Hancock-Washington-Penobscot Counties
42
Katahdin Region Cemeteries by Joyce Pye
T
Early burial grounds
he earliest burying-ground noted in A History of Lincoln, Maine is in the Mattanawcook settlement on “what was formerly called Snowville at the south line of Winn,” and one of the first gravestones to be located there is that of Betsey Babcock who died at the age of 33 years in 1825. Possibly the next cemetery in the area was “on the hill at Lincoln Village on State Road.” It was a small lot which grew in time as additional land was acquired, and is most likely mentioned in an 1882 description in the History of Penobscot County: “Lincoln Village is a flourishing place... with a railroad station, with side-tracks to the tannery and the saw-mill,” two churches, a schoolhouse, and a cemetery. Other industries listed by the authors were spool, furni-
ture, coffin and casket makers, granite and marble workers, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, and tailors. Among the names of early settlers laid to rest in Lincoln’s burying grounds are Gates, Nelson, Chase, Hammond, and Pinkham. Whether the Mattanawcook Islands were the primary burial sites of the “302 Indians on the Penobscot” reported in the 1815 census was difficult to determine. Southwest of Lincoln and lying at the junction of the Piscataquis and the Penobscot Rivers is the village of Howland. As reported in the county history published in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Howland was comprised of a “town post office, school No. 2, two stores, a saw-mill, a hotel, a shop or two, and a cemetery a little
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north of the village.” Buried here in 1857, when diphtheria was a constant concern throughout the state, were the wife and two children of Mr. Emory Bailey, a Howland farmer. One might add that both Lincoln and Howland had many bears, for a Howland veterinary surgeon was said to have killed fifty-two since moving there in 1862 and the Treasurer of Lincoln — shortly after the town’s incorporation in 1829 — paid one hundred and twenty-three dollars in bounty fees on forty-one bears. Within a few years, a bounty was passed on wolves and Canadian lynx as well. These facts suggest that at least a few folks buried in Lincoln and Howland may have tangled with wildlife and lost. The town of Brownville, north-
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