| only one of many ways they used the rivers. The Abenakis cultivated fields along the Kennebec, moving some of their produce in canoes. Hunting and fishing trips were taken on the river and its tributaries. They communicated with skin drums over long distances along the river from Moosehead to Seguin Island. All of this was a presence the Europeans came upon. There was probably more traffic on these rivers a thousand years ago than today. Two of Maine’s great rivers gained world fame for different, though related reasons. The Kennebec became known for the wooden ships built on its shores. The Penobscot was known for the wood that slipped past its shores on the way to the “lumber capital of the world” at Bangor. The first European settlers landed at the mouth of the Kennebec at Popham in August of 1607. But early on they were squabbling amongst themselves, fighting with the Indians, freezing and nearly starving to death. Half of the 120 returned to England that December, the others the following July. About 15 years later Plymouth Colony settlers from Massachusetts traded furs with Kennebec River Indians shortly after getting a colony-saving supply of fish in 1622 from a fishing outpost on Daramiscove Island, off what is now Boothbay. The Plymouth pilgrims had financed their expedition by borrowing money in London. The bankers charged them 51% interest on this high risk expedition loan. While they considered themselves under a fair amount of pressure to come up with the two hundred pounds a year they owed, the fact that they bought the furs with wampum must have taken the pressure off some minds. Williamson’s History of the State of Maine describes wampum in the following paragraph.
By 1627 the Plymouth Company received from London an exclusive patent to the Kennebec trade. Two shillings of wampum bought one hundred pounds of fur from the Indians. But this seeming cash cow would prove to be more a serpent. The Indians were regularly cheated, a fact which contributed to the largest and most organized effort by the native Americans to oust the Europeans in King Phillip’s War in 1675. In addition, the colony’s fur traders fought amongst themselves. John Alden, the first man to step off the Mayflower, the same John Alden to whom Priscilla said, “Speak for yourself, John,” was prosecuted for a murder on the Kennebec in 1634. In a struggle over furs, while carrying out Alden’s orders, one of his men shot and killed another fur trader. European involvement had got off to a messy start. The Plymouth colony patent was abandoned. Later, when European settlers again came to the Kennebec in the late 1600s they tilled the same fields the Abenaki had tilled for 500 years before them. When they moved themselves and their produce downstream they went around the same obstructions, through the same currents the Abenakis had, the same ones we go around today. Settlers’ farms soon lined the shores. On these farms and in these fields was what was learned from the Abenakis about surviving here. A short list would include snowshoes, storing food in the ground, corn, maple syrup, turkey and trapping. It was learning to fight their wars using camouflage, silently moving through the woods and firing from behind trees that was the most valued in 1776. Not much of anything and nothing heavy was loaded into a wagon in Augusta and dragged to Portland. The few roads were rutted or muddy trails through the woods. Benedict Arnold chose to push a few dozen heavy boats upstream on the Kennebec rather than hike through the woods to Canada in 1776. The river was the way in and out if the interior. With the river at the edge of the fields being the highway to markets and the world, a need to build boats grew alongside the crops. The skills grew as well. To build a boat farmers might borrow a neighbor’s shipbuilding tools and maybe a skilled son who would teach his own sons how to build. As early as 1758, the ship Merry Meeting was built at Topsham. People came from miles around for the launching and banquet. This became a feature of Maine launchings as in no other place. At the end of the 1700s nearly every farm with river frontage had ways where some kind of boat was built. There were 100 ships sent down the Kennebec by 1800. Daily on the river were sailing scows, which were flat-bottomed short-haul boats of about 30 feet, fishing boats, rowboats, sloops and schooners. The busiest stretch of river was between the coast and Augusta. Later in 1884 the Bath newspaper would report that in one month, the in-and-out traffic on the Kennebec was 892 vessels – 755 schooners, 86 steamers, 39 sloops, 7 barks, and 3 brigs. An 1880 copy of the paper, in an item on river traffic, reported a steamer passenger counting 113 vessels between Bath and Augusta in one day. It was here that farmers began building bigger boats, sending sons to captain them with hopes of making the same high profits some of their neighbors were reporting. One common cargo was Kennebec fish and lumber shipped to the West Indies. Lumber bought on the Kennebec for $8/1,000 board feet sold there for $60/1,000. The possibility that a ship may be paid for by its first voyage was the “dot com” windfall of the time. Enough had these great first voyage profits for it to be a motivator, and most made a good return over years. One ship led to another, and some families became professional builders. Shipbuilding affected the economy for miles around. It created a demand for lumber, a range of shipbuilding materials and tools, finance, a labor supply along with everything from food to furniture that shipyard workers and their families needed. Cotton was shipped from the southern states to mills in England in the early 1800s. It has been said that there were more southern mansions in Richmond, Maine than in any southern city six times larger. Richmond had quite a few sea captains and some of them spent time in Mobile and New Orleans loading cotton. They came to like the overhanging porticos and Greek columns of the plantation house and wanted them on their own homes along the Kennebec. The west coast of the U.S. opened in the 1840s, and Maine-built ships were making the trip around the Horn to California. The clipper ship was developed to speed the six-month trip. West coast lumber helped facilitate trade with China which Maine ships carried there, bringing back all kinds of Asian goods. Shipping, traffic and shipbuilding continued to grow on the Kennebec. Bath, bought by Robert Gutch in 1661 for practically nothing from Indian chief Robin Hood, had become the center of the industry. By the 1850s, the peak decade, Maine was building half of all the ships built in America. At the time, Bath was the fifth largest port in the U.S. with 183,000 tons owned and 33,000 tons built annually. Many of these Maine-built ships came down the Kennebec. Strong, economically built and better equipped, they earned a reputation around the world as Kennebec-built ships. With the sudden end of the square rigged clipper ship in the 1857 depression, there began the bigger and bigger schooner era. Many of the big yards that built these great schooners – three-, four-, five- and six-masted – were on the Kennebec. The Civil War in the 1860s interrupted shipping and shipbuilding, but introduced the iron ship with the Monitor and other ironclads. Fifty years later the metal ship was overtaking the wooden schooner and the Bath Iron Works evolved as the leading shipbuilder on the Kennebec. As agriculture and shipbuilding evolved through the 1800s, there were other things going on which would eventually affect life on the river and most people’s perception of it. As more and bigger ships were built, the steamboat began working the rivers in the early 1800s. The steamers carried more cargo and passengers on a predictable schedule. After the Civil War railroads were built in the 1860s, making overland shipping possible. Other than the railroad, overland shipping remained pretty much the way it had been since its last technological leap with invention of the wheel. When paved roads gave the automobile something to move on, it became a credible substitute for the horse and wagon. Ultimately it would replace the river and the railroad as a means of public transportation. The steamboats are gone, most of the railroads are gone, but the river is still there. The same obstacles and currents are there. And you still can’t know what the river is by looking at it through a speeding windshield or a thermopane window.
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