Hello Again,

Have you ever wondered what our town was like fifty years after it was claimed from the wilderness? Where were the schools and mills and places of Business? Now you can find the answer on a 1859 map of Brooks at our Brooks Historical Society Museum. This beautiful framed map is an enlargement of Brooks reproduced from the Waldo County map that year. Names of heads of households were printed where each house stood. A large square at the side shows all the names at the more populated center of our village, listing also the tradesmen and their occupations, so different from those of today, but so vital to rural living in those days.

Brooks even had a tannery then beside Marsh River, a short distance downstream from the bridge, but no picture of that building has ever been donated to our sociery. In that year the Brooks Congreational Church, then called the Union Church, was across the tracks from the "Rose House", now the parsonnage. South Brooks, near Morgan Pitch Road, even had its own store, post office, and school. In fact, there were seven one room school houses then, two in the village and five in the outlying districts.

This Brooks map will be hung on the first floor of the museum so that those of you unable to climb stairs will be able to see it.

The owner of my house in 1859 was Andrew Bean, who was listed as a dealer in stock and produce. He had apreviously served as a lieutenant in the Mexican and Aroostook Wars. Two years after the wap was made, he became a Captain in the Civil War, inlisting almost three hundred men in Brooks and Belfast. During the "Battle of Bull Run", he was shot in the leg, causing a permanent lameness. When Franklin and I moved to this house in 1954, we found Captain Beans's Civil War Trunk, which now has a place of honor in the parlor of the Pilley House.

Studying our map, you will notice that on the hill south of Brooks heading to Belfast, some of the early settlers had the same surname-Cilley. These were my ancestors, my mother's people. In fact, in Sketches of Brooks History, the hills above the Ames homestead are referred to as the "Cilley Hills." Delmont Clark told me once that he knew from his boyhood where all those old cellar holes were. From one cabin on that hill, my great-great grandfather, Simon Cilley, left his wife Polly and eight children to go fight against the British in the War of 1812. Next time you travel over that hill, imagine that family in the winter without the amenities that we have today.

Do you even realize that Route 7, the road we so frequently travel to Belfast, was only a trail from the Ames homestead to the Morgan Pitch Road until after WWII. I recall that when I was a child, our route to Belfast was through the Waldo birches on the Whitcomb Road. Bob Roberts remembers that when he was a teenager in 1947, he rode in the truck with Roy Roberts as Roy hauled gravel to the work site of the road. Other local men who helped build that stretch of Route 7 were Glen Hamlin, Jerome Quimby and the elder Reuben Kenney.

I must mention that Bob Roberts is a remarkable historian when one wants to know anything about Brooks history. I often call him with questions. Another one of our citizens with a great memory is ninety three year old Clayton Pattee. Clayton recently sent me an account, in his own hanwriting of a time when he watched the old steam pumper fire engine at work. He was just a lad of fifteen, and the old pumper, pictured on our 2010 calendar, was being used to put our a fire at the Percy Grant store on West Main Street. Clayton says that through the efforts of Roy Staples and Merton Fogg Jr., the old pumper was very efficent. Clayton remarked,"I thought it was great".

Thank You, and Goodnight

Betty Littlefield