That the now Town of Winslow shall be divided through the middle of the river Kennebeck (sic) as the river usually runs across the width of said Town” and “That part of said Town which lay on the Eastern side of the Kennebeck shall retain the name of Winslow, and the part which lay on the Western side be erected into a town by the name of Waterville.”  On June 23, 1802, the petition was granted, creating the new town and by local decree, a place called West Waterville (Oakland). Waterville became the 138th township in the District of Maine.









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