Maine Memory Network

Corinthian Hall at 906 Washington Street, later the Universalist Church, began as the home of the Bath Elocution Society in about 1840. Used as a clubhouse and Bath’s first theater, it also had a bowling alley in the basement and a dance hall on the first floor.

The Universalists raised funds for their first church building in 1837-1838 and moved to Front Street in 1839. Oliver Moses, attracted to the church’s desirable downtown location, purchased that building in 1860, tore it down, and constructed a business block, long known as the Church Block. The Universalists bought Corinthian Hall that year and had architect Francis Fasset remodel it for use as a church. The façade may have remained similar to the theater, or he may have added a false front with recessed entrance, colonnaded porch, and arched windows. Memorial stained glass windows were added in 1892.

The Universalists disbanded in 1946, and the Lincoln Lodge of Odd Fellows became the new owner. In 1962, the Bath Alliance Church purchased the building, razed it, and built a smaller brick church on the site, using five of the memorial windows in the new building. The memorial windows were auctioned off when the Beth Israel Congregation took over that building to create the Minnie Brown Center.

Swett’s Drug Store, at the corner of Front and Elm Streets, was in a block with other busy stores and a theater in downtown Bath in 1910.

Lewis B. Swett opened this drug store in 1891 and later a branch at Centre and Washington Street. It sold wholesale and retail drugs, over-the-counter remedies, sodas, cigars, and other merchandise, offering some products with a 25 to 33 percent discount. Swett liberally used the store's exterior walls to advertise his goods.

In the years after the drug store closed in 1924, a bakery, camera store, variety store, and other drug stores occupied the building. In 2021 Dot’s Ice Cream Parlor occupied the corner.

The Singer Sewing Machine store, at 162 Front Street, was next door to Swett's, with tobacco, confections, and furniture stores beyond. The Columbia Theater, easily identifiable from a distance by its coming events posters, was on the second floor above 176 to 186 Front Street. It burned in February 1907 but reopened between 1912 and 1919. In 1919 it advertised “Special Photoplay Productions, Local Entertainments.” For a time it coexisted with the Columbia Hotel across the street.

This large home at 12 Front Street, built in 1830 for Captain Davis and Betsy Hatch and their 17 children, later became a hotel. Captain Hatch was a Bath businessman with a boot and shoe business that lasted for 100 years.

In the 1890s the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.) occupied the building for several years before H. G. Berry opened the Berry House hotel in 1899.

Charles A. Hooker purchased the hotel in 1903 from Berry and renamed it Harbor View Hotel. He sold it in 1905, the year a fire occurred during a blizzard and destroyed the upper floor and roof, which were subsequently repaired. Shortly before 1914, it was operating as the Eagle Hotel.

The Eastern Illustrating and Publishing Company vehicle was parked in front of the hotel around 1910. A photographer was probably taking pictures for postcards.

A Bath Daily Times article reported the hotel “is admirably situated, has 22 cozy bedrooms, provided with every comfort. The house is well heated in winter, has electric lights and bells, toilets and baths, smoking and reading rooms, attractive parlors, etc.” with a pleasing wide veranda. At the time rates for most of the rooms were 75 cents for a single and $1.00 for a double.

Frederick E. Drake, Jr., president of James B. Drake & Sons insurance firm, later purchased the building and tore it down.

Commercial Street was a very busy area of Bath in 1910. Because the Maine Central Railroad track ran to the end of the street, manufacturers and businesses could efficiently load and unload goods for delivery and shipment.

Two men stand outside the Torrey Roller Bushing Works, manufacturers of Kennebec gasoline engines, brass and iron castings, machinery name plates, roller bushings, gipsy winches, port lights, and other marine hardware. Initially a foundry and machine shop, about 1904 it began manufacturing two-cycle marine engines, which were popular with fishermen. It stopped building engines in 1914 to focus on products for World War I but made marine fittings and fixtures until 1962.

The adjacent brick building was the Hartleb and Cheltra Bottling Plant, in operation from the 1890s until early in the 20th century. It housed the Crystal Spring Bottling Company, which produced ginger ale, mineral water, Uno beer, and other beverages.

The automobile garage beyond as well as the other wood building from 52 to 62 Commercial Street have been torn down.

In the early 1900s, Pinson’s Boat Yard in Brunswick looked across the New Meadows at the New Meadows Inn in Bath. Built in 1898, the Inn was nearly adjacent to the Maine Central Railroad Bridge and Electric Car Bridge. It was about half a mile upriver from the more recent New Meadows Inn on State Road, which as of 2018 operated as a daycare center.

