From collection Penobscot Marine Museum Archives
Record of the Searsport Teatotaler Temperance Society
Minute book for the West Prospect Washingtonian Temperance Society, later the Searsport Teatotal Temperance Society, kept between 1841 and 1849. It contains the group's constitutions with various amendments, lists of officers and members, and notes on the Society's relationship to other temperance groups. It also contains notes on various outreach activities, including convicing neighbors to sign a temperance pledge and dissuading citizens from selling alcohol. This volume was later re-used by Isaac B. Gatchell (1832-1886) as an account book, primarily for his work as a farm laborer in Newburgh, Maine, in the 1870s and 1880s. Gatchell's daughter, Minnie C., also used it as a notebook and a scrapbook, covering some pages with religious poems and family obituaries. Another writer used some blank pages for a journal of cutting ice in Etna, Maine, in 1906. Inserts include notes for deaths in the 1930s.
