Maine is the larger setting for Haven’s history, a place where timber commerce, revival religion, and small-town memory shape the settlement’s identity. The narrative traces the land from an early nineteenth-century timber tract to the town renamed Haven after a preacher’s harvest sermon, while later episodes continue to draw on Maine’s local institutions and remembered past.

Land, timber, and settlement

In 1813, Hugh Crane bought roughly 22,000 acres from Massachusetts, when Maine was still a province, for the equivalent of £1,800. Crane had served as a lieutenant in the Revolutionary War; his father, a Tory who became the twelfth Earl of Montville, disinherited him. Crane responded by naming his purchase Montville Plantation, an irreverent nod to the title denied him. When incorporated, it became the 193rd town in the Massachusetts Province of Maine.

Crane chose the tract for its plentiful timber and its proximity to Derry, twenty miles away, where logs could be floated downriver to the sea. When Crane died in 1826, Montville Plantation had 103 residents. Loggers temporarily doubled that population for six or seven months each year, but many spent their wages in Derry and settled there when they could no longer work in the woods—a threshold that might arrive by about twenty-five. Meanwhile, a permanent settlement began to grow along the muddy road north toward Derry and Bangor.

The road and the town’s early life

The road that loggers used to reach Derry became a line of everyday exchange. At month’s end, workers heading to the larger town often stopped at Cooder’s Tavern and Lodging-House for beer; across the road, Hiram Cooder’s nephew ran a less successful but marginally profitable general store. In 1828, Hiram Cooder’s cousin opened a barbershop and small surgery beside it. These businesses made the growing settlement more than a timber outpost, linking the rhythms of the woods to local commerce and social life.

The road’s name changed over time, though older residents remembered it as plain old Route 9. That persistence of local memory stands beside the town’s repeated renamings: Maine’s settlement history is presented not only through incorporation and commerce, but also through the names residents preserve, contest, and inherit.

Revival and the naming of Haven

In the summer of 1900, a fast-talking revival preacher known as Colson bypassed Derry and pitched his tent in Ilium. The town historian Myrtle Duplissey later suspected that his real name was Cooder and that he was the illegitimate son of Albion Cooder, though the account leaves his identity uncertain. Colson drew many local Christians to his energetic form of faith as the harvest approached. The crops were exceptionally abundant, and the religious meetings became increasingly loud and emotionally intense. The Methodist minister, Mr. Hartley, was alarmed as people who had once worshiped quietly began speaking in tongues and engaging in holy rolling.

Colson’s sermon joined the harvest to the idea of divine reward, then described Ilium as sanctified and as a haven. He argued that a town promising God’s harvest and refuge should not bear a name associated with a foreigner. The following day, discussion began about changing Ilium to Haven. At the March 1901 town meeting, the proposal was approved despite Hartley’s opposition and the practical costs of changing incorporation papers, road signs, and town stationery.

The cost of the revival and its afterlife

Before the vote, Colson had already left. On the night of September 7, 1900, after what he called the Harvest Home Revival, he collected a large offering and had sex with six young women behind the tent; he then disappeared. In the months that followed, nine children were born in the area outside marriage, and local gossip remarked on their shared features, including the black hair of all nine. The revival’s legacy therefore carried both a public name and private consequences, while Colson’s sanctifying language endured even after his conduct exposed its hypocrisy.

Two days after the town voted to change its name, Paul Clarendon killed his newborn son with a straight razor, then killed his wife and himself. The event is part of the town’s history rather than a direct consequence established by the account, but its proximity to the vote darkens the moment when Haven’s new identity was formally adopted. The name that began as a revivalist promise became inseparable from a history in which religious language, civic decision, rumor, and tragedy coexist.

Maine’s local history also remains present in later generations. Ruth Arlene Merrill McCausland was born and raised in Haven and became its constable; the account identifies her as the great-niece of the Reverend Donald Hartley, the minister who had been blindsided by the 1901 vote. Her public life carries the town’s earlier history into the twentieth century, while later scenes involving the Reverend Lester Goohringer and his plans for church bells show religious institutions continuing to shape community life. Across these generations, Maine is not merely a backdrop: its distances, roads, timber economy, congregations, and remembered names give Haven its particular social world.