Sebasticook Valley

By Brenda Seekins

Sebasticook Valley, located between the east and west branches of the Sebasticook River in central Maine, consists of several communities. This book showcases the six towns at the valley's center: Hartland, St. Albans, Newport, Pittsfield, Palmyra, and Detroit. The communities share many ties, including the river itself; farming, manufacturing, and families; multiple railroad lines; lakes and ponds that attract summer visitors and sportsmen for hunting and fishing; and religious and military encampments and reunions. Located at the "crossroads of Maine," the valley is familiar to travelers through central Maine or to the northern counties and Canada. The rise and fall of the Sebasticook River over a century has influenced the region's history and landscape, fortifying the Yankee independence and spirit of area residents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Sep 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781439631911

Brenda Seekins

In Sebasticook Valley, author Brenda Seekins highlights an area known internationally for its industry, education, artists, inventors, and adventurers. Seekins has been a reporter for thirty years and is a director with the Sebasticook Valley Chamber of Commerce. In compiling Sebasticook Valley, she has thoughtfully chosen images from valley historical societies and from her own and other private collections.

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Seekins

INTRODUCTION

Long before the English or other white settlers discovered the fields, hills, wetlands, and woodlands of Sebasticook Valley, an area defined by the flow of the east and west branches of the Sebasticook River, Maine’s native tribes were navigating the rivers and lakes, settling seasonally at strategic points to fish and hunt. The people of the dawn land, the Abenaki, are thought to have been among the original inhabitants of the valley, along with their brethren, the Penobscots and other members of the Wabanaki Confederation, who sought the abundance of fish, fowl, and mammals in the valley. The native people were regular travelers in Sebasticook Valley, using it as a meeting place and crossing point between two of Maine’s great river valleys, the Kennebec and the Penobscot. Many white settlers in the first century of Sebasticook Valley’s development would follow these same routes by land and water to find permanent homesites in the area.

Over the past 200 years of civilized development, many discoveries in the Sebasticook region have told the story of earlier native villages and encampments along the shores, but fail to tell us where and who those native peoples’ descendants, if any, might be today.

It wasn’t until after the Revolutionary War that organized settlements appeared in the area that would one day become Detroit, Hartland, Newport, Pittsfield, Palmyra, and St. Albans. Land in neighboring Corinna was also part of the original land grants and purchases.

In 1792, Ephraim Ballard and Samuel Weston were the first surveyors of record in the region, labeling most of the area as 3rd and 2nd Range of townships north of the Waldo Patent. It was another 28 years before the land became part of a state known as Maine. Much of Maine’s population at that time lived along the coast or on the lower reaches of the major rivers. A few rugged souls were pioneering in the Sebasticook Valley region and apparently were not here long enough to lay permanent claim to the land.

Many of the early residents came from settlements to the south and west of the valley to purchase land from the original developers. Dr. John Warren of Revolutionary War fame was one of the earliest landowners, but it was his descendants that eventually moved to the region to oversee Dr. Warren’s investment from a large home on Warren Hill in Palmyra, originally Township No. 5.

South of the Palmyra-Hartland-St. Albans development, General William Shepard and the trustees of Monmouth Academy were selling lots that would later become Detroit and other villages to its south. The early 1800s were a busy era of development for the entire valley.

Newport was designated as Township No. 4 in the third range of townships north of the Waldo Patent, and until 1800 it was only trappers that made their way up the Sebasticook to harvest the natural resources of the region. James Houstin, a single trapper, is recognized as the first Newport settler. Houstin was alone until he was joined in 1807 by Dea. John Ireland, who moved with his family from Bloomfield (now Skowhegan) to live in the region that would be known as North Newport. Ireland’s descendants still reside in the North Newport area.

Early settlers in Hartland and St. Albans, Townships No. 3 and 4 in the range, were emigrants from several New Hampshire communities. These early settlements began in what is now West Hartland and on St. Albans Mountain. It was years later that entrepreneurs took settlements to the lake and river shores to harness waterpower.

In Pittsfield, it was Moses Martin who traveled east with a Norridgewock hunting party and ultimately settled shortly before 1800 on Peltoma Point on the Sebasticook, just south of today’s village and near the confluence of the east and west branches of the river. Other Norridgewock neighbors eventually followed Martin to settle more of the region.

Sebasticook Valley’s location, between the Kennebec and Penobscot valleys and large industrial and governmental sites at Bangor, Waterville, Skowhegan, and Augusta, fostered its early development and continues to spur continued growth today at the crossroads or hub of Maine’s major transportation routes.

Like Maine’s earliest settlers, those who followed were men of vision and industry, women of strength and resolve, and children offering promise for the future growth of the region. Industry and business have waxed and waned throughout the centuries and continue to today.

This book is not intended as an authoritative history of the region, but as a small indication of what has been part of its history, its lifestyles and livelihoods, and how it has changed.

—Brenda J. Thompson Seekins

One

PITTSFIELD

By the time of Pittsfield’s centennial in 1919, Main Street had a thriving business community. The famed Lancey House was newly rebuilt after a devastating fire in 1906. The railroad was long established in the region and located prominently at the foot of Main Street in Pittsfield. The previous century was a busy time in Pittsfield’s early history, beginning in 1800 when George Brown from Norridgewock followed his former neighbor Moses Martin to the area. It was Brown who chose the advantageous spot that would become Pittsfield village. Brown apparently settled at the intersection of Main and Easy Streets, seen in the background of this photo. It was an elevation that could likely have given him a clear view upriver and down on the Sebasticook with the apparently barren landscape of the time. Martin, who came in 1795, settled in pioneering style farther south on the river, making his home on the west branch of the Sebasticook at Peltoma Point long before there were established roads or paths other than those forged by his friends the Norridgewocks, members of the Abenaki nation.

Pittsfield’s grand hotel, the Lancey House, survived 101 years