A Short History of the Twitchell Purchase

Also known as the Raymond Grant, in today's Town of Greenwood, Maine

Goose Eye No. 1 (2021)

A Short History of the Twitchell Purchase,

also known as the Raymond Grant, in today's Town of Greenwood, Maine

Larry Glatz

Township No. Four, which would later become the town of Greenwood, was surveyed out of undeveloped state’s land in 1788 by Samuel Titcomb of Hallowell. Seven years passed before the commonwealth began disposing of property within the tract. The initial grant, consisting of one thousand acres along the southern line of the township, was made in 1795 to James Mosher, John Haskell, and John Akers of Gorham, Maine. It seems the three men had been deprived of land in Gorham because of the government’s surveying error, and this new grant was made to compensate them for that loss.¹

Then in March of 1800, as part of a program to foster secondary education in the commonwealth, Phillips Academy of Andover, Massachusetts, was granted a little over half of the remaining township. This tract lay immediately north of the Mosher & Haskell Grant. The academy’s plan was to sell the land to raise money for the operation and endowment of the school.²

At this point, nine thousand acres in the northern part of the township remained for development, and in February of 1801 three investors contracted with the com­monwealth to purchase the tract. These were Eleazer Twitchell of Bethel, Dr. Ebenezer Harnden Goss of Brunswick, and John Raymond, a Boston merchant. Twitchell and Goss would certainly have known each other at the time, since both men had property and business interests both in Sudbury Canada (Bethel) and New Pennacook (Rumford). Exactly how or why John Raymond entered the partnership is unclear.

For reasons unknown—but perhaps simply to allow the three men time to raise the required funds—the sale was not concluded for another four years. In the meantime, John Raymond relocated his business to Little River Plantation (now Lisbon Falls), Maine, and bought out Twitchell’s interest in the project. Dr. Goss also sold his share in the tract (to Cornelius Thompson of Brunswick), so when ownership was finally transferred from the commonwealth to the proprietors, Raymond was the only one of the original three partners remaining as an active investor. As a technical matter, however, when the commonwealth issued its deed on February 1, 1805, the named grantees remained (in order) Twitchell, Goss and Raymond. Because of this, the tract has been referred to in many later records as the “Twitchell Purchase,” even though in reality John Raymond owned a two-thirds interest and Cornelius Thompson held the rest.³

As was the case with virtually all of the commonwealth’s grants and sales of the period, the deed stipulated that in order to obtain clear title to the property, the proprietor(s) would need to perform certain “settling duties.” For the Raymond Grant (as the tract was also sometimes called), the state said that eight families would need to be settled within four years of the initial sale, and eight more within the following four years. That is, sixteen families would need to be homesteading in the Raymond Grant by 1813.

John Raymond was no doubt encouraged by the fact that at least five families had moved onto the Mosher & Haskell Grant by 1800, and Phillips Academy sold some twenty-two lots in its section of the township by 1806. Moreover, the overall regional population was then increasing at a healthy rate. Between 1800 and 1810, the combined populations of Bethel to the north, and Norway and Paris to the south of the grant increased from 2,026 to 3,305, or 63 percent. Furthermore, in October of 1805 (just eight months after Raymond secured the property), his erstwhile associate, Eleazer Twitchell of Bethel, petitioned the county of Oxford for the construction of a road through the grant; and in May of 1807, the requested thoroughfare was laid out. This road was a continuation of an earlier county road which ran from New Gloucester to the southern edge of the Mosher & Haskell Grant. The new extension took it in a fairly direct line through the Phillips Academy Grant and the Raymond tract to Bethel village. In short order, this would become the principal corridor between Bethel, Norway, New Gloucester, and Portland; and it would provide ready access to the interior of Raymond’s nine thousand acres.

