Congressional Medal of Honor winner: Civil War GEORGE H. LITTLEFIELD
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SKOWHEGAN[skow-HEE-gihn] a town in, and county seat of, Somerset County was incorporated on February 5, 1823 as the Town of Milburn from a portion of Canaan. It annexed land from Norridgewock (1828, 1856), from Cornville (1831, 1833), and from Fairfield (1858). The name was changed to Skowhegan in 1836 and, with the annexation of Bloomfield in 1861, its modern boundaries were complete.Recorded as Skwahegan in early reports, the name means "watching place for fish," drawn from the falls in the Kennebec River that harbored salmon. Local Indians speared them as they attempted to scale the falls. Now the falls have been harnessed for electric power just below a small island.
On April 30, 1772, Joseph Weston and his family arrived as the first white settlers in the area. A few years later on September 29, 1775, Benedict Arnold and his army made camp there on their way up the Kennebec to Quebec. The Dudley's Corner School House, on U.S. Route 2 east of the main village, was the municipal center in the early 19th century, hosting "all town meetings but two 1828-1849" according to the plaque placed on it by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1932.
The other end of the Dudley Corner Road is known as Malbons Mills, named for the site of the old shingle mill powered by the dammed water of Wesserunsett Stream. The remains of the dam and the foundation of an old bridge remain just below the newer bridge.
Among the distinguished people who were born or lived in the town include U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith; Governor Abner Coburn, for whom the local park is named; Daniel Dole, a missionary to the Hawaiian Islands who helped establish Oahu College; Charles A. Coffin (1844-1926), the first president of the General Electric Company; and Artemus Ward, a humorist who worked briefly in a local printing business. The town became home to the Women's Correctional Center in 1935 when women from the Maine State Prison in Thomaston were transferred to that new facility. It has since been closed. Long a center of shoe making and textile manufacture, these industries were on the wane when Scott Paper Company opened a $230 million paper mill on the town line with Fairfield. Now owned by South African Pulp and Paper (SAPPI), the mill shelters a portion of the boundary line which runs through it. A huge sculpture of an Abenaki Indian, by Bernard Langlais, rises from the north end of the municipal parking lot in honor of the area's native heritage. The Lakewood Summer Theater is just five miles north of town.
National Register of Historic Places - ListingsBigelow--Page House
4/20/88, 20 High Street
History House 12/29/83
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