Sprague's Journal of Maine History
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS DDDDSHEflH4D /^.•*/ ^<>.'^^\/ ^«^*^-'/ ^^^'^ -^0^ '^o^ .-y"-^ ^ * *% -•%3!m>^'* .Iv^K^'"^^^ *.^ • » 4 _ .i^»' aP <• -yS* ^ 4' 9^ O «J A\/\Y JUINE JULY WM. W. ROBERTS CO. Statlonetrs cind Olank. BooR ;viant4faotur»i Office Supplies, Filing Cabinets and Card Indexes 233 Middle Street, PORTLAND, MAINE The LESLIE E. JONES Co. Eeyer & Small Office Outfitters Conservative Investment Bonds Typewriters of all Makes Wood St Steel WE OFFER Filing Equipment Municipal, Railroad and Public Utility Issues Specialists in Maine Securities 416-17 EASTERN TRUST BLDG. BANGOR - - - MAINE Augusta Portland Bangor Cbe Materville flDorning Sentinel Goes to press later than any other paper reaching Central Maine. It handles messages by wire up to 3 o'clook in the morning. If you want the latest news, READ THE SENTINEL. $4.00 per year by mail for cash. TDdlatervUIe Sentinel pul^Usbing Company Ximatcrville, /iDaine rEp AVC T n ^^ A V r ^^^ your plans to start your savings account m ft I u I U 4^ n f L with this bank on your very next pay-day. Set aside One Dollar—more if you can spare it—come to the bank and make your first deposit. Small sums are welcome. Put system into your savings. Save a little every week and save that little regularly. Make it an obligation to yourself just as you are duty bound to pay the grocer or the coal man, SAVE FAITHFULLY. The dollars you save now will serve you later on when you will have greater need for them. PISCATAQUIS SAVINGS BANK, Dover, Maine. F. E. GUERNSEY, Pres. W. C. WOODBURY, Treas. J. Putnam Stevens William Money Back If Not Satisfied G. Thomas INSURE WITH Is Your Protection The Mass. Mutual Life Insurance Co. of Springfield, Mass. JOHN T. CLARK & Co. Perfect f ^^^ the home ^'^^ DrntJntiAnI BUSINESS Protection ( for old age CLOTHIERS J. Putnam Stevens Co., Gen'l Agents, 82 Exchange St., Portland, Maine BANGOR, MAINE Ask About Our Monthly Income Policy. We have positive evidence of the reliability of the advertisers on these pages CONTENTS MAINE INLAND SCENERY C'ontributed by Hon. Leroy T. Carleton. CONTENTS PAOE Sir William Phips 3 The Little Towns, poem 19 Documenitary 20 Norway Notes 24 Colonel Arthur Noble 27 Gorham in the Days of the First School Teacher 29 Revolutionary Pensioners in Maine •. 35 Something About Artemus Ward 40 Berlin Voters in 1831 42 Queen Anne's Moose 42 Alassachusetts Governors 44 Foxcraft Academy Students in 1840 45 Proclamiation regarding- Penobscot Indians 47 Sayings of Subscribers 48 Browsings in the Editor's Library 49 Noltes and Fragments 55 YEARS the Insurance Man off Somerset Co. Never a Failure— Never a Law Suit—What more do you want? 52 CHARLES FOLSOM-JONE5, .Skowhegan Maine We have positive evidence of the reliability of the advertisers on these page? ( o ^' o" O . u "" —I i— L. I o V. CO *-i«^J : Sprague's Journal of Maine History Vol. VII MAY JUNE JULY 1919 No. 1 Sir William Phips By John Francis Sprague The title page of the work of Cotton Mather, which is the foun- dation of very much of the early history of New England, is as follows MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA; THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY ^ OF NEW ENGLAND, From its first planting, in the year 1620, unto the year of our Lord 169S IN SEVEN BOOKS By the REVEREND AND LEARNED COTTON MATHER, D.D.F.R.S. And Pastor of the North Church in Boston, Nezv England. The first edition was published in London in the year 1702, in a volume of seven hundred and eighty-eight pages. In 1852 this was republished by Si'as Andrus in Hartford, with a preface and "occa- sional notes by the Reverend Thomas Robbins, D. D." and aeain published by Silas Andrus & Son in 1853. It is a civil and ecclesiastical history of the earliest English settle- ments and plantations in New England, hence it is one of the orig- inal sources for all who desire to study men and events of importance in that period. The author has been accused of credulity and bigotry and such accusations cannot be well denied. He was a fiery and brilliant product of the times in which he lived and wrought; a leader in the days of credulity and bigotry, and yet with all of his prejudices and conceit he was o-ie of the founders of American literature. : 4 SPRAGUE'S JOURNAL OF MAINE HISTORY The "Magnalia" is a curious blending of historical facts, the peculiar sectarian views of the Puritans, citations from the Bible and quotations from Greek and Roman classics and from nearly all the great