In spite of these favorable conditions, however, John Raymond had a difficult time finding buyers for his land. His first sale was not of any particular lots, but of a one-third interest in his own investment, which he conveyed on March 8, 1805, to Cornelius Thompson’s brother, Ezekiel, who was a friend of Raymond’s and an influential businessman in Raymond’s new home town of Little River Plantation.⁴

Almost a year elapsed before Raymond made his next sale. This occurred in January of 1806, when two lots were sold to Paul Wentworth and two more to Paul’s older brother William. The Wentworths were from Buxton, where they had learned their father’s blacksmithing trade, married and begun raising families. Paul’s lots abutted the north line of the Phillips Academy Grant and straddled the route of the county road which Capt. Eleazer Twitchell had requested and which was soon to be opened. The site was just north of Sanborn’s Mills, which was the most active location in the township at the time. William’s lots were also on the route of the new road and immediately to the north of his brother’s. In short, the Wentworths were well situated.⁵

The young families of Paul and William Wentworth appear to have been the first of those who actually settled in the Twitchell/Raymond tract. In fact, at the time John Raymond made out the deeds, the Wentworths’ places of residence were listed as “Township No. Four,” so they may have cleared land and put up a make-shift dwelling even earlier—perhaps in the autumn of 1805.

Eight months later, in September of 1806, Raymond made another sale—this one to Isaac Howe of Bridgton. Howe bought two lots, numbers 7 and 8 in the second range. These were situated just to the northwest of Mount Abram in what has since been known (appropriately) as the Howe Hill neighborhood.⁶

As the winter of 1806-7 passed, John Raymond was no doubt concerned that in the two years since his purchase, he had been able to settle only three families in the half-township. Even if the commonwealth’s settling duties could be renegotiated, the return on his investment was woeful. Perhaps Raymond then appealed personally to Captain Twitchell, or maybe Twitchell simply felt an obligation to assist his former partner. In any event, Twitchell was certainly aware of the slow progress of settlement in the tract; and in March 11, 1807, he not only purchased a lot in the grant himself, but it appears that he may have had a hand in the purchase of a second lot at the same time.

The lot which Twitchell bought in his own name was situated on the new county road just a few hundred yards north of the William Wentworth property. Although it’s impossible to know exactly why Twitchell purchased this land, it could be that he intended one of his young adult children to settle there. This speculation is supported by the fact that the second lot sold by John Raymond on March 11, 1807, was deeded to Jesse Cross, Eleazer Twitchell’s son-in-law. At the time, Jesse Cross was twenty-nine, and his wife Lydia was twenty-four. The couple had been married four years earlier. Their first child had died in infancy, and at the time of the purchase of the lot in the grant, they had one-year-old twins. The fact that their purchase was made on the same day as the elder Twitchell’s and it was completed without a mortgage suggests—but of course does not prove—that Lydia’s father assisted in or at least guided the transaction.⁷

If Twitchell did, in fact, intend any of his other children to move into the township, he was disappointed. Three years later, the lot he purchased in 1807 remained unoccupied and he included it along with several other parcels in Bethel in a large sale of land to William C. Whitney, an investor from Hebron. Interestingly, after Eleazer Twitchell, Sr., died and Jesse Cross moved from Greenwood back to Bethel, Jesse’s now married brother-in-law Eleazer Twitchell, Jr., took over the property in Greenwood and lived there for at least a decade.

Between Jesse Cross’s lot (later occupied by Eleazer Twitchell, Jr.) and the Bethel town line lay another lot associated with the Cross family. This parcel became the homestead lot of Jesse’s older brother Samuel Cross, who appears to have lived there with his wife Persis (Kimball) and family for the remainder of his years. Because the relevant deed was not recorded, it’s difficult to know exactly when Samuel Cross settled in the Raymond Grant, but it was probably not long after Jesse’s arrival in 1807.