The original Inn was a popular dining destination. Shore dinners cost 50 cents at a time when clams were 15 cents a bushel and lobsters were 50 cents per hundred. Meals at the Inn were legendary, and on Sundays, it was not unusual for the establishment to serve as many as 800 patrons.

The New Meadows Inn was easy to reach on foot, by horse and buggy, or by train. Maine Central Railroad trains stopped at a flag station, which was established soon after the Inn opened. Diners took the electric car from Bath for 5 cents; in summer the cars ran every half hour. Private boats tied up at the Inn’s float, and excursion boats from Portland stopped there.

This well-known dining establishment burned down in March 1937.

The original Bath City Hospital, located on Winship (later Park) Street, was the former home of James and Vesta Jones. A corporation of Bath citizens purchased the house for $4500 on November 25, 1908, and remodeled it as an eight-bed hospital. It quickly became apparent that more beds were needed.

The large brick building, added in 1910, created a 36-bed hospital. In 1922 the unused third floor was adapted for maternity purposes, expanding the hospital to 50 beds.

In September 1927 a “Loyalty Fund Drive” for the hospital began, with a goal of $20,000. An active house-to-house canvass raised $27,145. The hospital was renamed Bath Memorial Hospital in 1934.

Daily rates in 1942 were: General Ward, $3.50; Private Room, $5 to $7; Semi-Private Room, $5. Operating Room charges were $12 for major surgery and $2.50 to $7 for minor surgery. The Delivery Room charge was $10.

A fund drive in 1960 raised $900,000 to expand to a 100-bed hospital. In 1991 the Bath and Brunswick hospitals merged into the Mid-Coast Hospital. In 2001 the hospital moved to a new campus at Cook's Corners, which in 2009 expanded with a new emergency department and additional medical/surgical inpatient beds.

Rosedale Farm was a multi-generation home and business in West Bath. In March 1894 John T. Rose purchased a 25-acre farm on Foster’s Point Road, where he raised poultry and cattle. Later, his son Henry Rose started a store at the house selling butter, cream, eggs, berries, vegetables, gas, and ice. He named the property Rosedale Farm.

Between 1913 and 1915 Fred Rose, Henry’s son, built a barn and outbuilding and added to the house. By 1926 the store was flourishing, selling farm products, groceries, confectioneries, soda, ice, and wood as well as Tydol gasoline and Veedol oils.

By 1953 the farm and store featured Guernsey milk and cream, and the Roses were representatives of the Eastern States Farmers Exchange, selling grain feed and farm supplies. Fred Rose retired from farming in the mid-1950s and moved his grain business to the former Trott Brothers Grain Store on Commercial Street in Bath.

The farmhouse burned to the ground in January 1965. The West Bath Town Hall was later built on the site.

Alonzo Fisher, Jr. built a small store in 1909 on six acres of land his father had purchased on the New Meadows River. Business was so good, by both land and sea, that a year later he built a much larger store that featured penny candy, freshly baked bread, groceries, an ice cream parlor that he kept cold with 150 tons of ice he harvested each year, and, of course, Moxie. In 1912 his store had a public telephone.

His business was slowing by 1920 as automobile ownership was increasing, and shoppers had the option of traveling to Bath or Brunswick. In 1926 Alonzo sold the store and land and moved to Bath, where he had other businesses, including a bicycle shop. As the Depression began, he and his family moved to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where they worked as caretakers on an estate.

A storm destroyed the store at Foster’s Point in 1979.

This view of Georgetown looks across Robinhood Cove where the East and West Branches of the Sasanoa River split. The East Branch was in the foreground. Heading north, the road, which was later numbered Route 127, first crossed the East Branch on a bridge, and a second bridge carried it across the West Branch in Georgetown Center.

The view shows the site of the former Berry Shipyard on the West Branch. Indian Point Road parallels the West Branch.

Feldspar, a mineral that is the primary ingredient in pottery glaze, was mined extensively in Georgetown and the vicinity. Quarry workers took a break in the Consolidated (Goldings) quarry on the Bay Point Road in the early 1930s. Feldspar was loaded on barges at a tidal wharf and shipped to Trenton, New Jersey, or loaded on ships in Bath, Maine, for longer voyages.

