Church, So. Thomaston Me. 2.

Church, So. Thomaston Me. 2.

"Church, So. Thomaston Me. 2." [included in the exhibit "Knox County Through Eastern's Eye"] Church, So. Thomaston, Me Methodists became established in South Thomaston in the 1850s and for many years met in private homes and on the top floor of the Knox Hall, served by short-time ministers. In 1875 the congregation obtained the services of Reverend David H. Sawyer, whose father Merrick Sawyer owned a quarry on Spruce Head Island. He purchased a lot above the Wassaweskeag River and, with James and Joseph Newhall, led fundraising efforts to build a church on it. The Methodist Episcopal Church was dedicated on April 24, 1877. Reverend Sawyer stayed as minister for only a short time, moving on in the next few years to pulpits in Friendship and Wiscasset and then to Massachusetts. The house next to the church was built in 1875. Its first owner was Lucy Coombs Hayden, who sold it to Henry Wiggin. Reverend Sawyer sold the lot behind the church, where the church addition now is, in 1876 for $25 to May Florence Stetson, who was only 15 or 16 years old at the time. (Her father probably paid for it.) The house on that lot burned in the 1990s. Information provided by Bill Colby, South Thomaston Historical Society