Eight more months went by before another lot in the half-township was sold—this one to Alexander Robinson—who immediately sold the parcel to Captain Samuel Stephens, then of Paris but soon to become a mill owner and influential citizen of Woodstock. Like Eleazer Twitchell, Sr., it seems that Samuel Stephens, Sr., may have intended the lot he purchased in the Raymond Grant to be used by his son, also a “junior.” Indeed, three years after the father bought the property, the son purchased it from his parent. But whether Samuel Stephens, Jr., actually homesteaded there is impossible to say. No records have been found showing the young man as a resident of the township between 1810 (when he bought the lot) and 1820, when he sold it to Christopher Bryant, Jr. In fact, Samuel Stephens, Jr., declared himself to be “of Woodstock” when the 1810 deed was executed and “of Buckfield” at the time the latter deed was drawn. However, sometime later, the younger Stephens did settle in Greenwood. He served there as a selectman in 1829 and appeared in the town’s census record of 1830. He was also said to have been “of Greenwood” in 1832, when he died in a mill accident at Locke’s Mills.⁸

After the sale of the Robinson/Stephens lot in September of 1807, autumn faded into winter, the snows arrived, piled up and then melted away; the spring planting season came and went; and yet there were still no new buyers for lots in the northern part of the Township No. Four. Finally, on June 21, 1808, the lot just to the west of the Robinson/Stephens lot was sold. This was Lot 11 in the 8th Range. It was situated just north of Indian Pond and to the east of today’s Rowe Hill. Again, however, the sale was not to a homesteader. The new owner was Melvin Stow, a very close personal associate of John Raymond. Stow was from Raymond’s home town of Little River Plantation, and he may even have been related somehow to Raymond, although a specific family connection has not yet been found. Although it is clear that Stow was interested in relocating to Oxford County, he did not contribute toward Raymond’s quota of “settlers” as defined by the commonwealth. In fact, four years earlier he had purchased a lot from his brother, Andrew N. Stow, who had established himself north of Bethel, in Newry; and when Melvin Stow eventually relocated his family, it was to Newry and not to Greenwood that he moved.⁹

As far as can be documented through registered deeds, there were no sales of land in the Raymond Grant in all of 1809 or into the first few months of 1810. In summary then, after the commonwealth conveyed the nine thousand acres to the first proprie­tors in 1805, five years elapsed during which only eight lots were sold; and of these, it appears that only four were actually occupied by homesteaders. These were Paul and William Wentworth, Isaac Howe and Jesse Cross. As mentioned above, Jesse Cross’s brother Samuel may also have moved to the grant during these early years; and it was not long before William Wentworth sold his lots to Noah Tobey and moved to Brownfield. But in any event, John Raymond and his partners were then a long way both from meeting their legal requirements and from making any significant money on their original investments.

However, in the first few months of 1810, John Raymond was probably not worrying about settling duties. In fact, he was most likely in bed being nursed by his wife and only-child daughter. At the end of the prior November he had declared himself “sick and weak but of sound mind,” as he dictated his will; and on March 20, 1810, he died.¹⁰

Without doubt, John Raymond’s death in 1810 added a new level of complexity to the business of the half-township grant in Oxford County. In his will, Raymond named his wife as executrix and left her a two-thirds interest in his estate, but only for the duration of her life, after which all would devolve to his daughter, who was the outright recipient of the other third of his business and property. As a technical matter, any deed for land in the grant would need to be signed by both the widow and the unmarried daughter—each of whom seems to have been named Nancy Ann and to have referred to herself sometimes as Nancy and sometimes as Ann, rather interchangeably. As a practical matter, however, no deeds were executed by either party between March of 1810 and March of 1812, when Raymond’s widow expired.¹¹

In the meantime, John Raymond’s investment in Oxford County land had endured its own growing degree of confusion. Although the details are fairly mind-numbing, the overview is that between the original purchase in 1805 and Raymond’s death in 1810, no fewer than seventeen individuals had entered and/or exited the proprietorship of the grant. When Raymond died, there were seven partners remaining—if both Nancy and Ann (or Ann and Nancy) are counted.