Consolidated continues to own the still-active quarry as of 2018. However, mineral searches are for tourmaline, aquamarine, and other semi-precious gems. Feldspar is an overburden or mining waste, which is used for many driveways in Georgetown.

This one-room school, which still stands as of 2018 on the Bay Point Road, in Georgetown, was built in 1820 under the supervision of “General” Joseph Berry, a local shipbuilder.

Local lore says Irish stonemasons built it, and it has no windows on the road side of the building to prevent distraction of the students by traffic on the road.

The Route 127 bridge across the West Branch of Robinhood Cove was new in the 1930s.

Cars were parked outside the store built in 1891 by Clem Todd. Known as Todd’s store, it was also the Georgetown post office, and Clem Todd was postmaster. Will Todd later ran the store.

As of 2018, boat builder Wil Ansel owned the former store building has his workshop in it.

The Second Baptist Church was originally built in 1822 at Robinhood. Around 1900 the Female Benevolent Society of Five Islands purchased the church building and had it moved to Five Islands. A belfry was added in 1914. It is an active church as of 2021.

The building in the left foreground is the Five Islands Schoolhouse.

By the early 1900s, Five Islands was a vacation destination, with summer people and locals enough to support two ice cream establishments on the hill above the wharf. A windmill stood behind L. H. Rowe’s Ice Cream Parlor. In the early 1900s, this establishment was also named Gibson’s Ice Cream Parlor.

The adjacent building catered to one’s sweet tooth too, selling ice cream and fresh pastry as well as milk and cream, undoubtedly from a local farm. “Island Spa,” a term used at other Maine summer resorts, perhaps referred to a place that sold goods considered summer indulgences. Some of the store’s “dry fancy goods” were souvenirs purchased by summer visitors. A popular Maine item in souvenir shops was Kennebec Spruce Gum, processed in Five Islands for over 60 years by Charles MacMahan, Frank MacMahan, and A. F. Carr.

Arthur Helson ran the Five Islands Ice Cream Parlor in the 1940s and Fred Fox in the 1950s.

The Otter Cliff House was one of the many boarding houses, inns, and hotels that opened as tourists came to explore the beauty of the Maine coast.

Many visitors stayed for the whole summer, arriving by steamboat and then settling into peaceful summer days of relaxation and local excursions.

Bina Hartford Marr, from Quincy, Massachusetts, owned the Otter Cliff House, a small hotel built in 1890. It had 24 guest rooms and provided three meals a day, served by local women. The top floor was a dance hall. Otter Cliff House operated until 1944.

Bina Hartford Marr’s extended family lived in the hotel during World War II. Fire destroyed the building in 1949.

The central white building housed the Five Islands’ general store and post office in 1910. It was conveniently close to the landing where goods and mail arrived.

The two-story building with the ramp was called the “Love Nest,” despite its history of industrial uses, which included canning and sewing. At one time, however, many young couples starting their lives together rented the top floor.

Hendricks Head Light on the Southport shore was located across the water on the left.

People waited to meet passengers or board the steamboat “Southport” as it docked at Five Islands wharf sometime between 1911 and 1920. In an era before vacation travel by automobile was common, most summer visitors arrived by boat. Across the water was Malden Island, a summer colony.

“Southport” was one of the smaller steamers operated by the Eastern Steamship Company, initially with Capt. Nahum Brewer at the helm. This vessel and its sister ship “Westport,” each 125 feet long and powered by a 450 hp engine, were built in Boston in 1911 to service the Kennebec and Sheepscot Rivers. In 1920 they were transferred to the Rockland-Blue Hill route. In the mid-1930s “Southport” went to Virginia and became a car ferry on the Potomac River in Virginia. It last saw service in the 1950s as an excursion boat in New York City

In the early 1900s the C.C. Pease Store, located at what was called the Crossroads at Phipps-burg Center, was also the post office.

The road ran very close to the store and continued south to Small Point Road, later referred to as the Main Road or Route 209. This road was later relocated. The road east went to Popham through Parker Head.

William V. Percy was the first owner of the store. Later owners were Captain C.W. Locke, the firm of Parker & Percy, and local blacksmith George C. (Cola) Pease, who also worked on building Fort Baldwin in Popham. Well-known local musician Walter Snipe bought the store and the Pease home on Higgins Lane after Mr. Pease’s death.

There have been many successive owners. Although it has had many changes and additions, the store is still in operation in 2018 and owned by the Bisson family.

