Ancestors

James Marion Mitchell

James Marion Mitchell was born on 20 April 1878, the third child of Charles H. Mitchell, who had gone to the Civil War with Company I of the 32nd Maine Infantry, and Lucy Jane Lakin. He grew up on Moose Hill, the ridge on the Fayette side of Livermore Falls where the Moose Hill church and cemetery stand.

He went to work at six years old in a bobbin mill. In those days, his wife said long afterwards, children worked. As a young man he went to sea for many years as a stoker, shovelling coal into ships' boilers, and then worked in the woods in Virginia. In February 1909 his father was killed by a train, and he came home to the funeral. There he met Nettie Estelle Plant, a schoolteacher of twenty-three from the Plant farm on Moose Hill. He stayed home, and on Saturday evening 21 August 1909, at eight o'clock, they were married at his own house on Moose Hill by the Rev. J. A. Mitchell of Limington, assisted by the Rev. Ozro Roys, with the double ring service. C. Ralph Mitchell stood as best man and Faymie Barden as bridesmaid. After refreshments the couple left on the ten o'clock train for two weeks in Lewiston.

He took work at the International Paper Company's mill at Chisholm, the mill village of Livermore Falls, and became a grinder man, tending the machines that ground pulpwood against stone for newsprint. One summer the mill had a serious strike and he earned fifteen dollars all season; the family lived on what Nettie raised on the farm. The strike ended in a compromise and a small raise. He worked eleven- and thirteen-hour days, and the biggest pay cheque he ever brought home was twenty-six dollars.

They had ten children, of whom seven grew up: Marion, Lucie (1914), Roger (1916), Charles Ralph (1918), Margaret, Almon Waters (1923) and Phoebe Constance (1925). Roger died in May 1932 at fifteen. James died on 7 March 1936 at Fayette, aged fifty-seven, leaving, as a newspaper put it in 1961, "his half-grown brood in their mother's capable hands". There was no Social Security when he died, and Nettie got none. He is buried at Moose Hill Cemetery under a flat granite marker that says FATHER.

If James Marion Mitchell is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "James Marion Mitchell (1878-1936)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/james-marion-mitchell-1878-1936-0389e3.