Authors: J. Anthony Lukas
In the mid-eighteenth century, Maine was largely untamed wilderness, a frontier territory hazardous to the unwary traveler but rich in opportunity for the audacious speculator. Nowhere were peril and promise held in more tantalizing equilibrium than along the mighty Kennebec, which swept 150 miles from the depths of Moosehead Lake to the rocks of Casco Bay. The Indians called it the Snake because its seething waters suggested the movement of a giant serpent beneath the surface. Kennebec winters were cruel and bleak; the Norridgewock Indians and their allies, the French, were determined to expel English settlers. But the river teemed with fish and fur; its banks bore miles of spruce, hemlock, and white pine; the sandy loam produced goodly crops of corn, rye, and flax.
The Kennebec Proprietors numbered some of colonial Massachusetts’ ablest men. John Hancock was one of the company’s principals, John Adams its attorney. Among the proprietors were James Bowdoin, a delegate to the Continental Congress, and James Pitts, who took part in the Boston Tea Party.
The company also included some notable Tories, among them Benjamin Hallowell, Boston’s Commissioner of Customs, and Silvester Gardiner.
This diversity was the company’s hallmark and ultimately the source of its downfall. John Adams once wrote in his journal: “Going to Mr. Pitts’ to meet the Kennebeck Company—Bowdoin, Gardiner, Hallowell and Pitts. There I shall learn Philosophy and Politicks in Perfection from H.—high flying, high church, high state from G.—sedate, cool Moderation from B.—and warm, honest, frank Whiggism from P.”
He was least drawn to Gardiner, who had “a thin Grasshopper voice … an affected Squeak, a meager visage, and an awkward, unnatural complaisance.” Yet, for all that, it was Gardiner who made the company a powerful enterprise which disposed of vast resources, worked its will in the General Court, intrigued with royal governors, and struck marriages of convenience with military and civil authorities.
John North was a striking example of such reciprocity. Though a military man, North doubled as a company surveyor, helping to lay out many new settlements along the lower river. It would have made sense, then, for Gardiner to dispatch John McKechnie to serve an apprenticeship with North at Fort Frederick, initially as teacher to the North children. In 1757, the captain’s command was enlarged to encompass neighboring Fort St. George’s, and John McKechnie was appointed his lieutenant. Three years later, McKechnie asked for the hand of North’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Mary. The captain wasn’t pleased, in part because the suitor was a decade older than his intended bride, but ultimately he gave his consent and on New Year’s Day 1760 performed the ceremony himself.
Family tensions persisted nonetheless, and soon the McKechnies left the fort, settling first at Townsend, later at Bowdoinham. The sixties were a decade of rapid development along the Kennebec, and John McKechnie played no small role in that growth, both as a surveyor for the proprietors and as a warden of their property.
In 1771, McKechnie took his family further up the river, settling in Winslow, a town founded that very year by six Massachusetts men. He and his family took up residence in the “Fort House,” a gabled building within Fort Halifax. The fort was no longer a military installation. With four hundred surrounding acres it had been sold a year before to Silvester Gardiner. McKechnie had apparently been dispatched to Winslow by Gardiner himself, for soon he was functioning as the company’s agent there, selling real estate, making grants to encourage fresh immigration, supervising the company’s tax payments, above all surveying and planning new settlements.
Shrewdly he took advantage of his travels to search out the choicest lots in town. In the winter of 1774, he chose one at the intersection of the Kennebec and Messalonskee Stream. There, beside his log cabin, he built a dam and mills for grinding grain and sawing lumber, enterprises which soon made him a prosperous man. By 1775, only two of the sixty taxpayers in town had more land than McKechnie, only one a larger personal estate. Quickly he assumed
a leading role in town affairs. As early as 1772 he was moderator of the town meeting. Two years later he was elected one of Winslow’s three selectmen.
Like most Maine communities, Winslow was slow to apprehend the crisis brewing between the British Crown and its American subjects, but once the first shots were exchanged at Lexington, the Kennebec Valley was drawn into the hostilities. General Washington saw the Kennebec as a critical thoroughfare to British Quebec. Fearing that troops there might intervene in battles to the south, he decided to strike first. To command the expedition, he chose Colonel Benedict Arnold. On September 19, 1775, Arnold and 1,100 volunteers set sail from Newburyport. Three days later they landed at Gardiner, Maine, where they transferred to flat-bottomed “batteaux” for the journey up the Kennebec. The voyage was an arduous one. At every waterfall they had to empty the boats and carry them, with all their equipment, to clear water. Cold, wet, and exhausted, ravaged by fever, the troops limped into Fort Halifax on September 27.
