You may have heard about it. Citizens are infuriated about taxes. They’re demanding an abatement of the burden upon them. In fact, they don’t want to pay any taxes.

No, I’m not talking about Auburn and some citizen unrest following the recent revaluation. I’m talking about a taxpayer revolt about 220 years ago that involved the settlers of the land that’s now Auburn, Poland, Minot and other communities west of the Androscoggin River

It happened decades before Maine became a state. The early inhabitants petitioned the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for relief, and they went so far as to argue that they shouldn’t have to pay any taxes at all. The legal matter dealt with a 1765 grant by the Province of Massachusetts Bay to Samuel Gerrish and others of a tract of land known as Bakerstown. According to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Tax Act of 1788, the Bakerstown tax was 34 pounds, 16 shillings and one pence.

On Jan. 8, 1789, the inhabitants of Bakerstown presented a petition for relief from those taxes. In it, they claimed that the original grantees – the proprietors, as they were called – were supposed to see to the settling of 30 families in the town, build a house for public worship, “settle a learned Protestant minister, and lay out one sixty-fourth part of said tract for the use of the first minister, and one sixty-fourth part sixty-fourth a grammar school, and one sixty-fourth part for the use of Harvard College.”

The settlers said the grantees didn’t do this and they were left in a sorry state. They said if they had to continue “laboring under various disadvantages, under no regulations, having neither order nor discipline, civil, nor religious, and but very few of them any real title to their improvements, and liable to be dispossessed whenever the righteousness of the soil shall please, they esteem it a great hardship to be burthened with any taxes at all.”

So, if the court couldn’t see fit to give title to the inhabitants, themselves, the court should at least force the grantees to put the inhabitants “in a condition to be of use to the community of which they are a part by contributing their proportionable parts of the public tax for the support of government.”

The people went on to say if they “may be quieted in the possession of their improvements and put under proper regulations, they hope for the future to be able, and if so, shall be fond of contributing their share of public taxes.”

To put it another way, “If you come through with the services we need, we’ll be more than happy to pay the taxes.”

Does all this sound sort of familiar? Maybe the language is a lot less formal now, but our sense of property ownership and our expectations for services from the government seem pretty much the same. You still hear some people insist they are not going to pay any more taxes.

Well, just how was that 200-year-old dispute resolved? As you might expect, it was tabled. The Massachusetts court said the matter should “lay over to the first sessions of the next sitting of the General Court and the treasurer be directed to stay his execution till the first of July next.”

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and an Auburn native. You can contact him at dasargent@maine.com.

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