Between Raymond’s death in 1810 and that of his widow in 1812, there was little if any progress in settling Raymond’s numerous business affairs. Subsequently, the couple’s daughter appointed attorney Abel Boynton of Bath to administer the estate, but it took two additional years for him to conclude the matter.¹²

Plan No. 222, Oxford County Registry of Deeds (Eastern District), showing the distribution of lots to the six final proprietors of the of the Raymond Grant.

Other events—both political and personal—also interfered with land sales in the grant. In the former realm, the United States and Great Britain had gone to war in the summer of 1812, and the economic shock caused by that conflict was particularly devastating in Maine. Commerce was at a standstill, unemployment was high, and the only real growth industry was smuggling. Even if John Raymond’s estate had been a model of efficiency, it is doubtful he would have sold much land during these years. And in addition to this, John’s sole remaining heir, his daughter Nancy, could well have been other-focused, in light of her father’s death in 1810, her mother’s passing in 1812 and her own courtship and marriage, which was solemnized in May of 1814 to a man who was firmly settled in Boston.

Fortunately—at least for the good of the half-township in Oxford County—Nancy Raymond’s husband, James Barker, was a fairly well-organized businessman. Where John Raymond seemed content to operate with partners having, say, a generalized one-third or one-ninth interest in the larger property, James Barker and the remaining proprietors commissioned a new survey to identify the quality of each individual lot, whereupon each investor was given title to specific lots making up his quota of the ownership. Of the 106 lots remaining unsold in April of 1815, James Barker received 34; Roger Merrill, Stephen Purinton, and Hezekiah Wyman received almost equal shares of 19, 18, and 19 lots respectively; while Benjamin Riggs received ten and David Stinson got six. (Except for Eleazer Twitchell, who by 1802 had removed himself from the enterprise, almost all of the early investors in the tract were from the Lisbon-Bath-Brunswick area.)¹³

It is interesting that the paperwork by which the lots were distributed contains no mention of the settling duties, which in the strictest legal sense would still have been required of the owners. Perhaps the men interpreted the commonwealth’s failure to make a claim against Raymond’s estate to be a waiver of the requirements. Or perhaps they knew the state seldom pursued such actions in the first place. Or maybe they simply forgot the matter. In any event, the proprietors of the northern part of Township No. Four, like those of many other townships in Maine, failed to accomplish their required settling duties and suffered no consequences as a result.¹⁴

There was also at the time another important development that may have spurred the investors both to decentralize their holdings and to “back-burner” the matter of settling duties. This was the fact that in May of 1813, the residents of the greater township had received permission from the commonwealth to form themselves into a plantation, and this action was most likely to lead them shortly to incorporate as a town. Although the great majority of the inhabitants had settled in the southern part of the township, it was Paul Wentworth who appears to have been the organizer of the plantation’s first meeting (which was held at Simeon Sanborn’s place), and it was Wentworth who was chosen as clerk of the organization. The next most important office was that of assessor, and three were chosen: John Small from the Mosher-Haskell Grant section, Simeon Sanborn from the Academy Grant, and Noah Tobey from the Raymond Grant. Another resident of the northern tract, Jesse Cross, was named one of five highway surveyors. (It is worth noting that Sanborn’s dwelling place, as well as those of all four of the principal office-holders, were located along the 1807 county road.)

As was almost inevitable, after two years of operation as a plantation, the residents petitioned the commonwealth to become incorporated as a town. Of the thirty men who signed that petition for incorporation in March of 1815, only five were from the Raymond Grant section of the township. These were Paul Wentworth, Noah Tobey and Jesse Cross, along with James Nutting and Foxwell Swan. The fact that just one-sixth of the signers were from the northern tract is probably a fair representation of the extent of settlement in the township at the time. The center of gravity was clearly in the Academy Grant section. As one local resident recalled, the Patch Mountain neighborhood “was then the home of a large portion of the wealth, beauty and aristocracy of the place.”¹⁵

As the town slowly grew, the principal expansion was not from south to north, but from west to east—that is, away from Sanborn’s mills and the corridor of the 1807 county road, toward the settlements which were developing near the two other significant water powers in the town.

