Author Description

Excerpt from History of Cumberland Co;, Maine: With Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers IV. Biographical Sketches, with portraits, on steel, wood, and stone, of men of more or less prominence in different parts of the county, arranged according to their respective towns, or in connection with the histories of those interests with which the subjects have been most intimately identified in their business or professions. The advantages of this arrangement, we think, are obvious. While it furnishes to each town its appropriate history, much more economically than could be afforded in separate volumes, it also gives the publisher a larger territory in which to dispose of his work, and in that degree enables him to add to its excellence and value. It also conduces to a more orderly and systematic classification of the materials which make up the volume. It is common to include in town histories a great deal of matter that is of a general character, or common to all the towns, and such matter is usually repeated in each separate history of a town. But in the plan of the present work these repetitions are entirely avoided by placing all the matter of a general character in the general history, and only that which is strictly local in the town histories. The plan of the work is such as is deemed, upon the whole, best adapted to the orderly classification of the large amount of matter which such a county must necessarily furnish, - a county whose settlement dates back two hundred and fifty years, and whose varied resources and interests have been developed by a people remarkable for their intelligence, thrift, and enterprise. It would be strange if such a people, during a period of two and a half centuries, in many respects the most eventful of modern times, had' not made history enough to fill one volume, however large, to say nothing of the doings of their savage predecessors, or of the voyages of discovery and efforts at colon