This scene showed the old and the new in Phippsburg Center about 1915, with an ox cart in the foreground and an automobile by the house. At the time, agriculture was still part of the community. The automobile belonged to the Eastern Illustrating and Publishing Company, and a photographer was probably taking postcard shots nearby.

The building with a chimney, the first house on the Parker Head Road to Popham, was the parsonage for the Phippsburg Congregational Church in the early 1900s. In 2018 it was a home with a business in the barn.

The building in the background was the 1881 Town Hall with an outbuilding. It was the place for Selectmen’s meetings and town meetings, dances, suppers, and other events. In 1958 the town offices and town meetings moved to the new Phippsburg Elementary School. The old building was sold. In 1988, 30 years after the town offices moved out, the old town hall was given back to the town and moved to a location across from the school. Town offices once again occupied the building, although town meetings continued at the school.

Phippsburg Center's view from the hill behind the early 1900s C. C. Pease Store encompassed the Parker Head Road's buildings.

The first house on the left was once a parsonage for the Phippsburg Congregational Church. The Congregational Church was in the background. The church was built in 1802, but the church community had been active since July 4, 1765. In the center of the photo, at the curve in the road, was the 1859 Center School.

The first house on the right was the former home of Jan and Anda Bijhouwer, whose grandson was farming the property as of 2018. At the far right was a vessel on the ways at the Bowker Shipyard. Near it, surrounded by trees, was the “Spite House,” which was moved by water to Rockport in 1925. A sidewalk starting at the Main Road and probably leading to the Minott shipyard was on the left.

Many of the buildings still stand in 2018. The C. C. Pease store was Bisson’s Store. The former parsonage has been restored as a gift business. The Church was the Center Church. The Phippsburg Historical Society Museum occupied the Center School building.

The Popham Beach Library opened in 1910. The first fundraising events for it took place in 1907. J. Arthur Stevens drew the plans for the shingle building. Master carpenters George and Lyman and stonemason Nathaniel Perkins did most of the construction. Coast Guardsmen Guy Crowley and William Hodgkins brought stone from Stage Island in an old green dory.

Upon completion in 1910 the library had hardwood floors, a main room, children’s room, furnace room, broad veranda, stone fireplace, bookcases on three walls, and carved beams.

In 1933 the Popham Beach Improvement Association assumed responsibility for the library. Donations, especially from the summer visitors and summer fairs, kept the Library in repair.

In 1960, with help from the Maine State Library, the Popham Beach Library became an information center and, in 1961, a working library. Cultural activities such as historical lectures and art shows occur at the library.

This building, one of the oldest in Phippsburg in 1910, was known as the Square House. Built for John Lowell about 1790, it was just south of the site of Fort Augusta and a little to the north of the Aliquippa Hotel. After John Lowell’s son Tallman built the hotel in 1826, the Square House was referred to as the annex or cottage.

Sawn lumber for the Square House came from the early Morse sawmill at North Creek, which was later moved to Winnegance. For many years the house remained in the Lowell family. It was eventually torn down for a new house site.

Fort Augusta was a small stone fort built by Dr. Oliver Noyes to protect the small fishing village called Augusta. The Pejepscot Proprietors established the village at Small Point Harbor in 1716. The 100-square-foot fort was garrisoned from 1718 to 1721 and then abandoned.

Parker Head was on the main road to Popham Beach in the early 1900s. However, its location on the west bank of the Kennebec River meant that travel and commercial activity had long taken place on the water as well. Sawmills and ice harvesting were once active businesses.

The pier pilings were where lumber, ice, cordwood, and granite were loaded on shipping vessels. The Mill Pond, on the right, powered four sawmills with two saws each. All were under one roof until destroyed by fire on a September night in 1867. In 1870 John G. Morse I and a Bath partner purchased the old mill pond and dam for cutting and shipping ice, starting a business that continued until the late 1890s. Ice sold for $1 to $2 a ton, and often 30,000 tons of ice were cut and sold annually.

The first building on the village end of the Mill Pond dam, on the right, was a store owned by W. A. Oliver from 1901 to1906. It later became Harrington’s store. The tower was on the Baptist church. The bell was in remembrance of three people who drowned in the river off Parker Head. In 1972 the church was torn down, with the bell going to the Phippsburg Historical Society.

Parker Head was growing by the mid-1850s. In time there were stores, a church, a post office, sawmills, and an ice harvesting business. In the early 1900s there was also a gas station and telephone exchange.

