|Carl Wilcox|
Gloucester Hill has a 499-foot elevation. From where the sun is rising it is 43 miles to the east to the Atlantic ocean. If the camera was rotated to the right to the southeast, it is 2.5 miles to my house down in the dark valley and 14 miles to the Atlantic ocean.
In New Gloucester there was a battle to separate church from the state, I’m sure one of many across the nation. From New England settlement to the early 1800s, the Congregational Church was the New England state church. It was/is a spinoff of the Puritan church. A portion of people’s property taxes paid to the Town funded the church. Down in my part of town in the valley the residents resented that. Maybe they also disliked the pastor. Or, they didn’t like climbing the hill on Sunday mornings to the Congregational Church. Some of them refused to pay the church assessment tax. 1/2 mile down the road from my house they started to meet and hold church in a home at Fogg’s Corner. They started a Universalist church parish, which today is now the Unitarian Universalist church, a very liberal church. The town fathers, selectmen, all men back then, women couldn’t vote, seized Mr. Woodman’s oxen for failure to pay his taxes. That is like seizing one’s truck if you are trucker. Oxen were needed to plow the fields, etc. The big field seen in the morning light in the foreground of the photo was Woodman’s farm.
The people in my section of town, the liberal eastern section, built a church on a small plot of land given by the farm we own. The neighborhood parish held a protest march from the home church 1/2 mile to the north of our house to 1/2 mile south of our house to the new Universalist church building. Property taxes stopped funding the Congregational Church. I don’t know if Woodman ever got his oxen back or had to get a new team. The Universalist parish continued til about 1950. The building still stands on its little lot. One small battle in separation of church and state done.
