Harpswell, Maine, is a seaboard, almost a sea-girt, town. It is made up of a long, narrow neck of land and forty islands, some containing hundreds of acres, others almost entirely covered by the tide. Indenting the shore of this peninsula and the larger islands are sheltered inlets of deep water well suited to the building and harboring of ships. Hither came, during the first half of the eighteenth century, from Boston, Scituate, York, and other settlements, men and women of Puritan stock and Puritan ways of thinking; and here grew up large families, hardy and God-fearing, some farmers, but most of them fishermen, sailors, and ship-builders.
Elijah Kellogg could not long attend Bowdoin College, only a few miles distant, without being attracted to these sea-going people of Harpswell; for Kellogg was born with webbed feet. When hardly out of the cradle, family tradition has it, he went to sail in Back Cove, Portland, with a sugar-box for a boat and his shirt for a sail. As a youngster he would often steal to the Fore Street wharves to watch the ships, and he was never so happy as when listening to the yarns which the sailors spun. He says of himself, “At ten years of age I began to climb the rigging, and at fifteen went to sea.” His years in the “fo’c’sle,” with all their perilous and disagreeable tasks, only intensified his love for the water. As a Freshman he took supreme delight in sailing with a good comrade, on a Saturday afternoon, in his little cat-rigged boat, the Cadet, among the islands of Casco Bay.
One of these half-holiday expeditions affected, as it happened, his whole after-life. The Cadet, belated by wind and tide, ran ashore on Birch Island, and “Captain” Kellogg and crew, supperless and weary, sought shelter at the house of Captain John Skolfield. Mr. Kellogg never forgot how cosily the light from the house that evening shone through the hop vines growing over and around the windows. The hospitable islander gave the wayfarers a warm welcome and a plentiful supper; for which hospitality, before the evening ended, Kellogg, full of stories of college and the sea, made his host feel well repaid. Thus began his acquaintance with the Birch Islanders,—the Skolfields, Curtises, and Merrimans,—an acquaintance which was to ripen into a life-long friendship. The men on this island, hardy, powerful, and fearless, at once became heroes in the admiring eyes of this venture-loving student. After this he spent many happy hours building boats, gunning and fishing with Captain John, or spinning yarns and reading aloud with “Uncle Joe” Curtis,—a man who read every book he could get hold of and who remembered everything he read.
From Birch Island to Harpswell Neck, where Eaton’s store and the church were located, is but a short row; there Kellogg often went to buy something for his boat, or to worship on the Sabbath. Before long he had many friends and admirers upon the mainland; for these people had but to see the sharp-eyed, brown, wiry “colleger,” and hear his stories, or listen to his earnest and eloquent exhortations in the prayer-meeting, in order to love him. It was with them, as well as with him, love at first sight; and by the time he was a Sophomore they had plighted troth. Learning that he was to study for the ministry, they must have him for their preacher; and he, half jokingly perhaps, told them if he lived to get through the seminary and they built a new church, he would come to preach for them.
After graduation at Bowdoin, Kellogg began the study of theology at Andover. When his course at the seminary was near its close, Professor Thomas C. Upham, who had been so stanch a friend of the Harpswell church that Mr. Kellogg once said it owed its very existence to him, came to Andover with a message from the Harpswell people that the timber for the new church was on the spot, and they still wanted him for a preacher. The bearer of the message evidently saw in the young preacher the salvation of the Harpswell church; for he reënforced this reminder of the promise Kellogg had made in his student days by the emphatic prophecy that God would curse him as long as he lived if he did not go. Influenced somewhat by these prophetic words, but probably much more by his love for the place and the people and the opportunity he saw of doing good, he turned away from a call to a much larger church and went to Harpswell, where, as he said many years later, he found that “obedience is sweet and not servitude.”
Although Mr. Kellogg, in response to this informal invitation, began at once to supply the pulpit in the old church, a formal call to settle as pastor was not extended to him until the next year. The reason for this becomes apparent upon an examination of the church records.
The original Harpswell church and parish were at this time passing through a transition period. Formed in 1751, the parish was at first identical with the town. The preacher’s salary and other church expenses were assessed by the town officers as taxes. But later, other churches having been built and other denominations having sprung up, many citizens objected to being taxed for the support of the minister, and some absolutely refused to pay such taxes. A troublesome question concerning the control and ownership of the first church building also arose between the town and the parish. Accordingly the supporters of the Congregational church organized a new society and erected a new church building.
This church was dedicated September 28, 1843. For this dedication the following poem was written by Mr. Kellogg:—
“Here, ’mid the strife of wind and waves
Upon a wild and stormy sod,