A fire in 1917 destroyeded several Parker Head businesses and homes. Among them were George Duley’s store and Lizzie Harrington’s boarding house, visible in the center, and Ed Wyman’s home. In the foreground was the Grinlowe house, owned by Percy Young, that burned in the 1930s.

The village of Parker Head in 1889 purchased a piece of fire equipment from the City of
Waterville for $100. It was most likely used in the 1917 fire. In 1928 that equipment
was sold for $25.00. The hand tub fire engine was called Veteran #2.

Popham was a busy village about 1910. The attractive new Popham Beach Library, next to the church, was a welcome addition to the community in 1910. Vessels made frequent stops at the Eastern Steamship Company pier, on the right. The Riverside Hotel, in the center-left, did a brisk business, offering accommodation, meals, activities, and outings for its guests.

With many vessels on the Kennebec River and off the coast, the crew at Hunnewell Beach Lifesaving Station, later the Popham Beach Coast Guard Station, regularly patrolled the beach, stood lookout duty, and were at the ready to provide assistance.

The church facing Atkins Bay is Popham Chapel, built over several years between 1892 and 1896. One of the first marriages there was that of Dr. Adelbert F. Williams and Emma Pearl Stacey in 1899. Dr. Williams delivered over 200 babies in the town of Phippsburg before going overseas in the Medical Corps in World War I. Emma Pearl Stacey was the daughter of John Hutchins Stacey, owner of the Riverside Hotel (formerly the Eureka House).

The Hunnewell’s Beach life saving station was established in 1883 halfway down Riverside Beach. The station became the Popham Beach Coast Guard Station in 1935.

The lifesavers patrolled the beach almost to Morse’s River day and night, no matter what the weather. Someone was always on lookout duty in the tower. Many times the men rowed to the rescue of crew and passengers on vessels in distress. The lifeboat had no motor.

On George Popham Day each year, the station was open for public viewing at high tide. The men gave a presentation and demonstration with the lifeboats, the Lyle life gun, which threw lifelines, and the breeches buoy. A young boy was selected to ride in the breeches buoy.

Area residents were disappointed with the decision to close the Coast Guard Station in 1971. As of 2018 the station has been used as a bed and breakfast inn but remains a landmark for those at sea.

The Eastern Steamship Company built the Popham Beach wharf, also called the State Pier, in the mid-to-late 1800s. It was a gathering place for watching vessels arrive from and depart for
Bath, Portland, or Boston. The vessels carried passengers and cargo for the local stores, farms, and fishermen. Fishing boats also left from this wharf.

At the head of the dock was a little place that sold candy, gum, postcards, and cigarettes. The wharf agent slept in a small room adjoining his office on the pier; he had responsibility for setting out a red lantern on the ends of the wharf to help vessel captains in navigating a safe landing. People on land would blow horns and ring bells, with the arriving or departing steamer responding with two short and a long blast whistles.

“Alf” Perkins, his brother, James M. Perkins, and John H. Stacey built the Eureka House, later the Riverside Hotel, in 1878 for Mr. Peleg O. Vickery. “Alf” was the manager.

The hotel was a short walk along the Kennebec River from Fort Popham, which was constructed in 1861 on the site of a battery dating from the Revolutionary War. Visitors inspected a Civil War-era cannon on the hotel lawn.

The Riverside opened each year in early June and hosted visitors until shortly after Labor Day. An important summer event was the July 4th celebration, which included a fireworks display in the dark in front of the hotel.

Hotel guests went horseback riding. played croquet, enjoyed bonfires, fished, dug for artifacts, and played baseball. They took trips to nearby islands and to communities such as Georgetown, Wiscasset, and Harpswell. From the piazza, visitors viewed many vessels on the Kennebec River, some making daily runs from Popham to Bath.

Timothy Small kept the horses for his mail route in the hotel stable. He made two trips a day between Bath and Popham in the winter and three trips each day in summer.

In 2018 Percy’s Store occupied the site of the Riverside Hotel.

Freeman H. Merritt, a postmaster and contractor from White Plains, New York, bought land in
Sebasco from George W. Lowell and William Beal. Between 1909 and 1912 local craftsmen built several cottages there, including Camp Edgewood. Italian masons from Boston built chimneys and stone fireplaces. Freeman and Jenny Merritt owned and operated the Rock Gardens Inn there.

In 1928 Nathan Cushman bought part of the land and some cottages and developed Sebasco Lodge. Camp Edgewood became the office for Sebasco Lodge and the caretaker’s house, where Gordon and Irene Alden and their children lived from 1945 to 1963.
Bark-covered slab siding was on the outside, with a porch in the middle. Later, employees of the lodge
and resort lived there in the summer.