Arnold had his own surgeon, but the ills besetting his forces were more than one physician could attend and during the expedition’s brief stay in the Winslow area, John McKechnie lent a hand. His diary records some of his cases: “James Conner, with part of his toe cut off with an ax. Thos. Parks, Joshua Warren, Charles Bartlett, dysentery and fever. Joseph Carter, camp fever. Arnold, with a cut in his leg.”
But these fleeting ministrations didn’t establish McKechnie’s revolutionary credentials. Like many colonists born in Scotland, he knew all too well the reach of English power, which left him little faith that the patriotic cause could prevail. Moreover, as an educated man of wealth and social standing, he had many dealings with prominent Tories, notably his sponsor, Silvester Gardiner. For years McKechnie had served as an intermediary between Gardiner and the town, and so long as it served their interest, the townsmen had been pleased to use McKechnie’s influence with the proprietors; but now these connections no longer stood him in good stead. As patriotic fervor swept the Kennebec, bands of settlers roamed the countryside confronting known Tories and their suspected allies, demanding that they swear allegiance to the cause and, if they refused, tarring and feathering them or making them ride the rail. Gardiner was one of the mob’s prime targets. In October 1774, some 150 armed men surrounded his house. Told he had already fled to Boston, they “rushed in, rifled the house, broke open his desk and perused his papers.”
As Gardiner prudently remained behind British lines, agitation in the valley focused on his associates, among them John “Mahogany” Jones, who, like McKechnie, was a surveyor for the proprietors. Also known as “Black Jones,” he was a particularly virulent Tory. In late 1774, the mob demanded that he sign a “solemn league and covenant” pledging to end all commerce with Britain. “Upon which,” according to an eyewitness, “he stripped open his bosom and told them they might stab him to his heart, but nothing should induce him to sign that accursed instrument. They seized him with violence and threw him headlong into the river and then dragged him about till he was torn to pieces.”
All this could scarcely have reassured John McKechnie, who had worked closely with Jones in laying out the territory.
By early 1777, Winslow was ready to proceed against suspected Tories in its midst. In July, acting on instructions from the General Court of Massachusetts, its Committee of Correspondence, Inspection, and Safety paid a call on John McKechnie at his cabin. The committee confronted the doctor with accusations they had received about his relationship with known Tories, and with remarks suggesting a lack of enthusiasm for the patriotic cause. McKechnie heard them out. Then, with characteristic hauteur, he told them, “Gentlemen, if at any time I have said anything you do not understand, I am sorry for it.” With that, he ushered them out the door. No formal charges were ever preferred against him.
Several factors may have helped McKechnie slip the committee’s net. First, while Gardiner belonged to the reviled Church of England, McKechnie shared his neighbors’ Congregational faith. Second, he had made himself a valuable, if not indispensable, participant in Winslow’s affairs. Whether as moderator or selectman, surveyor or agent, physician or miller, he had a thumb in every pot in town. A community of only sixty voters could ill afford to lose a man of his energy. Had he been a defiant loyalist of Gardiner’s stripe, none of this would have saved him; but if he wasn’t a zealous Whig, he was hardly a raging Tory either. The colonists would have called him a “trimmer,” a shrewd opportunist, an entrepeneur alert to the main chance, a confirmed hedger of bets.
For two years, McKechnie remained under a cloud: for the first time since his arrival in Winslow he held no town office. Then he was rehabilitated—from 1779 to 1781 he served twice as moderator, three times as selectman. Those were good years for the McKechnies. The log cabin on the Messalonskee was so crowded—with thirteen children—that they built a new frame house, the first in town. The doctor read widely and studied astronomy until he died in April 1782.
He left a considerable estate—1,250 acres of land, a gristmill, a half interest in a sawmill, two horses, eighteen cattle, a library of forty-two books—the total valued at 1,074 pounds sterling. Even after it was divided among his widow and twelve surviving children, it left enough for everyone to live quite comfortably.
