Part of an occasional series on places across North America named for the Morrill family.

Six miles west of Belfast, on land once carved out of General Henry Knox’s Waldo Patent, sits the oldest of all the namesake towns. According to the town’s own history, the first settlers arrived as early as 1794, more than sixty years before the place had a name of its own.

That name came out of a family quarrel, more or less. Morrill started life as the north end of neighboring Belmont, and for years the town’s two halves had been at odds — the north and south sides each accusing the other of shortchanging them on how town officers were apportioned, how taxes were assessed and collected, and how expenses got split. In 1854, fed up, the northern half circulated a petition to break away entirely. The legislature obliged the following year: on March 3, 1855, the north end of Belmont became its own town, incorporated as Morrill — named for the man who happened to be governor of Maine that season, Anson P. Morrill (1803–1887).

It has stayed a small place ever since. The 1870 census counted 523 residents; the 2020 census counted 971 — roughly double, after a century and a half.

Anson Morrill’s path to the governor’s chair started nowhere near it. As a boy in Belgrade, he split his time between the local school and his father’s mill complex — a grist mill, a carding machine, a sawmill — working whenever the machinery was running and the classroom wasn’t. He became a storekeeper first at Dearborn, then at North Belgrade, and by 1834 had moved on to East Madison to open a store of his own. His real business breakthrough came in 1844, when he took charge of a failing woolen mill at Reading. He turned it around, and ended up owning it outright. Only alongside all of this did the political offices accumulate — postmaster, state representative, county sheriff, state land agent. Nothing in any of it would have predicted what came next.

Then, in 1854, everything changed. The Kansas-Nebraska Act had just reopened the poisonous old question of slavery in the territories, and it split Maine’s Democratic Party clean in two. Morrill seized his moment. He ran as the candidate of an unlikely coalition — disaffected Democrats, Whigs, Free-Soilers, and Know-Nothings, thrown together by circumstance more than conviction. No one won a popular majority, so the legislature settled the matter and put Morrill in the governor’s chair.

Within months, that same patchwork coalition had a new name: the Republican Party. Which makes Anson Morrill, however accidentally it happened, the first Republican governor anywhere in America.

He used his single year in office to push strict enforcement of the Maine Law, the state’s pioneering prohibition statute. Afterward came a term in Congress, then the presidency of the Maine Central Railroad.

His younger brother went further still. Lot Myrick Morrill was governor of Maine himself by 1858, then spent fifteen years in the U.S. Senate. There he steered the 1862 bill that freed every enslaved person in the District of Columbia — Lincoln signed it into law. He chaired the Senate’s very first Committee on Appropriations. In 1868, he voted to convict President Andrew Johnson at his impeachment trial. And in 1876, Grant made him Treasury Secretary, where Wall Street’s hard-money men liked what they heard, especially his insistence on shoring up the nation’s gold reserves ahead of a return to the gold standard. He finished his career, fittingly, as customs collector at the port of Portland.

So who were these two brothers, and where did they come from?

Their father was Peaslee Morrill (1771–1855), of Berwick and later Belgrade. His own family line runs back four further generations, and it’s worth following. Peaslee was the son of another Peaslee Morrell, born in North Berwick in 1748. That Peaslee was the son of Peter Morrell, born in Berwick in 1709. And Peter was the son of John Morrell, born around 1675 in Kittery — himself the son of the original immigrant John Morrell, one of the two founding immigrants this whole family history traces back to.

As for the town itself — it remains, in spirit, exactly what it always was. A quiet farming community, tucked among ponds and low hills near Quantabacook Lake.

Sources

Biographical detail on Anson and Lot Morrill is drawn from the Blaine House (Maine’s official governors’ history), the National Governors Association, and the Miller Center’s presidential-cabinet archive. Detail on Anson’s early working life (the family mill in Belgrade, his storekeeping and woolen-mill years before politics) is drawn from biographical sketches indexed via the U.S. House of Representatives’ history office and Maine: An Encyclopedia. Detail on the town’s founding — its 1794 first settlement and the dispute with Belmont that led to the 1855 split — comes from the USGenWeb/Rootsweb town history page for Morrill, itself drawn from Timothy W. Robinson’s History of the Town of Morrill in the County of Waldo and State of Maine, from Its First Settlement in 1794 to 1887 (1944), the standard local history. Population figures are from the 1870 and 2020 U.S. censuses. The generation-by-generation lineage comes from this site’s own master genealogy, cross-checked against its underlying documentary citations — chiefly a paginated published Morrill genealogy and the family’s own recollections.