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The end of the colonial wars brought a flood of mostly English-speaking
settlers to the Kennebec Valley and with them came changes to Fort Western.
Former Captain and now local leader, James Howard, purchased the Fort, cut
timber from the great pine forests surrounding the site, and opened a store
in what had been the military storehouse section of the main house. For the next
50 years, this store was a center of trade between the new settlers on the Kennebec and
Boston, New Foundland and the West Indies.
On the store-exhibit shelves are hundreds
of items documented in Howard-store account books, in store newspaper ads
from the Kennebec newspapers of the 1790's and early 1800's, and on the 1799
probate inventory of store partner, Samuel Howard, one of Captain Howard's sons. |
| Included in the store exhibit are the farming and forestry tools so essential
to the economic life of the new settlement; a wide variety of ceramics
and crockery ware, including utilitarian storage vessels as well as the latest
in tea sets and tableware; buckets, shoes, and hardware. Also exhibited are
sword knots and sashes for the local militia, pocket knives and razors, andirons,
shovels, and tongs, fishhooks, pails, and window glass. Most important
are the bolts of homespun and of factory cloth - the Tammy, Baize, Camblet,
Moreen, Serge, Indian Cottons, Copperplates, silks, shirting, and blanketing
- that were so much a part of changing traditional ways after the Revolution. Finally,
there are the casks of pork, beef and fish; boxes of tea, raisins, and chocolate;
bags of feathers;barrels of flour and bread;and sides of sole and upper
leather upon which the community relied. |
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At the back of the store are examples of many of
the items that store customers used in place of cash during the age of barter.
Included are bundles of shingles, red oak and white oak staves for barrels
and hogsheads, barrel heading and hoop stock, boards and planks, and the
pelts of not only beaver but muskrats, foxes, fishers, sables, and minks, plus bear skins and moose hides, too.
Copies of two of the surviving Howard-store
account books may be examined on the store's desk. There is also a page
from the 1765 English Pilot to help document the trade routes followed
by the Howards and others as they exchanged the products of the Kennebec forests for
the world's goods.
You can browse through this assemblage
of English, West Indies, and Kennebec goods today just as you might have
so long ago. |
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