Sold in 2005, Camp Edgewood was moved to a lot on Round Cove, and a new hotel was built on the original site of that and several other cottages.

The Rock Gardens Inn and Sebasco Lodge, called the Sebasco Harbor Resort in 2018, were still welcoming summer visitors.

In 1908, Freeman H. Merritt, a New York contractor, and his wife, Fanny, bought and developed the area called Horse Island Harbor. They built the Rock Gardens Inn, operated the Club House, and owned a number of cottages. In 1928 they sold part of their property to Nathan A. Cushman but retained the Rock Gardens Inn.

Cushman, who had been in the bakery business in New York, developed a popular modern resort he called Sebasco Lodge and Cottages. It had a swimming pool, tennis court, bowling, and a golf course. Dick, Nathan’s son, and his wife, Ruth, took over running the resort in the 1940s. Over the decades they and subsequent owners made improvements and other changes to the resort, and in 2018 it was the Sebasco Harbor Resort.

In the foreground was Cornelius Creek, first dammed up in 1870 for ice cutting. Often 60 men were cutting ice, which was shipped throughout the world before the days of refrigeration. The Hook and Wyman cemeteries were flooded when the creek was dammed. The Eastern Ice Company built a new boarding house in 1886 so that the men could stay near the ice cutting.

In the background was the William Wallace farmhouse, which later burned, and Merritt Mountain, named for Freeman and Jenny Merritt.

A horse and buggy waited at the Sylvester Store and Small Point Post Office about 1910. The girl on the porch was Wilma Sylvester Roberts. Mr. Sylvester opened the store in January 1878 and served as postmaster for a time. This post office was one of several locations used over the years in the Small Point-Ashdale area. It was between the road and the harbor, opposite the Fletcher House. The Bath-Small Point stagecoach stopped here on its run.

The barn burned many years ago. In 2018, the store was the home of Merle and June (McIntire) Gilliam at the bottom of Saw Mill Hill in Small Point.

Shortly after the Kennebec and Portland Railroad built the “low road” through Richmond in 1851, Dresden Station was built north of Richmond Village. It accommodated Dresden folk ferried across the Kennebec River.

In 1868 the Kennebec Valley Camp Meeting Association (Methodist Episcopal) purchased 50 acres between what is as of 2021 Route 24 and the river for a place to hold annual revival meetings under a large oak grove. Dresden Station was then moved about a mile downriver to better serve the Camp.

The K&P Railroad provided a station attendant for the campground season. The man in the photo likely held that position when this photo was taken about 1910.

A group of young campers posed outside the Richmond Campground Tabernacle, where Methodist Episcopal campground services took place. The 50 feet by 95 feet Tabernacle, built in 1899, replaced a large tent previously used for services. It seated 1000.

In the Campground’s first years, worship was held outdoors at the “main stand,” erected in 1872. It was an outdoor pulpit elevated 10 feet above the ground with staircases ascending both sides. A bell hung from the roof. Interestingly, there was a room in the back under the pulpit used as a jail. Richmond hired a constabulary force to keep the peace.

The Salvation Army, the Maine State Sunday School Association, and the Kennebec Valley Temperance Association also held gatherings in the Tabernacle. Two statewide and one national Temperance gatherings brought the prohibitionist Neal Dow to the Campground.

The roof of the building caved in from snow in the winter of 1943/1944, and the building was torn down. The old boarding house became the campground church.

The small pleasure boats tied up around 1910 at the Richmond Campground boat landing are evidence of the shift to recreational activities at the Methodist Episcopal Campground after 1900.

Across the Kennebec River on the Dresden shore, the Cedar Grove Ice Houses were on the right. Owned by Cochran–Oler Ice Co. of Baltimore, the ice houses were started in 1870 and greatly expanded in 1885. Next to the ice house was the boarding house where laborers, mostly Aroostook County farm boys, stayed for the annual ice harvesting season.

In the middle of the photo was the Eastern Steamship Company wharf and freight house. Here the Boston boat landed in the morning as it made its way upriver to Augusta, stopping again in the afternoon as it headed back south. Many Campground guests arrived by steamship and were then ferried across the river.

Adjacent to the wharf was the large horse stable and a store. All work on the ice required many teams of horses.

Summer campers posed on one of the streets of tidy cottages at the Richmond Campground about 1910.

