Buzzy complained he was still tired from the previous two days, so no road trip today. Just around my hometown area. Not much to show as one of our two well known landmarks, the Two-Cent Bridge, is undergoing extensive work. So I took him to Fort Halifax...
Located at the confluence of the Sebasticook and Kennebec Rivers, Fort Halifax was a strategic location for protection from the local Native Americans in the mid-1700's. There had been a been a battle near this area about 20 years before the fort was built. In that battle, a village of the Norridgewock Tribe was burned to the ground and a Jesuit priest, Father Raisle, was killed by the British.
In 1775, Benedict Arnold and his men spent a night at Fort Halifax on their ill-fated journey to try and capture Quebec City during the American Revolution. Originally, the fort had four corner blockhouses, a wooden stockade and barracks. According to some drawings, there was another look-out blockhouse on the hill upstream. All that remains today is one of the blockhouses, and even that isn't completely original. In 1987, the worst flood ever recorded on the Kennebec River (36 feet above flood stage) washed the blockhouse away. Approximately seventy percent of the structure was recovered at the mouth of the river, 50 miles downstream and were reassembled with new beams replacing the missing timbers. These can be easily spotted in the above photo.
After Fort Halifax, I showed Buzzy our local Ivy League School, Colby College. Buzzy did what squirrels do best and climbed a tree on the shore of Johnson Pond to get a better view of the campus.
Established in 18**, Colby is one of the oldest institutes of higher education in Maine. Waterville is known as the Elm City, but lost most of its stately elms in the 1970's due to Dutch Elm Disease. Thanks to research at Colby College and elsewhere, disease resistant elms can now be found around the campus and some parts of the city. Maybe in a hundred years or so, these stately elms will once again shade most of the city's streets.
Colby is also known for its annual Lovejoy Award in journalism. The award is named for Elijah Parish Lovejoy. Born in nearby Albion, Maine, Lovejoy did what many a Mainah has had to do since--he left the state of Maine to make a living. He was a newspaper publisher and set-up his press in the western frontier state of Illinois. There, locals got upset with his anti-slavery views and burned his press. He tried to stop them and they killed him. As it states on the monument in the picture, he was the first American Martyr for Freedom of the Press. This monument sits in his hometown of Albion, Maine.
