In Hallowell, acting on one’s ideals and beliefs has always been regarded not simply as desirable, but necessary. Jacob Abbott came to Hallowell in 1800 and was engaged in trade on Water Street. He had five sons. All five went to Hallowell Academy, all graduated from Bowdoin College, all studied theology at Andover, and all became ministers and teachers.
One son, Jacob, was the author of 180 books, including the 14 volume Rollo series. Van Wyck Brooks stated that in Rollo the reader beheld in all its phases the shaping of one of Daniel Webster’s “solid men.”.... “How to be dutiful, how to be conscientious, how to be genteel, and well-informed, in order to be right on all occasions and able, especially, to set others right, this was Jacob Abbott’s open secret....here the New England passion for self-improvement, as it was understood by the plainer folk, found its completest record.”
Young Couple from Hallowell
If all members of the community did not set out to “be right on all occasions,” they did act on their reform impulses. The first Anti-Slavery Society in Maine was organized here in 1833, and a Temperance Society exerted a strong influence for many years. A community that well understood that the rewards of a life at sea might be few organized a Seaman’s Relief Society in 1848 forwarded relief packages to the Colored Seaman’s Home in New York and placed the following in its Annual Report:
Thus we may have the satisfaction of feeling that we have done something, taking our motto “Hope on, Hope ever” let us labor on, trusting that our efforts may be crowned by the preparation of some of those whose “home is on the deep” for that New Heaven and New Earth where there shall be no sea.
A maritime community such as Hallowell would experience its share of losses of husbands, brothers and sons to shipwreck, disease or accident. Women of the community were determined that women who were widowed by such events would not be abandoned. During the 1840s, they established the privately-endowed Hallowell Female Benevolent Society, an organization that performed charitable work for more than 100 years, to benefit women who had no means of support.
State School for Girls, Hallowell, ca. 1920
Maine State Archives
When it became apparent that the effects of industrialization included the separation of families, causing poverty and homelessness for young women, Mary Merrick Flagg and Mrs. A.C. Dummer proposed an Industrial School for Girls, which was founded in 1874. Its objective was to provide safe housing and a moral, social and academic education for young women who were considered a danger to themselves or a threat to society.