The Baldwin Collection

Extract

I most heartily Congratulate You on the Completion of the Middlesex Canal, the Judgment and Perseverence with which that Stupenduous work hath been Conducted will deservedly render the Name of Baldwin as Immortal as the Middlesex Canal it Self.

Thus read a letter written to Colonel Loammi Baldwin, the able engineer, by his friend and former partner, Josiah Pierce, on December 25, 1802. But today that monument is but a dry ditch and “the canal in any complete form remains principally as a faint memory in the minds of some few members of the oldest living generation.” However, another monument, which none of the available biographical accounts has mentioned, remains to remind later generations of the feats of this pioneer engineer and Revolutionary hero — the town which bears his name — Baldwin, in Cumberland County, Maine.