by Lea Wait
Historical Notes
The Panic of 1837 began when state banks that had been given authority and funding by the federal government used the money to make poor investments. Many banks failed, losing the savings of individuals and businesses. Although President Martin Van Buren tried to establish a national independent treasury system, the depressed economy did not begin to recover until 1843. Many men, such as Jake’s father, lost their jobs and had to begin again.
Wiscasset was, and remains, a small seaport on the Sheepscot River in the State of Maine, about fifty miles north of Portland. In 1838 it was home to 2,300 people who made their livings as farmers, mariners, and workers in lumbering and other industries.
Of those 2,300 people, 983 were children who attended one of eight district (public) schools, or one of the private schools in the village. In 1838 New England most children were expected to attend school from the time they were four until they were ten or twelve. There were two school terms each year: summer and winter, each lasting eleven or twelve weeks. The school day was from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, with a nooning break for dinner. Boys and girls sat on benches on opposite sides of the classroom. There were no blackboards. Each student was responsible for supplying his or her own handheld slate and primer, and, for older students, quill pens, ink, and copybooks for writing. They learned by memorizing and reciting, and studied reading, arithmetic, geography, grammar, penmanship, and spelling. “Classes” were groups of students at the same level of learning, not students of the same age. Five-year-olds could be in the same class for reading as ten-year-olds.
After the age of twelve a few boys continued to study at academies or with private tutors to prepare for college. Girls from wealthier families were tutored in needlework, art, and music, or went to female boarding seminaries. But most twelve- or thirteen-year-old young adults became apprentices to craftsmen, or worked with their families at home, on farms or in family businesses.
Jake, Frankie, Nabby, Simon, Tom, and their families were not real people, but some of the people in Finest Kind did live in Wiscasset in 1838, and some of the story is true.
Dr. Theobold was fifty-five years old in 1838; he had been the doctor in Wiscasset for over thirty years and had outlived three wives. His son, Fred, graduated from Bowdoin College and in 1838 was married and working as a doctor in Gardner, Maine. Dr. Theobold’s daughter, Ann, was also married and lived in Calais, Maine. His housekeeper, Thursey Seigars, was famous for the soap she made in large cauldrons in their kitchen.
Samuel Holbrook and his wife, Lucy, lived in Wiscasset and eventually had five children. In 1838, Samuel Holbrook was both in charge of the Lincoln County Jail and a schoolmaster in a district school. On December 3, 1838, the jailer’s home and the jail did burn down, but all the prisoners were saved by school students who got them out of their cells and tied them to trees in the prison yard. The prisoners were then taken to the Wiscasset poorhouse, where they were housed until September of 1839, when a new jail was completed. The prisoners mentioned in Finest Kind were among those imprisoned at the jail in 1838.
The new jail was built on the same spot as the old one, and followed the same design, except that it had only three floors. Today if you visit Wiscasset during the summer, you can walk through the jail and the jailer’s house, and see the granite cells that housed prisoners (in later years on a limited basis) until 1953.
Today we would call Frankie Webber’s illness cerebral palsy. In the mid-nineteenth-century there were no medicines that could help him, and most people who had cerebral palsy died while they were still infants. Few lived beyond the age of two or three. At that time many people believed diseases ranging from physical disabilities like Frankie’s, to mental disabilities like Simon’s, to the “insanity” of some of those housed in the jail, were the result of their parents’ sins. Intemperance and immorality were often cited as causes for diseases that affected the brain. Today Frankie’s fits, which we would call seizures, could be controlled, and possibly stopped, by medications. Although there is still no cure for cerebral palsy, about six in every 100,000 people in the United States today are affected by it, and many live full lives.
In 1838 there was no Halloween, but Scots and Irish immigrants had brought with them traditions of fall festivals, which included fortune-telling and visiting from house to house carrying simple lanterns made from vegetables. Halloween was not celebrated as it is today until the late nineteenth century, when trick-or-treating, bobbing for apples, and predicting the future combined with black cats and carved jack-o’-lanterns to become a children’s festival.
Thanksgiving was a state holiday in 1838, and the people of Maine celebrated it on Wednesday, November 28. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln made the last Thursday in November a national Thanksgiving Day.
In 1838, Christmas in New England was still primarily a religious holiday, celebrated on the Sunday closest to December 25. As on Thanksgiving, people attended church and then shared a special dinner. Gifts were only exchanged on New Year’s Day. By the 1830s, however, some German families, like Dr. Theobold’s, had begun to share their way of celebrating Christmas by decorating small tabletop evergreen trees. The “Christmas tree” gained popularity in England, and then in the United States, after Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, who was German, introduced the custom to the British royal family, and others copied them.
There are no longer oysters in the Sheepscot River; they were overharvested, and then killed by water pollution. Saltwater farms in rivers like the Damariscotta are now bringing oysters back to Maine.
“Nabby” was a common nineteenth-century Maine abbreviation for the name Abigail.
And in Maine, “finest kind” is still the term used to describe the best of the very best.
Also by Lea Wait
For young readers
Stopping to Home
Seaward Born
Wintering Well
Margaret K. McElderry Books
For adults
Shadows at the Fair: An Antique Print Mystery
Shadows on the Coast of Maine: An Antique Print Mystery
Shadows on the Ivy: An Antique Print Mystery
Shadows at the Spring Show: An Antique Print Mystery
Scribner
Margaret K. McElderry Books
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Eleanor Wait
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Book design by Ann Zeak
The text for this book is set in Aldine401 BT.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wait, Lea.
Finest kind / Lea Wait.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When his father’s Boston bank fails in 1838, causing his family to relocate to a small Maine town, twelve-year-old Jake Webber works to prepare the family for the harsh winter while also keeping the existence of his disabled younger brother a secret.
ISBN 978-1-4814-7511-2
ISBN 978-1-5344-1286-6 (ebook)
[1. Survival—Fiction. 2. Cerebral palsy—Fiction. 3. People with disabilities—Fiction. 4. Secrets—Fiction. 5. City and town life— Maine—Fiction. 6. Maine—History—1775-1865—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.W1319Fin 2006 [Fic]—dc22 2005025422
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