The first of these was situated at the outlet of Hicks Pond, near the center of the Phillips Academy Grant. By the early 1820s, a sawmill and gristmill had been built there by the nobly named Orlando Israel Bagley Fifield, and presumably at least one inn was also located there at the time. Then in 1822, the county laid out a new road from Bethel, running east of Twitchell Pond, through Fifield’s mill development, along the east side of Hicks and Mud Ponds to the Norway line. This became the principal corridor for commerce between northern New Hampshire, Bethel, and Portland; and as traffic increased along the route, “Fifield’s Mills” grew into “Greenwood City.”¹⁶

At about the same time, a second development was occurring in the northeastern corner of the town, where the Alder River empties out of Round Pond. This enter­prise was established by Samuel Barron Locke, Sr., of Bethel. Locke was an accomplished millwright who had earlier built works in Vermont, New Hampshire and Fryeburg, Maine, before coming to Bethel about 1796. In 1819, Locke invested the considerable sum of two thousand dollars in buying three full lots and abutting gores around the ponds from Stephen Purinton. To this he added two other nearby lots, creating a holding of some six hundred acres in all. Over the next fifteen years, Locke’s lumber milling operation grew to become one of the largest such businesses in the region. By the time he retired from management of the enterprise in 1835, what had been the original Raymond Grant consisted of the industrious village of Locke’s Mills in its northeastern corner and probably not more than three dozen farms of varying degrees of prosperity spread throughout the remainder of the tract.¹⁷

During the same years that Locke’s Mills was increasing in prosperity, the principal investors in the remainder of the grant were doing nowhere near as well. Although it appears that all three of the original grantees—Twitchell, Goss, and Raymond—made money on their investments, at least four of the six final proprietors did not.

The account of Eleazer Twitchell is the easiest to tally. Assuming his original investment was $736 (that is, one third of the contract price of $2,209), when he sold that share to John Raymond for $1,500, he quickly doubled his money. Unfortunately, Ebenezer Goss did not leave a record of the sale of his share to Cornelius Thompson; but since Thompson’s brother Ezekiel had earlier paid Raymond $2,750 for one-third of the grant, it’s reasonable to assume that Cornelius would have paid something similar to Goss for an equal share. (And even if he had paid Goss as much as two thousand dollars less, Goss still would have made money on the transfer.) At the same time, the payment by Ezekiel Thompson to John Raymond combined with the proceeds Raymond realized from the sale of at least eight individual lots to settlers yielded him a profit of about $1,500 over his costs. In short, the three investors no doubt overpaid for the eventual value of the land in the grant, but each was fortunate to find later investors who were willing to overpay even more.¹⁸

However, when the bubble eventually burst, those left with title to thousands of acres of vacant land in the grant faced very large write-offs. Of these six men, Stephen Purinton of Harpswell may have considered himself most unlucky when in 1815 he drew rights to three lots in the northeastern corner of the grant. One of these was graded as “middling” in quality by the surveyor; one was deemed “poor”; and the third was almost completely under the water of South Pond. But four years later, his misfortune was entirely reversed when Samuel B. Locke agreed to pay him two thousand dollars for these three parcels. Netting another five hundred dollars from the sale of three other lots to settlers, Purinton made a profit of about $1,100 on his investment—even though he lost the last ten of his lots in 1825 for failing to pay taxes thereon.¹⁹

David Stinson of Bath had the least to lose of the six final proprietors, since he owned only a half dozen lots in the township to begin with. Although it took him almost thirty years, he eventually sold all six lots to settlers for a net gain of about nineteen dollars ($19) on his investment. It is likely that interim property taxes and the cost of drawing up deeds cost him more than that; but even so, he did better than some of his colleagues.

