The Great Harvest Home Revival of 1900 was a religious campaign in Ilium that transformed the town’s public identity: Preacher Colson joined the promise of a miraculous harvest to the idea of a divinely sanctified haven, and his language helped inspire the change from Ilium to Haven. The revival’s exuberant worship and rhetoric of abundance carried a darker exchange beneath them—cash, sexual exploitation, and consequences that continued after the preacher disappeared.

Colson and the Revival’s Rise

Colson arrived in Ilium as a fast-talking revival preacher, having bypassed Derry. Myrtle Duplissey, the town’s self-appointed historian, later became convinced that his real name was Cooder and that he was the illegitimate son of Albion Cooder; the narrative leaves that identification as her belief, not established fact. By the time the corn was ready for picking, Colson had won over most of the town’s Christians with his lively version of the faith.

His success unsettled the established clergy. Mr. Hartley, who served Methodists in Ilium and Troy, watched previously restrained worshipers speak in tongues and engage in holy rolling. The meetings in the tent beside Derry Road, held on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, grew louder and more emotionally charged. Hartley privately described the spectacle as something that would be called hysteria in a carnival tent, though within the revival it could be named Pentecostal Fire. The contrast between familiar congregational order and the revival’s escalating fervor made the meetings a challenge to local religious authority as well as a popular attraction.

Colson’s appeal also drew strength from the extraordinary 1900 growing season. The soil, ordinarily poor and stingy, produced a harvest of exceptional abundance. Against that material backdrop, Colson preached harvest not merely as agricultural yield but as a sign of God’s reward. The season gave his promises a persuasive local immediacy: abundance could be experienced in the fields and imagined as a spiritual promise for the town.

Harvest Language and the Naming of Haven

On a hot August night, Colson’s sermon moved from the harvest as a symbol of divine reward to the identity of Ilium itself. He called the town sanctified and described finding a haven there, likening it to the land Adam and Eve knew before they ate the forbidden fruit. The congregation answered with an amen. The scene joined the revival’s biblical imagery to a claim about local place: Ilium was not simply a town where Colson happened to preach, but a community he represented as specially favored.

Colson then argued that a town promising God’s harvest and haven should not bear a name derived, in his account, from an Italian. He attributed Ilium’s name to the devil’s work in the preceding generation. Talk of changing the name began the next day. The clergy were divided in their responses: Mr. Crowell protested listlessly, while Hartley opposed the proposal more strongly. Ilium’s selectmen treated the issue as a practical municipal matter, noting the costs of revising the incorporation papers in Augusta and replacing road signs, as well as the stationery and letterheads that would need updating.

The proposal eventually reached the March town meeting as Article 14, asking whether Incorporated Maine Town No. 193 should change its name from Ilium to Haven. Colson had already left before that vote. The revival thus outlasted its preacher as a public argument and as a name: the haven language that had first been part of his sermon became attached to the town’s enduring identity.

The Harvest Home Meeting and Colson’s Departure

Colson called his final major gathering the Great Harvest Home Revival of 1900. For weeks he presented it as the most important meeting he would hold that year, perhaps the most important of his life, and suggested that God might be calling him to settle in town. That prospect stirred the women who admired him. He framed the meeting as a love-offering to God in gratitude for the growing season and harvest.

The evening’s offering had two forms. Colson urged the congregation to give the largest financial love-offering of his stay, and after the meeting he had sex with six young women in the field behind the tent. The account describes three of his conquests as virgins before his arrival. The meeting’s progression—preaching until ten, gospel singing until midnight, and sexual activity continuing past two—makes the gap between the language of devotion and the preacher’s conduct explicit. The women had also competed to bring him meals, while the owner of the hostelry lent him a buggy and his nightly entertainment cost him nothing. The financial generosity was widely remembered, though local gossips disagreed about its exact amount.

On the morning of September 8, 1900, both tent and preacher were gone. Colson had taken the money and left after the Harvest Home meeting, having exploited the devotion and hospitality that had sustained his campaign. His flight made the revival’s promises look less like pastoral commitment than a means of gaining material and sexual advantages. Yet his departure did not undo the movement he had helped create: the name-change discussion continued, and the consequences of his sexual conduct surfaced in the months that followed.

Children, Violence, and the Revival’s Aftermath

Between January 1 and the late-March town meeting of 1901, nine illegitimate children—three girls and six boys—were born in the area. All were reported to resemble one another: six had blue eyes, and all had thick black hair. Local gossip also speculated about young women who had left to visit relatives elsewhere and married women who had given birth, but those rumors are not presented as confirmed cases. The children’s shared appearance, by contrast, was treated as evidence of Colson’s lasting physical legacy in the community.

Two days after the town voted to change its name, a particularly brutal consequence unfolded at the home of Paul and Faith Clarendon. After Faith gave birth to an eight-pound boy, the midwife, Cora Simard, saw Paul stand over the crib for more than an hour. When she awoke from a doze, he was holding a straight razor. He seized the baby by its blue-black hair and cut its throat; he then went into the bedroom, cut Faith’s throat, took her hand, and cut his own. The child’s appearance connects the killing to the pattern associated with Colson’s illegitimate offspring, while the timing places the family catastrophe immediately after the municipal renaming vote. The account does not establish a direct motive for Paul’s actions, so the proximity of the events should not be mistaken for a stated explanation.

The revival’s aftermath therefore resists a simple story of religious enthusiasm followed by a clean return to ordinary life. Colson’s harvest imagery helped give Ilium a new public name, but his conduct left a record of exploitation and children born after his departure; in one household, that legacy coincided with the violent deaths of a newborn and both parents. The revival’s promise of abundance became inseparable from the costs hidden beneath it, while the town retained the word haven that Colson had made central to his preaching.