But John McKechnie left another, more durable, legacy. For generations to come, his descendants felt intimately connected to the stirring events of the American Revolution. If the doctor’s own connection to those events was at best ambiguous, such quibbles were largely erased over time. As his leather-bound diary passed from father to son, often to be read aloud at family gatherings, what lingered were McKechnie’s ministrations to Arnold’s troops on the march to Quebec, his leadership of a New England village in the first brave years of the Republic. For more than two centuries—down to Joan Diver in contemporary Boston—the McKechnies would feel they were following in that noble tradition.
John McKechnie’s third-oldest son, Joseph, strengthened his claim on that heritage by marrying Electa Bement, the daughter of a Revolutionary War major. In 1805, they pulled up stakes, settling thirty miles north in the little farming village of Athens. Purchasing eighteen acres on the brow of Chapman’s Ridge, they and their nine children scratched out a modest living from corn, potatoes, and apples. For salt, sugar, candles, and rum, however, they depended on credit from local merchants, and soon McKechnie owed substantial sums to several storekeepers in nearby Norridgewock. By 1817 he was compelled to mortgage his farm for $250. Two years later, the firm of Selden & Fletcher sued him for $126.53 and, when McKechnie was unable to pay, the merchants took possession of his farm. The McKechnies hung on in Athens for another fifteen years, farming land which Electa had acquired from her brother; then in 1833, beset by still more debts, Joseph mortgaged his farm again and moved to Argyle Plantation on the Penobscot.
In a trip of barely fifty-five miles, they had gone from a bucolic farming community to the cutting edge of the Maine frontier. Few settlers had yet found their way to the banks of the Penobscot and those who had were a freewheeling breed disinclined to till the soil for a living. They had recourse instead to that oldest of frontier occupations, lumbering, which by its own logic bred a disrespect for the domestic virtues of more settled communities. Timothy Dwight, who visited Maine in those years, dismissed its lumbermen as a tribe of wastrels given to “prodigality, thoughtlessness of future wants, profaneness, irreligion, immoderate drinking and other ruinous habits.”
Taking hyperbole into account, such was the setting in which the McKechnies now found themselves. Argyle Plantation was a heavily forested tract on the Penobscot fifteen miles north of Bangor. In 1834, Joseph McKechnie purchased a lot on the Bennoch Road, Argyle’s sole “highway.” To either side, the land fell away to swale and bog, covered with spruce, cedar, and white birch. It was there that Joseph and his five sons launched their lumbering operation. Each November when the swamps were frozen, they loaded a sled, hitched up a team of oxen, and set off into the wilderness. Establishing their camp in a likely stand of timber, they spent months felling trees, then hauled them to the edge of a stream. When the ice melted in April, the logs were launched into a network of streams until they reached the Penobscot, where they floated downriver to the sawmills clustered north of Bangor. From spring through fall, the McKechnie men worked the river, sorting the logs with huge pikes called “hookeroons.” To a contemporary observer, watching loggers come home from a season on the Penobscot, they seemed “crisped to a blackness by the sun, baked with heat, bitten by black flies, haggard, gaunt, sore-footed.” Not surprisingly, they sought relief in the grogshops of the river towns or in Bangor’s notorious red-light district, the Devil’s Half-Acre.
This life didn’t suit everyone. One of those who wearied of the river was Joseph McKechnie’s second son, Charles. A colleague once called him “too retiring for the logger’s life, a born farmer if ever I saw one.” In the Maine
woods that wasn’t a compliment. After barely a year on the Penobscot, Charles moved back to the farming belt of Central Maine, settling in the village of Ripley. There he married Elizabeth Hale, daughter of a prominent innkeeper and justice of the peace known as “Squire Hale,” and bought a farm just down the road from the Squire’s homestead.
If Charles McKechnie had been an indifferent logger, he wasn’t much of a farmer either. By 1850 he had 113 acres, but only 25 of them cleared. His livestock holdings were typical for a farm his size: a team of oxen, a horse, two cows, and twelve sheep. But his crops of wheat, corn, oats, potatoes, hay, and butter were well below average.
Charles’s five sons weren’t much drawn to their father’s placid life. Ripley’s stubborn soil would have frustrated even the most avid agriculturists, but the young McKechnies had other reasons for shunning the farm. The aura of bracing peril and boundless opportunity which had attracted their grandfather to the territory had largely dissipated over the years. To many young people, Maine now seemed a somnolent backwater, while the nation’s cities, pulsing with commerce and industry, offered a new challenge.