Ancestors

Nettie Estelle Plant

Nettie Estelle Plant was born on 23 March 1886 at Fayette, on Moose Hill, "not too far from the church", the eldest of the four children of Walter W. Plant, a farmer, and Elizabeth Ela. Her father stood six feet two, worked sixteen-hour days for a dollar and came home singing, and bought the first mowing machine in that part of the country, so that people came from miles around to see it. Her grandfather Joseph Plant, a woodsman who had been wounded at the Wilderness in 1864, gathered with his friends at the house on Saturday evenings to tell Civil War stories while the children sat and listened. Her mother's father, the Rev. Roger Ela, had been a circuit-riding preacher; her grandmother Phebe Wadsworth, his widow, wove cloth and sat at her spinning wheel all day.

She could count and say her letters before she was two, taught on the bed beside her father, and read the newspaper before she was four. When she was two a visitor with a Southern drawl gave her a copy of Gulliver's Travels and told her mother, "I tell you, Lizzy, that girl is going to be a teacher." At five she had the cooking and cleaning of the household and could not start school until seven. When she was eight she was lost in the woods for nearly twenty-four hours. The mills shut down and more than five hundred people searched; pieces of her clothing were found at the edge of a quicksand up in Chesterville, more than ten miles from home. She was not frightened, she said, because her grandmother had told her that Jesus would give her anything that was right if she asked, and she kept asking to go home and see her baby sister. She heard a sheep bell, followed the flock, and the sheep took her home.

She went to the one-room Moose Hill School, took a year of advanced study there under Mabel Norcross, and in 1905 entered the new brick high school at Livermore Falls, where she took the college preparatory course, Latin, geometry, algebra, and English from Shakespeare to Chaucer, and graduated with a standing of 96.5. She went on to the Farmington Normal School. At nineteen she began teaching, in the Blaisdell district of Jay, for six dollars a week of which two went for board, and taught term by term wherever she was asked: Jay, Bing's Corner, Bethel, Canton, Gilbertville. "I earned $6 a week and paid $2 of that for board," she said, "and I loved it."

In February 1909 Charles H. Mitchell of Moose Hill was killed by a train, and his son James came home from the Virginia woods for the funeral. They met, and on Saturday evening 21 August 1909 she married James Marion Mitchell at his house on Moose Hill, in white nun's veiling with lace front and silk sash, and left on the ten o'clock train for a fortnight in Lewiston. She taught until that month and never went back to the classroom. He worked at the paper mill at Chisholm, eleven and thirteen hours a day, and she ran the farm on Fayette Ridge Road, which fed them through a summer-long strike when he earned fifteen dollars. They had ten children; seven lived to grow up. He died in March 1936, leaving the younger ones half grown, and there was no Social Security for his widow. She kept the farm. In May 1950 the census found her at sixty-four, head of the fifth house on Fayette Ridge Road, keeping house for her son Charles, her five-year-old grandson Carrol Walton, and three elderly lodgers, one of them a widowed wood cutter. "In the past 25 years I have taken care of a great many children," she said in 1976. "One man called it The Refuge. They'd just walk in and say, 'May I stay?'"

From the year she left high school she was the Fayette correspondent of the Livermore Falls Advertiser, and she was still writing its sports and Moose Hill Church columns at eighty-nine. She wrote poetry; her poem "My Grandad", about Joseph Plant and his axe, was printed in the Congressional Record. When the Starling Grange opened a library at Fayette in 1952 with seven hundred volumes she became its volunteer librarian, and by 1961 it held about ten thousand, open every Thursday, with a story hour for the children. Her obituary calls it the Underwood Memorial Library of Fayette. She was a seventh-degree Granger with the golden sheaf for fifty years' membership, a member of the Fayette Corner Church and of the Moose Hill Church, and of the Three Quarter Century Club, and "people came from near and far for information on local historical matters".

In 1976, when she was eighty-nine, a reporter for the Maine Sunday Telegram sat with her and printed her recollections of rural Maine in the 1890s: the games the children played, the poorhouse and the bound-out children, her grandfather's war stories, her recipe for frog ointment and her cure for hiccups. Senator Edmund S. Muskie, who had met her on a visit home, had the whole article printed in the Congressional Record of the Senate on 18 February 1976. That same year the filmmaker David Hoffman, shooting a series of Bicentennial television commercials for Mobil Oil called "An American Album" with ordinary people from across the country, came to Fayette and filmed her at her desk. She told him she had a better story than the commercial, and he shot it separately: the story of Emeline Bachelder, a Fayette outcast she had visited as a child. Twelve years later, with Matthew Collins, he made it into "Sins of Our Mothers", broadcast on 17 January 1989 as the final episode of that season of PBS's The American Experience. The footage of her telling it survives on his channel.

She died on Saturday 7 March 1981 at the Kennebec Valley Medical Center in Augusta, two weeks short of her ninety-fifth birthday. She left four daughters, Marion Davenport of Wayne, Lucie Kennison of Greene, Margaret Barbioni of Turner and Phoebe Walton of Chesterville; two sons, Charles of Turner and Almon of Fayette; twenty-seven grandchildren, forty-eight great-grandchildren and six great-great-grandchildren. She is buried with her husband at Moose Hill Cemetery.

If Nettie Estelle Plant is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Nettie Estelle Plant (1886-1981)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/nettie-estelle-plant-1886-1981-b0af05.