Libbey Mill founder kept irons in fire

Bricks and mortar. We pile them up and, sooner or later, we knock them down.

The Libbey Mill in Lewiston, next to the Great Falls of the Androscoggin River, is the latest to fall. I have written before about that mill’s economic role in L-A, but there’s a human side to the man whose name was attached to it.

“Industrialist” is the label that usually identifies Winfield Scott Libbey. I would add “adventurer,” because W.S. Libbey found international inspiration for the many benefits he brought to the Twin Cities.

I worked with descendants of W.S. Libbey several years ago to document that remarkable man’s life. He was born in 1851 in Avon and his father, Asa Libbey, soon moved to West Waterville, where he farmed.

Between the farm and a lavish executive’s office, Scott’s life bristled with excitement. Around 1870, he learned telegraphy by watching a train depot operator, and it landed him a job in Auburn. He worked elsewhere, but returned to Lewiston in 1873.

For $65 a month, he tapped out and received messages for Western Union at 14 Lisbon St. He gained some fame for taking 6,000 words of a presidential address telegraphed in Morse code without a break. Around this time, he courted Annie E. Shaw, daughter of the agent of Lisbon’s Farnsworth Mill.

They married in 1877, and they lived frugally. Money went into a Lincoln Street tenement house Scott bought as an investment. In 1880, they began building a fine house at Sabattus and Nichols streets.

A first son died of diphtheria within a month of birth, but two more sons and two daughters completed the family. Annie’s journals, which she kept for 53 years, documented one medical crisis after another. Scott’s insatiable interests took him far and wide while Annie kept the home going. He went to North Dakota by train, and when the train slowed, he jumped off and back-packed until he found a spot to build a shack and stake a claim. He soon sold that land, and with his profits he set out for Bogota, Colombia.

He bought stock in a silver mine, but it was another short-lived and disappointing venture. Scott returned to Lewiston. On advice from his father-in-law, he bought a small cotton mill in North Auburn and a woolen mill in Vassalboro, which required much time and travel.

Meanwhile, Annie was doing mountains of wash, baking pies on a wood stove a dozen at a time, and still finding time to make the family’s clothing. One record shows Scott paid her 25 cents for making him a pair of pants.

Success was on their doorstep when Scott purchased the Cumberland Woolen Mill in Lewiston with the financial backing of Henry McKenney Dingley, son of a Maine governor and congressman. Business expansion followed, including their acquisition around 1890 of the empty Lincoln Mill (built in 1845 and soon to be called W.S. Libbey Co.). There had been a bumper crop of potatoes in Aroostook County, and Scott Libbey bought carloads of surplus potato starch. He stored it in the old mill, sold it at a profit and bought new machinery for the mill.

End of story? Far from it. In later years, his travels led to fruit growing in Central America and a cracker factory in Mexico. Libbey and Dingley built Deer Rips Dam on the Androscoggin, and that provided electricity for their development of the Lewiston-to-Portland Interurban trolley line. It was Libbey’s proudest achievement, but he died two months before the inaugural run of the trolley in 1914.

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and an Auburn native. You can e-mail him at [email protected].