characters in ancient history. Yet the authenticity of his historical data, when divested of religious exaggerations, has ever been and will doubtless always remain a standard authority. It is almost wholly to this work that one must resort to learn of the life of one of Maine's most famous and worthy sons, for Cotton Mather was the only one of the early writers who wrote fu'.'v regarding him. He had at hand more facts pertaining to him than had anyone else for he and his father. Increase Mather, were his contemporaries. After devoting nearly five hundred words to citing examples of men of fame in the Roman Empire, and other parts of the world who had arisen to great heights from obscurity and small begin- nings, the author introduces Sir William Phips in this manner For my reader now being satisfied that a person being obscure in his original is not always a just prejudice to an expectation of considerable matters from Iiim, I shall now inform him that this our Phips was born February 2, A. D. 1650, at a despicable plantation on the river Kennebec, and almost the furtherest village of the eastern settlements 'of New England.^ His birthplace is on a point of land in the southern part of the town of Woolwich near a little bay. called "Phip's Bay'' and was not in any sense a "despicable" place. He was the son of James Phips and one of the youngest of twenty-six children. James came early to New England from Bristol. England. Mather refers to the family in this wise: His fruitful mother yet living had no less than twenty-six children, whereof twenty-one were sons; but equivalert to them all was William, one of the youngest, whom his father dying left with his mother "keeping sheep in the wildern.ess' until he was eighteen years old. During his boyhood days, struggling with his widowed mother for exist- ence, he was employed much of the time by sheep raisers and writers have frequently alluded to him as "the Shepherd boy of Woolwich"." But few facts are attainable regarding him as a youth except that he desired to learn the trade of ship building and when nineteen C) Alather's Magnalia p. 167. O lb 2. "A Manuscript Account of Pemaquid" by Judge Gro.ton (collections Me. Histo. Soc. vol. 2, p. 239) says: "James Phips, father of Sir William Phips, settled here (Pemaquid) about the year 1638, but afterwards removed to the banks of the Kennebec, in the town of Woolwich." SIR WILLIAM PHIPS years of age he served an apprenticeship of three or four years with a ship carpenter, and became master of the trade. At the age of twentv-two he removed to Boston where he worked in a ship yard for one year. At his home on the coast of Maine he had no school privileges and did not learn to read and write until his first year in Boston, and Mather says: by a laudable deportment, he so recommended himself that he married a young- gentlewoman of good repute, who was the widow of one Mr. John Hall, a well-bred merchant, but the daughter of one Captain Roger Spencer, a person of good fashion .^ He acquired learning by his own efforts and became a student of what books were accessible in the town of Boston. As his mental growth developed, his aspirations took a wider range and his ambition was to build a ship, own it and command it himself. He would frequently tell the gentlewoman his wife that he should be the captain of a King's ship ; that he should come to have command of better men than he was now accounted himself; and that he should be owner of a fair brick house in the Green lane of North Boston.'' Soon after his marriage he entered into what was probably a partnership with some Boston men to build a ship near his birth- place on the Maine coast, Mather saying that he indented with several persons in Boston to build them a ship at Sheeps-coat River, two or three leagues eastward of the Kennebec. Ill fortune was his first experience in this enterprise, for when the vesesl was completed and he was about to load her with lumber the Indians made a murderous assault upon the inhabitants, and to preserve their lives he took them on board and gave them a free passage to Boston.^ He was a doer as well as a dreamer and possessed a bold and ad- venturesome spirit. After arriving at Boston with his load of refugees, he learned from some ship captains in that port of a Spanish wreck on the coast of the Bahamas, and that in it were many valuables and large quantities of gold and silver. Boston friends had faith in him even if having mental reserva- tions about the truth of this "sailor's yarn'' that Phips had told them.