Lewiston

Lewiston, a city of Androscoggin county, Maine, U.S.A., on the Androscoggin river, opposite Auburn, with which it is connected by four steel bridges, and about 36 m. N.E. of Portland. Pop. (1900) 23,761, of whom 9316 were foreign-born; (1910 census) 26,247. It is served by the Maine Central, the Grand Trunk, the Portland & Rumford Falls and the Lewiston, Augusta & Waterville (electric) railways. The surrounding country is hilly and the river is picturesque; in the vicinity there are many lakes and ponds abounding in salmon and trout. The Maine fish hatchery is on Lake Auburn, 3 m. above the city. Lewiston is the seat of Bates College, a non-sectarian institution, which grew out of the Maine State Seminary (chartered in 1855), and was chartered in 1864 under its present name, adopted in honour of Benjamin E. Bates (d. 1877), a liberal benefactor. In 1908-1909 the college had 25 instructors and 440 students, and its library contained 34,000 volumes. The campus of the college is about 1 m. from the business portion of Lewiston and covers 50 acres; among the college buildings are an auditorium (1909) given by W. Scott Libbey of Lewiston, and the Libbey Forum for the use of the three literary societies and the two Christian associations of the college. The literary societies give excellent training in forensics. The matriculation pledge requires from male students total abstinence from intoxicants as a condition of membership. There are no secret fraternities. From the beginning women have been admitted on the same terms as men. The Cobb Divinity School (Free Baptist), which was founded at Parsonfield, Maine, in 1840 as a department of Parsonfield Seminary, and was situated in 1842-1844 at Dracut, Massachusetts, in 1844-1854 at Whitestown, New York, and in 1854-1870 at New Hampton, New Hampshire, was removed to Lewiston in 1870 and became a department (known as Bates Theological Seminary until 1888) of Bates College, with which it was merged in 1908. Lewiston has a fine city hall, a Carnegie library and a public park of 10½ acres, with a bronze soldiers’ monument by Franklin Simmons, who was born in 1839 at Webster near Lewiston, and is known for his statues of Roger Williams, William King, Francis H. Pierpont and U. S. Grant in the national Capitol, and for “Grief” and “History” on the Peace Monument at Washington. In Lewiston are the Central Maine General Hospital (1888), the Sisters’ Hospital (1888), under the charge of the French Catholic Sisters of Charity, a home for aged women, a young women’s home and the Hesley Asylum for boys. The Shrine Building (Kora Temple), dedicated in 1909, is the headquarters of the Shriners of the state. The river at Lewiston breaks over a ledge of mica-schist and gneiss, the natural fall of 40 ft. having been increased to more than 50 ft. by a strong granite dam; and 3 m. above the city at Deer Rips a cement dam furnishes 10,000 horse-power. The water-power thus obtained is distributed by canals from the nearer dam and transmitted by wire from the upper dam. The manufacture of cotton goods is the principal industry, and in 1905 the product of the city’s cotton mills was valued at about one-third of that of the mills of the whole state. Among other industries are the manufacture of woollen goods, shirts, dry-plates, carriages, spools and bobbins, and boots and shoes, and the dyeing and finishing of textiles. The total factory product in 1905 was valued at $8,527,649. The municipality owns its water works and electric lighting plant. Lewiston was settled in 1770, incorporated as a township in 1795 and chartered as a city in 1861. It was the home of Nelson Dingley (1832-1899), who from 1856 until his death controlled the Lewiston Journal. He was governor of the state in 1874-1876, Republican representative in Congress in 1881-1899, and the drafter of the Dingley Tariff Bill (1897).