7 minute read
Brewer’s Joshua Chamberlain
by Brian Swartz
He grew up a fun-loving boy
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Remembered for almost 160 years as a brave army officer, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain spent his growing years as a rambunctious and fun-loving “Brewer boy.”
Born on September 8, 1828 to Joshua and Sarah Dupee (Brastow) Chamberlain at their house on North Main Street, Lawrence Joshua Chamberlain grew up in a Brewer focused on shipbuilding and brickmaking, the local clay providing a solid substance and a particular red color to so-called “Brewer bricks.”
He later switched his first and middle names while at Bowdoin College.
Joshua Chamberlain was the oldest of five siblings. After him came Horace, Sarah (“Sae”), John, and Thomas. By the mid-1830s the family had moved to a new house that the father built at 80 Chamberlain Street. From there the family operated a 100-acre farm, and everybody was expected to contribute to the farm labor.
The second house took shape after the elder Chamberlain returned “from a visit to the South” and mentioned he was “much impressed with the plantation style of living.” He soon “built a mansion … remote from other houses” and erected “humble cottages” for his hired farmhands and their families, son Joshua later wrote.
A brook still extant in the 1970s crossed the farm not far from the farmhouse. The young Chamberlains liked to construct “bridges, dams, water-wheels and probationary mills beside the stream” and then watch the flowing brook play among the structures.
“Great was the fun in freshet times,” when fast-flowing runoff swelled the brook and washed all the children-engineered items downstream. Joshua recalled “the rallying and rescue.” He and his brothers often fell into the water as they retrieved what they could. Water and debris swirled “around the trunks of the mighty elms,” he said, but even
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the elms disappeared in the 1960s.
Routinely exploring local shipyards, the Chamberlain boys cut “a tall mast … in the deep woods” and dragged it with oxen to the family’s barn. Using blocks and tackles secured to the barn’s interior beams, the boys raised the mast and festooned it with “all the spars and rigging practicable” to resemble “a ship’s foremast.”
The brothers even created a ropewalk and attached “the American ensign” to the fore-top. For Joshua, whose given name “Lawrence” honored War of 1812 naval hero James Lawrence, that flag became “Launce’s color-pole.”
The foremast stood above an imaginary ship, crewed with “all relatives who could be lured on board, and all humbler schoolmates who could be impressed into service,” Joshua said. “The discipline … was stern,” the crew issued doughnuts, molasses, and even “a pan of cold sausage or a stack of pumpkin pies” during a difficult voyage.
Wintertime brought different activities, especially “skating and ‘sliding down hill.’” Besides the slopes near the Chamberlain home, “there was one royal course” running along North Main Street “from the Holyoke hill down through the village,” Joshua recalled.
“A well-weighted sled would make a half-mile run” on this course, which today cuts through the State Street intersection and zips along the overpass carrying traffic over the former Maine Central Railroad tracks. Joshua liked to equip a pung — “a light sort of market wagon set on runners” — with “cushions and warm robes and furs.”
In the pung sat girls, “rosycheeked,” who relied on “a big boy or two” sitting in front of them to steer the pung. Friends stood at street corners “to warn the villagers and travelers and teamsters” what was coming, and away went the pung!
“Down we go!” Joshua exclaimed. “Or upward — we know not which: breathless, flying, sinking, soaring; with a sweet delaying at the end, motion quivering to its close” beneath the stars.
Besides the fun related with sledding, he believed the sport “teaches the value of good judgment and good steering.”
Summer brought different pastimes, including swimming. Brewer boys would swim across the Penobscot River to Bangor while carrying a 25- or 30-pound rock “under one arm.” Once across, the swimmer would shift the rock to his other arm and swim back.
This seemed all good fun until the day that Joshua watched as “an adventurous young [unidentified] brother come near drowning, sucked by the swift tide current under a big raft.” There was “a dash, a leap and a plunge, just in season to save him.”
Joshua and his brothers hunted, with (cont. on page 20)
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(cont. from page 19) wild birds (especially partridges and passenger pigeons) plentiful. He got “a famous gun … fully five long” that “got the habit of kicking and rearing.”
One day Joshua carefully stalked birds — apparently pigeons feeding on harvested grain — and got “a good sight” on the flock. The gun “was let go, with a bang and a roar and a whir and a whirl, and the three parties to the transaction suddenly separated — the gun end over end backward into the bush; the birds off for undiscovered lands; the boy flat on his back in the grass.”
Joshua remembered laying there, sucking on his bruised and bleeding trigger finger “and holding on to his right shoulder as if he thought it would get away from him, too.
“The gun was exchanged for one less widely destructive of bird and beast and money,” Joshua admitted.
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Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine gathered at a Gettysburg reunion in 1889. Item # 4163 from the collections of the Maine Historical Society and www.VintageMaineImages.com
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