Between 1868 and 1900 the annual Kennebec Valley Camp Meeting (Methodist Episcopal), lasting four to ten days, drew as many as 5000 people from up to 50 miles away. Most initially stayed in sailcloth or canvas tents with straw and quilts on the ground. However, by 1877 there were 96 private cottages, 46 private tents, and 17 society chapels and tents. The Campground also had a boarding house, store, rooming house, and long stable. Since each town society or church held its own services in addition to the camp-wide gatherings, emotional shouting and loud prayer was heard throughout the campground.

Between 1900 and 1920 the Campground became a flourishing summer colony. Religious activity continued but on a smaller scale. Outdoor recreation became an important part of the experience. Many of the cottages were spruced up and new porches added. A bathhouse and wharf were built on the Kennebec River just below the railroad. The old Augusta chapel was converted into a recreation hall. In 1903 a Women's Improvement Society was formed; it later changed its name to the Pine Tree Club.

Around 1910 the Town Hall had recently relocated to the former First Parish Congregational Church building at the intersection of Elm Street and Green Street. The building was designed by architect Samuel Melcher and constructed for the church in 1837.

As the Town Hall it served as the government center as well as a community center, with dances, plays, and many social activities. The building was destroyed due to an accidental fire in 1963. The steeple bell was salvaged and relocated for permanent display in front of the Town Hall at 100 Main Street.

Samuel Melcher also designed the United Baptist Church, built in 1835 on the corner of Elm and Main Streets in Topsham.

Constructed in 1896, the two-story school building with distinctive Palladian windows at 22 Elm Street housed the Topsham Village School and Grammar School. It was named the John A. Cone School in 1938 in honor of the superintendent of the Topsham and Brunswick School Union who served from 1909 to 1923. Mrs. Augusta Cone was a teacher and principal of the school.

A fire heavily damaged the building in 1940, and it was reconstructed without the cupola. A fire damaged the building again in 1965 and it was deemed unfit for use as a school. After being rebuilt, it operated as the Topsham Municipal Building from 1967 to 2007. The old school has been restored and in 2018 housed apartments for the Highlands Retirement Community.

The well-worn path in the foreground led to the Brick School on Elm Street at the corner of the Riverview Cemetery. The school was later moved to Middlesex Road.

Bridges across the Androscoggin, former riverside industrial areas, and the Barron Farm (later Daggett's Truck Farm) were viewed from Barron Hill. Downriver were Summer Street, the short bridge connecting Main Street to Mill Island, and the lower railroad bridge.

The short iron truss bridge over Granny Hole Stream, built in 1916, was disassembled and in 2018 awaited preservation and reuse on an appropriate site. The Great Flood of 1936 swept away the lower railroad bridge, but it was recovered. It is still in use in 2018, parallel to the Merrymeeting Bridge connecting the Route 196 by-pass and Route 1 in Brunswick.

Flagg’s Brickyard, which made most of the bricks used in the village, was in the area of Summer Street. Nearby was the Golden Pipeline, an area that overflowed in each flood or freshet and deposited logs carried downstream; the logs were then recovered and sold to the paper and pulp mills.

Great Bowdoin Mill Island was viewed from Barron Hill, between Winter and Summer Streets in Topsham.

The two-story tower identified the paper mill, which was later the Pejepscot Paper Company. Built in 1868, the mill on the Androscoggin River was the first pulp paper factory in Maine and arguably the first in America. It first operated as the Topsham Paper Mill. In 1874 it was sold to the Bowdoin Paper Manufacturing Company, which once operated up to ten mills in Maine.

This building was once listed as the most endangered historic structure in Maine. The mill was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 17, 1974. A fire took out the building closest to Main Street; the remaining buildings were restored for mixed-use commercial property.

Visible to the far right was the iron bridge that spanned the Androscoggin River between Topsham and Brunswick from 1877 to 1935. It connected directly through the mill. The road was moved in 1935 with the construction of the Frank J. Wood Bridge.

This building on Elm Street and the small ticket window building in front were at the main entrance to the Topsham Fairgrounds on Elm Street, next to the Purington House.

The first Topsham Fair, initially the Sagadahoc Horticultural and Agricultural Society Fair, was held in 1855.

In the background was the grandstand constructed in 1864, which received the National Register of Historic Places designation in 1992 and as of 2021 is the oldest such structure surviving in the State of Maine.

The building at the entrance was removed in the early 1960s and a new race entrance and tunnel were constructed.

