Calais Academy Class of 1905
Since it is once again graduation season, I’d like to share this photo of the 1905 graduating class of Calais Academy.
Source: My Personal Collection
Since I first wrote about them a few years ago, a couple more graduates have been identified.
Here are the names of those in the class. Now, if we could just put each name to the correct face!
Source: My Personal Collection
An asterisk in front of the name indicates that there are no direct descendants living today. Those whose names are highlighted in green have been identified in the photo.
*Vera Pearl Adams – born 18 September 1887 in Calais; died 29 September 1973, Fall River, Massachusetts. She married Perce Chadwick on 21 June 1916 in Calais. They had one son, Charles Adams Chadwick, born 20 January 1923 and died on 24 October 2006, North Scituate, Rhode Island. Charles didn’t marry and had no children.
*Ellen Douglas Bates – born 13 October 1886; died 18 April 1974, Eastport, Maine. Ellen never married.
*Harold Hitchings Burbank – born 1887, Canada; died 1951, Cambridge, Massachusetts; married Alice May Eaton, 10 June 1914, Calais, Maine. It appears they had no children. He was an economics professor at Harvard.
Howard Kenneth Dyer – died November 1973, Portsmouth, NH. He married Lillian Hall and had a son, Kenneth Howard, who apparently did not marry. He died in 2012. Daughter Helen Hall Dyer, who went by Dee, died in 2015, leaving three children. Howard also had ten siblings so there should be family out there. There is definitely a chance to find a photo of him or someone who could recognize him.
Helen Eary Fox – born 27 May 1888, Calais; died 10 November 1953, Brooklyn, New York; married Oscar Fred Bredesen, 14 April 1920, Washington, DC. They had one daughter, Sara Harriet (called Sahara in the 1940 census), born 16 October 1922; died 14 November 1995, possibly in Metairie, Louisiana. She married Arthur Murray Aldag, but it is unknown whether they had any children.
*Luella May Grover – died 1968, Canoga Park, CA. She was an only child. She married Augustine Swanson and in 1930, they were in their 40s, living in Santa Barbara, CA with no children in the home.
*Virginia Harrison Hume – died December 1987, Washington, DC. She married James E. Boody in 1916. James was a theater musician and is last found in a 1960 city directory in DC. She was a government secretary. They had no children.
*Robert Harrison Kirkpatrick – died 6 April 1944, probably in Birmingham, Oakland County, Michigan. He married Laurel Wallace when he was in his 30s and it appears they had no children.
Ida Woods McCoy – married William Lemont Algar in 1919, moved to St. Stephen, Canada. they had at least one daughter, Helen Elizabeth, who married Henry Carl Smythe in 1941 in St. Stephen.
Grace McCullough – died 20 February 1920, Philadelphia, PA in an epidemic. She married Walter Abel Flewelling in 1907. They had three sons. William Morse died a couple of weeks before his mother in the epidemic. Richard Milton Flewelling died in 1988 in MA. It’s unclear whether he married or had children. Herbert Eldridge married and had a military career. He died in 1954 and it’s not clear whether he had any children.
*Ralph Bernard McGinn – died, unmarried on 2 February 1911. Ralph has a sister, Mary Louise who married William John Daly and had children. She died about 1926. He also had a brother, Harold Joseph who died in 1969 in Bangor, Maine. Harold married Florence Angley.
Laura Ethel McKusick – born 8 July 1891; died 1954; married Donald Leigh Fowler, 6 November 1907, Calais, Maine. In 1930, they lived in Smithfield, Rhode Island and had four teenage children, three sons and one daughter.
*Ella Jane McVay – died March 1973 in the Calais, ME area; she never married. She had two sisters, Mary and Annie, but it appears they never married either.
Harold Hale Murchie – born 8 March 1888; died 10 March 1953; married Jessie. Harold became Chief Justice of the Maine Supreme Court. They had two daughters, Barbara, who married Robert Abercrombie and Janice, who married James Briggs in 1945. Barbara had a son and a daughter and one grandchild when she died in 2012. Janice had at least one son.
Florence Louise Randall – married Walter Leroy Hewitt in 1906. They had one son, Randall R. Hewitt, born 1908. The family moved across the water into Canada, where they are in the 1911 and 1921 censuses. Walter and Florence are last found living with her widowed mother in Calais in 1940. Randall married Lillian Henderson in Calais in 1930. They had one daughter, Sandra Barbara, born in 1936 in Canada. The young family was living with his aunt in Calais in 1940. Sandra was in the 1954 graduating class of Calais High School and married Carleton B. Sprague in 1956. They had at least one son, Ralph, who died in 2001. Carleton died in 2003 in Brewer, Maine. Sandra died in 1986 and is buried in Calais Cemetery, but her parents are not buried with her.
*Ethel Pearla Rourke, died 1950, San Antonio, TX. It looks like she was an only child. She married Charles Nowlin II, according to her Social Security record. She may have been his second wife and no record of any children has been found.
Please contact me if you recognize anyone else in this graduation photograph.
Interesting stories. How did you decide to write about this class?
Here from Decluttering the Stuff.
My great grand aunt was Pearl Adams, who is in the photo. I wanted to try to connect the names in the graduation program I inherited with this photo, which Aunt Pearl also owned. It hasn’t been easy since many don’t seem to have any living descendants today.
Hi Linda, Laura E. McKusick is my Great Grandmother. She married Donald Leigh Fowler and they had 4 children.
I am the granddaughter (one of three) of Ethel Laura McKusick.
She was born in Calais on July 8, 1886. She married Donald
Leigh Fowler 6 November 1907 at her family home which was
number 9 Temprence St. I visited the McKusick home site a
year ago, only to find it no longer standing. E L McK died
August 28, 1954 in Warwick, RI near where her daughter
Carmen (named for Carmen Ganong) and her family lived.
Steve Sallsbury, above, is the son of Ethel’s 2nd grandaughter.
Anne Fowler. There were also five grandsons. Ethel is buried with her family in the Calais Cemetery. I was very happy to find my grandmother’s school picture.
Hi Portia, I’m pleased you found your grandmother’s photo of her Calais Academy graduation in 1905. I wish I could identify all the other students in the photo. It’s a treasure!