Benjamin Riggs of Georgetown sold two of his ten lots to settlers and the remaining eight to his sons, Moses and Benjamin F., who by August of 1835, had managed to sell the last of these lots as well. When all the dust settled on their various transactions, the greater Riggs family lost about seven hundred dollars on their dealings in the Raymond Grant.

After selling no property in the grant at all for fourteen years, Hezekiah Wyman of Bath managed to sell two lots each to two individual settlers in 1822 and 1825. He then sold eight lots to Charles Potter, a colleague investor from the town of Bowdoin, in April of 1827; and four months later, he died. By the time his executors had sold the last of the property in his estate, Wyman’s investment in the grant had suffered a loss of about a thousand dollars.

In 1810, Roger Merrill of Brunswick paid two thousand dollars for rights to fifteen hundred acres, or about one-sixth of the grant. From the surviving records, it appears that he sold just six lots over a fifteen-year period, for which he received a total of about a thousand dollars. But he then stopped paying taxes on his remaining thirteen lots and lost them all to the town in an auction in 1825. In the end, Merrill lost about half of the money he had invested.²⁰

James Barker might have been the largest loser of the group had it not been for the fact that his actual investment in the property was not pecuniary but obtained by default through the love and affection he shared with his wife, the sole heir to John Raymond’s estate. In fact, of the thirty-four lots managed by Barker, seven may have been sold (although records of only three of those sales were recorded) and the remaining twenty-seven were put up for auction by the town in 1819 for the recovery of taxes which Barker had not paid. In short, Barker’s profit of about seven hundred dollars resulted entirely from the fact that he had paid nothing at all for the few lots he sold.²¹

Coincidentally, the years 1819 to 1835 marked both the period of the building up of the Locke’s Mills section of the Raymond Grant and the winding down of the six proprietors’ interests in the area. By that later date, the demographics of the northern part of Greenwood was established essentially as it remained for the next century. Although it is difficult to detail with any precision the changes that may have occurred in the area in the fifteen years immediately after the senior Locke’s retirement and return to Bethel, it is most likely that the nationwide “Panic of 1837”, lasting nearly a decade, slowed or perhaps even halted development completely. The collapse of a national bubble in land speculation and the resulting currency crisis would have been particularly troublesome to an area such as the Raymond Grant, where except for the lumber milling sector, investment and development had been weak in the first place. But milling, too, would have suffered, as customers were hard pressed to pay outstanding bills or commit to new purchases.

The building of the railroad in 1849 and 1850 and the opening of the line to Bethel in 1851 focused all development in the town toward Locke’s Mills. The old county road between Sanborn’s Mills and Bethel, which had been superseded by the Greenwood City road, was abandoned—as Addison Verrill remembered it from his youth. And the Greenwood City road lost virtually all of its hauling traffic to the railroad. Verrill’s family, which had moved from Patch Mountain to Greenwood City in 1845, relocated to Locke’s Mills in 1850.²²

Although the area benefited economically from the New England-wide growth of the tourist industry in the early twentieth century, the seasonal activity around the lakes and at Mount Abram did not change the essential nature of the old Raymond Grant of 1819-1835, with its population clustered in the immediate neighborhood of Locke’s Mills and its interior mostly wild, but spotted with occasional houses, workshops and gardens.

1. Cumberland County Registry of Deeds, Book 30, p. 355.

2. Oxford County Registry of Deeds (Western District), Book 3, p. 485.

3. Cumberland Deeds, Book 36, p. 300; Book 45, p. 110; Oxford County Registry of Deeds (Eastern District), Book 5, p. 136.

4. Oxford Deeds (Eastern), Book 9, p. 538.

5. Oxford Deeds (Eastern), Book 2, pp. 104-5. For a record of a sawmill and corn mill at Sanborn’s prior to 1807, see Book 1, p. 384.

