Summer of 1900

The Summer of 1900 marks the season when the revival preacher Colson recast Ilium as a promised haven, and his language of sanctification became the town’s enduring name. The revival’s exuberant faith and extraordinary harvest gave way to a hurried departure, sexual and financial exploitation, and consequences that exposed the cost of the story the town chose to tell about itself.

The Revival and Its Promise

Twenty-two years after the preceding events, Colson bypassed Derry and pitched his tent in Ilium. Myrtle Duplissey, the town’s self-appointed historian, later became convinced that Colson was really Cooder, the illegitimate son of Albion Cooder; the account leaves his identity uncertain. By harvest time, he had won most of the town’s Christians to his lively form of faith, drawing people away from the Methodist and Baptist ministers who served Ilium and neighboring communities.

That summer’s crops were so abundant that ordinary descriptions of a bumper harvest seemed inadequate. Colson made the yield part of his religious argument: in an August sermon, he presented the harvest as a sign of God’s reward and described Ilium as sanctified, a haven resembling the home Adam and Eve had known before the Fall. The congregation answered his declaration with an amen. His appeal joined local prosperity to a claim of sacred identity, making the town itself seem to embody the promise he preached.

The revival’s meetings, held on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays beside Derry Road, grew louder and more emotionally charged. Methodist minister Mr. Hartley was alarmed as members of his ordinarily restrained congregation began speaking in tongues and holy rolling. He objected to the revival’s fervor, but his misgivings could not halt its growth. Even after Colson’s character was exposed, some former congregants remembered admiringly how powerfully he had shouted for Jesus.

Renaming Ilium

Colson turned his idea of a sanctified haven into a proposal to change Ilium’s name. He argued from the pulpit that a town associated with God’s harvest and haven should not bear a name he disparaged as belonging to a foreigner. Talk of changing Ilium to Haven began the next day. The name was therefore not simply a label for the revival’s religious mood: it was a civic decision prompted by Colson’s sermon and its effort to define the town’s identity.

The proposal met resistance. Mr. Crowell protested listlessly, while Mr. Hartley opposed the change more strongly, especially after Colson had fled and proved, in Hartley’s view, a thief, fornicator, false prophet, and deceiver. The selectmen remained neutral and noted the practical expense: twenty dollars to amend the incorporation papers in Augusta and probably another twenty to replace the road signs, apart from revised stationery and letterheads.

At the March 27, 1901 town meeting, Article 14 asked whether Incorporated Maine Town No. 193 should change its name from Ilium to Haven. Hartley arrived expecting the motion to be defeated. The discussion was brief, and the town voted for the change. The result fixed Colson’s religious metaphor in civic life even though he had left months earlier.

The Harvest Home Revival and Colson’s Departure

Colson called his culminating gathering the great Harvest Home Revival of 1900. For weeks he had described it as the most important meeting he would hold in town, perhaps even the most important of his life, and suggested that he increasingly felt called to settle there. That prospect stirred excitement among women in his congregation. He presented the meeting as a love-offering to God for the growing season and its harvest.

The evening also brought Colson’s own harvest. He urged attendees to give the largest offering of his stay, then had sex with six young women in the field behind the tent after the meeting. The revival’s order of events sharpened the contrast between public devotion and private exploitation: preaching continued until ten, gospel singing until midnight, and the sexual encounters well past two in the morning. The contributions were generous, though local gossip disagreed about the precise sum; Colson had also benefited from free meals, a borrowed buggy, and other forms of hospitality.

On the morning of September 8, the tent and preacher were gone. Colson had left after the September 7 meeting, taking the money and disappearing before the town’s later vote on his proposed name. His language of a divine harvest thus accompanied a plainly material one: he departed with cash and had exploited women who had welcomed him as a religious leader.

Consequences and the Town’s Inheritance

Between January 1 and the late-March town meeting of 1901, nine illegitimate children—three girls and six boys—were born in the area. The account notes that the babies shared striking features: six had blue eyes, and all were born with thick black hair. Local gossip also speculated about young women sent downstate or to New Hampshire and Massachusetts, as well as married women who gave birth during the same period. The precise extent of Colson’s sexual exploitation remained a matter of rumor, but the births made its consequences visible.

The most devastating episode followed the town’s vote. On March 29, two days after the name change, Faith Clarendon gave birth to a boy. Midwife Cora Simard saw Paul Clarendon stand over the baby’s crib for more than an hour, mistaking his fixed stare for wonder. When she woke from a doze, Clarendon was holding a straight razor. He seized the child by its blue-black hair and cut its throat; afterward, he went to the bedroom and killed Faith and himself. The sequence makes the revival’s legacy more than a contest over religious language: its sexual consequences and the civic identity adopted in its wake converge in a family catastrophe.

The period’s memory remains divided between Colson’s persuasive performance, the community’s adoption of Haven, and the harm that followed. The name endured after its preacher had vanished; its origin carried both the promise of refuge and the record of how religious authority, harvest imagery, and local hopes could be used to serve a charismatic outsider. Much later, the Reverend Lester Goohringer would privately think of a plan involving the church bells as simple and beautiful, then rewire the church basement fuse box to supply the required voltage. The later episode echoes how religious settings and their instruments could be redirected, though it does not erase the very different history of Colson’s revival.