From A Short History of Otisfield
By Jean & David Hankins
When in 1775 George Peirce arrived in the land northeast of Sebago Lake, he found hills, lakes, streams, but no people. For centuries the land that is now Otisfield had been traversed by Passamaquoddy Indians on foot and in canoes, but no archaeological evidence exists of any permanent human settlement before Peirce’s arrival. Peirce, the agent of a group of Boston based businessmen, had a specific commission. From what was essentially an untouched wilderness, he was to build a town. He was to run a town’s boundaries and divide the land within those bounds into hundred acre lots, thus allowing for individual ownership. He was to clear a road and build a bridge over the Crooked River to allow access to those lots. On the river he was to construct a saw mill and grist mill. In short, Peirce was commissioned to establish the structure that would allow a new town to take root in the western hills of the Massachusetts territory of Maine.
Otisfield’s beginnings actually reach back close to a hundred years before George Peirce’s arrival. Otisfield became one of many so called “Canada towns,” towns tracing their origin to 1690 when Massachusetts sponsored an unsuccessful military expedition against French held Canada. In 1736 the Massachusetts General Court had actually granted a township to the heirs and descendants of the military company headed by Captain John Gorham which participated in that expedition. For various reasons that land grant was cancelled and in 1771 superseded by a second grant of land to the heirs of Gorham’s Company. Twenty Boston businessmen, most of whom had no connection to the original grantees, acquired rights to the land and became its proprietors.In 1776, presumably to honor Col. James Otis, one of the major property holders, the proprietors voted to name their town Otis Field. At their bidding, George Peirce arrived in Edes Falls (now part of Naples), and set to work establishing the new town.
Eighteenth century Otisfield encompassed a much larger area than it does now. Bounded by Raymondtown and Bridgetown, the new town eventually would be the northernmost town in Cumberland County. Its western boundry included the eastern half of what is now Harrison. (Harrison was established in 1805 by setting off the land east of Long Lake and west of the Crooked River from Bridgton and Otisfield.) To the southwest the town extended from Edes Falls across the outlet of Long Lake to include much of what is now the village of Naples. (Naples was formed in 1834 from parts of Otisfield, Raymond, Harrison, Sebago, and Bridgton.)
George Peirce chose Edes Falls for his foothold in this wilderness first, because of the water power supplied by the falls on the Crooked River, and second, because of the ease of access to more developed towns to the south by way of the Crooked and Songo Rivers and Sebago Lake. One of Peirce’s conditions for undertaking this task was the use of the proprietors’ boat for ten years.
The aim of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in establishing new towns was to expand settlement, thus increasing trade, security, and the wealth of the colony. Therefore the General Court imposed certain conditions on the proprietors. They could not simply strip their land of virgin timber and abandon it. To retain their grant, within six years the proprietors were to settle thirty families, build a meetinghouse, and settle a “Learned Protestant Minister” in town.
The town’s second settler, Benjamin Patch, arrived in 1776 from Groton, married George Peirce’s daughter Sarah, and soon moved onto Bell Hill, where his son Levi built what is now thought to be Otisfield’s oldest house. Despite the outbreak of the American Revolution, more new settlers continued to arrive, principally from Wrentham and Groton, in Massachusetts, and from Gorham and Falmouth in what is today Maine. By 1783 fourteen families had purchased hundred acre lots from the proprietors, clearing land, building log homes, and producing large families. They were the families headed by George Peirce, Benjamin Patch, Ebenezer Kemp, Joseph Spurr, Daniel Cobb, Samuel and Micah Whitney, Jonathan Moors, David Ray, Mark and Zebulon Knight, Jonathan Britton, Samuel Reed, and David Mayberry.
Edes Falls, with its access to Long Lake and the Songo River and with water power for Peirce’s mills, was the first part of the original Otisfield to be settled. From there settlement spread to the north and east. Perhaps because of its longer growing season, Bell Hill was the earliest settled section of present-day Otisfield. Bell Hill, originally known simply as “Otisfield Hill,” was also the location for the town’s first school district and the first town school, built in 1800. It was also Bell Hill that the proprietors selected as a site for the meetinghouse they commissioned George Peirce to build. That meeting house was dedicated on November 7, 1797. The proprietors’ gift of half a barrel of New England rum and half a barrel of West Indies rum made the dedication ceremony a bit merrier. Two weeks later eight men and women — one Peirce, three Spurrs, two Hancocks, one Turner, and one Thurston —formally covenanted together to form the Otisfield Congregational Church, with the Rev. Thomas Roby as the first minister. In 1839 the present Bell Hill Meetinghouse, designed by Nathan Nutting, ]r., was erected.
Through these early years, as the first settlers struggled to carve their farms from the forests, they looked to the proprietors for the necessities of a civilized town—roads, bridges, schools, and churches. The proprietors, after all, owned the town. The townspeople were increasingly dissatisfied with a system where decisions were made by absentee landlords in Boston, where months, often years would pass before their requests were answered. As the settlers gained control of the land, they also sought to gain control of its governance. In 1787 the residents successfully petitioned the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to gain the status of plantation. The first plantation meeting, the precursor of our present-day town meeting, was held on May 18, at the house of Deacon Stephen Phinney, with David Ray acting as moderator. Eleven years later, on February 19, 1798, the General Court of Massachusetts passed an “Act to incorporate the Plantation called Otisfield, in the County of Cumberland, into a Town by the name of Otisfield.” With the town’s incorporation, the proprietary role of the Boston businessmen came to an end. The residents of Otisfield had now to look after their own affairs.