Visible in the foreground was an early water trough that was converted to a flower bed and remained tended by the Topsham Garden Club as of 2021. It was placed at the entrance to the train station, with its twin located by the school at 22 Elm Street.

Before the Carlton Bridge was completed in 1929, anyone wanting to travel between Woolwich and Bath, on the far shore, had to take the ferry across.

The Ferry was the only way for students who attended Morse High School in Bath to get there and for fire trucks from the City of Bath to get to Woolwich in an emergency.

Buildings in the Woolwich area known as Sagadahoc Ferry included boarding houses, a sawmill, and an “Agency for the Bath Hand Laundry.”

The wooden deck areas outside the doors were attempts to keep mud and debris from the gravel road contained and not tracked into the houses.

People, vehicles, and trains all needed to cross the half-mile-wide Kennebec River between Woolwich and Bath. The dock at Sagadahoc Ferry in Woolwich served trains and was located slightly north of the automobile and pedestrian ferry dock.

The Frank O. Moses shipyard in Bath constructed the double-ended side-wheeler “City of Rockland,” used for trains. It was 130 feet long and 50 feet wide over the paddleboards, with a single track amidships on which two passenger coaches or four freight cars could be carried. Only railroad coaches and cars crossed the river on the ferry; engines waited on both sides.

Everything changed in 1909 when the big Maine Central ferry “Ferdinando Gorges,” equipped to handle engines, was built. These vessels had tracks on their deck; train cars were pulled onto the ferry on one side of the river and off onto tracks on the other side.

The completion of the Carlton Bridge in 1927, which included railroad tracks on its lower level, ended the need for these ferries. Since 1927, the former dock location was the site of two different boat yards and in 2018 was the site of a Reed & Reed Company yard.

The "Hockomock” was the first double-ended propeller ferry east of Boston. It was launched on February 19, 1901, from William McDonnell’s Shipyard in Bath. Charles Robinson was the vessel’s master builder. The ferry’s machinery was designed by Charles E. Hyde and installed at Bath Iron Works. She was 94 feet long on deck and 31’4” wide. George Gowell was the engineer.

The ”Hockomock” was a constant source of expense due to fuel bills and poor management. By 1907 the first automobiles began crossing the Kennebec on the ferry. In 1910 it carried 1,961 cars. The State of Maine began supporting operating costs in 1913, but it was not until 1916, when 15,000 cars crossed, that receipts exceeded expenditures.

As the amount of traffic increased, this ferry was joined by a double-ended, paddle-wheeled ferry. Built in New York, it was renamed the “Governor King.” In 1920, the two ferries transported 31,747 passengers, 51,200 cars, and 10,021 horse-drawn vehicles.

By 1926 it was evident that the era of “Ferries across the Kennebec” was coming to an end and a bridge had to be built to keep the traffic moving. With the opening of the Carlton Bridge in 1927, both ferries were sold.

Main Street in Woolwich ran to Sagadahoc Ferry, the location of the Kennebec River ferry, farming, fishing, and commerce. It had stores, a post office, railroad station, one-room school, boarding houses, vehicle repair shops, and other services. People going to Bath left their horses and carriages at the livery stables.

Sagadahoc Ferry was the name of the area of Woolwich adjacent to the ferry landing and encompassing the southern part of the historic Tuessic Neck at the meeting of the Kennebec and Sasanoa Rivers. There were ferry landings on both the east and west sides of the river, but the west side was most active. Prior to the completion of the Carlton Bridge in 1927, it was most likely the busiest place in town.

The completion of the Carlton Bridge meant that almost none of the businesses and services at Sagadahoc Ferry were needed. Private residences replaced them the businesses.

A. B. Thwings store was located in Days Ferry, also known as West Woolwich, on the Kennebec River. It was located at the dock of a ferry that crossed from Bath about a mile by water north of Sagadahoc Ferry.

The store sold some of everything, and from 1887 to 1909 the store housed the West Woolwich branch post office. Thomas Stetson bought the store property in 1826 and in 1830 received a permit from the Maine Legislature to operate a horse-powered ferry.

Days Ferry was a substantial community that included a schoolhouse, church, blacksmith, shipbuilder, ship owners, cobbler, pattern maker, two ice houses, potter, carpenter, and tanner. Across the street from the store was the Robert White Tavern.

The only wooden sidewalk in Woolwich followed the road through the village. Known as the Old Stage Road, the road went on to Wiscasset.