No. 601] CHABLE8 OTIS WHITMAN 7 



He declined to join the first church started at Buckfield 

 as he did not believe its creed. Of other founders and 

 early settlers of Buckfield it is known that they were 

 hunters and were attracted to the locality by observations 

 made on hunting expeditions. Such were Nathaniel Buck 

 ''a man of great physical strength and endurance, and 

 noted for being an expert hunter and skilled in wood- 

 craft"; Thomas Allen, a deserter from the English army 

 to the side of the colonists, a man of adventurous disposi- 

 tion, fiery temper and obstinate in his opinions ; and Ben- 

 jamin Spaulding who had retired from Chelmsford, near 

 Lowell, Mass., to this wilderness, partly to avoid certain 

 financial obligations and partly to trap and hunt.^ Ox- 

 ford County was, indeed, as much a frontier of civiliza- 

 tion at the end of the eighteenth century as the Rocky 

 Mountains were fifty years later and attracted much the 

 same sort of adventurers, lovers of untouched nature, the 

 forests and wild animals. It was the sort of blood from 

 which naturalists might be expected to arise, and from 

 Oxford County and from the adjacent counties of Cum- 

 berland and York have arisen such men as A, E. Verrill, 

 of Greenwood, H. C. Bumpus, of Buckfield, and C. 0. 

 Whitman, of Woodstock (Oxford Co.) ; E. S. Morse, of 

 Portland; A. S. Packard, of Brunswick (Cumberland 

 Co.) ; Geo. B. Emerson, of Wells, and Geo, L. Goodale, of 

 Saco (York Co.) ; and Elliot Coues from just over the 

 boundary at Portsmouth, N. H. 



Charles Otis Whitman was born December 12, 1843, in 

 Woodstock, Me. As a boy he attended the town schools 

 at Woodstock and Waterford, and worked on the home 

 place. During the summers of 1857 and 1858, while at 

 Waterford, he helped his father's brother, Elhanan, on 

 the farm, as Elhanan 's daughter, Mrs. H. D. Smith, of 

 Norway, Maine, recalls very well. He was a good-na- 

 tured boy and good company to his cousins. His cousin 

 can not recall that he was engrossed in birds at that time; 

 but by 1860 he had made a considerable collection which 



3 Cole and WTiitman, 1915, pp. 24-5. 



