Gardiner

By Danny D. Smith and Earle G. Shettleworth Jr.

Gardiner’s manufacturing and transportation advantages during the first half of the 20th century created one of the strongest local economies in the state. The city seal, adopted in 1849 when Gardiner became a city, flawlessly depicts the characteristics that shaped the community. Featured prominently on the seal is a river with falls to power manufacturing. A vessel represents transportation and trade, while an idealized city in the background reveals prosperous factories and commercial buildings. At the top is a lofty church tower, representative of the many churches in the city. Gardiner features many never-before-published postcards from the collections of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Dec 8, 2008
• ISBN: 9781439621813

Danny D. Smith

Danny D. Smith is chairman of the Special Collections Committee of the Gardiner Library Association and editor of an Edwin Arlington Robinson Web site. As curator of the Yellow House Papers, Smith has become an authority on Julia Ward Howe, Laura E. Richards, and the Gardiner family. Earle G. Shettleworth Jr. has been the director of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission since 1976 and Maine state historian since 2004. In 1996, Smith and Shettleworth were coauthors of Gardiner on the Kennebec, in Arcadia’s Images of America series.

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INTRODUCTION

Like books, postcards contain history and ideas. Some 200 Gardiner postcards, drawn primarily from the collections of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, tell the story of five central-Maine communities on the Kennebec River from the advent of postcards in 1898 to the close of World War II, when high-rise capitalism redefined the economic landscape in the Northeast. Gone are the local industries, the paper mills, the icehouses, and the shoe factories. Gone are the railroads and steamboats. Yet there remains an indelible sense of place because the library, the Gardiner Common, the churches, Cobbossee Stream, and 19th-century buildings and residences define Gardiner as a unique place. At the beginning of the 21st century, the community is reawakening to its cultural heritage, touting the waterfront as a place of recreation and the sites associated with Edwin Arlington Robinson, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, as a major draw for cultural tourism. As this book goes to press, the city is developing a comprehensive plan to link 13 public spaces.

Although the earliest history of this area centers upon two episodes pertaining to a branch of Abenakis known locally as the Cabbassa tribe from which Cobbossee Stream takes its name and the pilgrims of Plymouth Colony who exploited fishing and beaver pelts, the rise of the community that we know today has its roots firmly in the entrepreneurship of Dr. Silvester Gardiner (1707–1786). Shortly before the conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1763, Dr. Gardiner, who had amassed one of the largest fortunes in the American colonies, acquired a one-tenth interest in a land company that owned a million and a half acres on either side of the Kennebec River from Bath to Skowhegan. When the company declared dividends, it was not cash or stock shares, but rather it was subdivisions of land. Dr. Gardiner chose well when he secured one of the Great Lots at the confluence of the Kennebec River with Cobbossee Stream.

Gardinerston, that choice lot as Gardiner was then known, contained some of the best waterpower sites in Maine. The course of the last mile of Cobbossee Stream drops 130 feet where eight dams were built. During the manufacturing phase of this area’s history from the 1760s through the 1960s, a succession of mills formed the basis for the local economy. The earliest businesses to exploit the waterpower were two sawmills, a fulling mill, a potash factory, and a gristmill. The gristmill was the only place within a 50-mile radius where the pioneers could grind their corn. Because Gardinerston was also situated at the head of tide where ocean-going vessels of great draft had to stop, the area became both a manufacturing and transportation center.

In the 19th century, Gardiner’s manufacturing and transportation advantages matured, and it is these economic assets at their zenith that we can study in the postcards published in this book. A network of roads extending into the second and third tiers of lots to either side of the river united the rest of Kennebec County to Gardiner at the same time that railroads formed the ultimate link to water transportation. When businessmen up and down the East Coast discerned the pristine quality of Kennebec River ice, Gardiner and neighboring communities had another international market. Large-scale lumbering at the headwaters of the Kennebec River provided raw materials for several lumber mills, a broom handle mill, and eventually paper mills. On the eve of World War I, the last major industry came to Gardiner: the shoe factories.

This book divides into eight chapters. The first is concerning the downtown, which was described by Henry Richards (1848–1949) as a commercial district where he made shopping trips and neighborly calls.

All the stores in those days were kept by Gardiner men and women, every one of whom had a stake in the town and a position in the social, religious, and philanthropic groups in which the whole heart and soul of the place found expression, not only in manifold good works, but in rivalries and competitions which gave Gardiner the name of a fighting town, though the fights seemed to bind us all closer and closer together, after the dust they raised had settled.

These conditions had changed drastically by the end of Richards’s long life in 1949. Later he described the change that has come over Gardiner and the whole country, as mass production and incipient state capitalism have crowded small, individualistic enterprises off the state.

Chapter 2 describes public buildings and spaces. The philanthropic interests of the Richards family brought cultural and social stability to the community. Through the efforts of Henry and Laura E. Richards, the high school was built in 1920, the hospital established in 1919, the Gardiner Public Library in 1881, and the Gardiner Water District in 1885, along with many other institutions such as the local chapter of the Red Cross and the establishment of a public health nurse. In March 1824, Robert Hallowell Gardiner I (1782–1864), grandson of Dr. Silvester Gardiner and grandfather of Henry Richards, presented Brunswick Square to the people of Gardiner in trust for the convenience of residents, for the ornamenting of the town, and for public walks and parades. The deed of gift mandated that trees be planted and that a neat fence be maintained around it. No buildings were to be constructed on the Gardiner Common as Brunswick Square became known. In a public address, squire Gardiner said that an open space advanced public morality, a concept that we in the 21st century would call civic pride.

Chapter 3 describes the churches lining the common and Church Hill. Church Hill, rising abruptly 125 feet, is aptly named because the spires of the Congregational, Universalist, Episcopal, and Roman Catholic churches answered to the other visible