‘Courthouses’ not a light read

THE COURTHOUSES OF MAINE, by Robert K. Sloane, Maine Lawyers Review, P.O. Box 6663, Portland 04101, paperback, 1998, 272 pages, $30 plus $5 shipping, handling and state sales tax.

Robert Sloane’s history of Maine’s courthouses, presumably the first ever written, isn’t exactly bedtime reading. The senior editor of the Maine Lawyers Review, a bi-weekly publication devoted to legal cases and commentary, chronicles rapes, stabbings, hangings and enough bickering among jealous townspeople over new courthouse design and location to make even F. Lee Bailey blanch.

His early chapters are dense at times, beginning with early English law and stories of how the 17th century residents of York County in the Province of Maine, later called the District of Maine, began to mold a rigid court system into the flexible network of courts many take for granted today.

But because the author knows his law and how to marry history with storytelling, his book, based on a series of articles he wrote for the Review from 1993 to 1998, is seldom dull. Everything about it is quality, from the crisp writing style, to the wonderful maps and old black and white photographs (and contemporary ones taken by his son, Jacob) showing imposing courthouses in Maine’s 16 counties, to the book’s layout and design, with wide margins on each page for copious note-taking.

He even persuaded Vincent McKusick, former chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, to write the introduction and compile the four appendices at the back of the book, listing all members of the Supreme Court, from Prentiss Mellen, who served from 1820 to 1834, to the most recent, Susan Calkins, who began serving on Sept. 2, 1998. Also listed are members of the state superior court, beginning with its formation in 1930, in addition to information on U.S. District Court judges.

The book’s 19 chapters, 16 of which are devoted to the evolution of Maine’s counties, contain helpful footnotes, encouraging further research. There’s also a nine-page bibliography. Curiously, though, Sloane chose not to aid the reader with an index. He also could have included photographs of human beings; there are none. He mentions Wilfred Mansur, who designed the Penobscot County Courthouse in Bangor (1903) and the 1895 Caribou courthouse, as well as Boston architect Gridley J.F. Bryant, who drew up plans for the Androscoggin County Courthouse in Auburn, completed in 1857 and still in use today. Photographs of these, and other important figures, and even some of the scoundrels tried in Maine’s courtrooms, would have enlivened his book.

One comes away from Sloane’s history with renewed appreciation for today’s civilized, multilayered court system. It must have been a cruel world when prisoners were chained in dungeons and men and women were subjected to public whippings simply because they fell into debt. It also must have been difficult living in towns like Castine, once the county seat of Hancock County, when a public vote named Ellsworth as the new shiretown. In the early days, before Waldo County was established and before major population shifts, Belfast residents endured choppy boat rides across Penobscot Bay to attend court proceedings in Castine.

The Pownalborough Courthouse in Dresden is pictured on the book’s cover. Visitors to this museum near Wiscasset can explore all the nooks and crannies of Maine’s oldest existing courthouse, opened for use in 1762 when Pownalborough was the shiretown of Lincoln County. The young Boston attorney, John Adams, arrived on horseback at the courthouse in 1765, encountering nearly impassable roads and battling sickness along the way.

In 1791, when Maine’s population was sparse and its counties numbered only five, the defendant in Bangor’s first murder case was taken all the way to Pownalborough to stand trial. He was found innocent and the murder of fur trader Joseph Junin in his riverside cabin remains unsolved 208 years later.

Fires in Portland and other towns have wreaked havoc with courthouses. It is miraculous that so many stand like proud sentinels in the downtowns of Maine’s county seats. It’s no fluke the courtrooms in most are located upstairs, for the same reason church sanctuaries often weren’t built on the ground level: To look upward instills a sense of awe.

Thanks to Robert Sloane for looking upward and inspiring this awe in us all with a very ambitious history of a worthy subject.