6. Oxford Deeds (Eastern), Book 4, p. 257.

7. Oxford Deeds (Eastern), Book 5, pp. 145, 150.

8. Oxford Deeds (Eastern), Book 3, pp. 268, 270, 386; William B. Lapham and Silas P. Maxim, History of Paris, Maine, from its Settlement to 1880 (Paris, Maine: Privately printed, 1884), 732; Lapham, History of Woodstock, Me. (Portland: Stephen Berry, printer, 1882), 256.

9. Oxford Deeds (Eastern), Book 1, p. 332; Book 4, p. 143.

10. Lincoln County (Maine) Probate Records, Volume 14, p. 327-9; Vol. 14, p. 355; Vol. 15, p. 478.

11. Curiously, the only other legatee named in John Raymond’s will was Melvin Stow, the earlier purchaser of a lot in the half-township. Stow was bequeathed an unspecified lot in the grant, but he eventually took a cash payment instead. In other words, Raymond effectively paid Melvin Stow back for the lot he had purchased in 1808. There is probably more to this story than the few surviving documents reveal.

12. Lincoln Probate Records, Volume 19, p. 133.

13. For the distribution of lots to the six final proprietors, see Oxford Deeds (Eastern), Plan No. 222 (1815).

14. For the division of the grant among the remaining six proprietors, see Oxford Deeds (Eastern), Book 12, pp. 27-34. Regarding settling duties: A few early proprietors actually obtained certificates from the commonwealth declaring that their settling duties had been met. (An example is the town of Rangeley in Franklin County.) Others (e.g., Lovell, Upper & Lower Cupsuptic Townships) sought formal extensions of the period of time required to meet the obligation. Still others seemed simply to ignore the issue. To date, I’ve found only one tract in Oxford County (Riley Township) whose proprietor (Phebe Ketcham) was required to make repayments to the state and eventually to forfeit title to property for failing to meet the duties.

15. “Mark Tapley” (William A. Emery), “The young men who wore cowhide boots...,” Oxford County Advertiser, July 18, 1890. The homestead of James Nutting was located on Lot 11 in the 6th Range (Oxford Deeds [Eastern], Book 17, p. 37). Both his house and that of Foxwell Swan are mentioned in a road survey of February, 1816 (Oxford County Commissioners Records, Vol. 1, 153).

16. For deeds involving Fifield’s operation, see Oxford Deeds (Eastern), Book 22, p. 336 (1823) and Book 25, p. 17 (1824). For the laying out of the new county road, see Commissioner’s Records, Vol. 1, 254.

17. For Locke’s purchases, see Oxford Deeds (Eastern), Book 15, p. 529; Book 43, pp. 498, 499. The 1858 map of Greenwood shows only 43 dwelling houses outside of Locke’s Mills in the original Raymond Grant section on town.

18. For Twitchell’s sale to Raymond, see Cumberland Deeds, Book 36, p. 300. For Raymond to Ezekiel Thompson, Oxford Deeds (Eastern), Book 9, p. 538.

19. For the grading of Purinton’s lots, see Oxford Deeds (Eastern), Plan No. 222 (1815). Deed of Purinton to Locke, Oxford Deeds (Eastern), Book 43, p. 498. Greenwood property tax vendue, Oxford Deeds (Eastern), Book 25, p. 397.

20. Not counting the unusual sale of three lots to Samuel B. Locke, lots in the Raymond Grant sold for about a hundred dollars each. When records of sales are absent, this is the figure used in estimating the value of the transaction and calculating the gain or loss of “about” some final figure.

21. For records of the tax auction of 1819, see Oxford Deeds (Eastern), Book 17, p. 352.

22. Regarding the abandoned road, see Addison Verrill, ­­Addison Verrill’s Greenwood, ed. Herbert Adams and Larry Glatz (Bethel and Greenwood, Maine: Bethel Historical Society and Greenwood Historical Society, 2016), 23.