*The Lincoln Historical Society*
*“Did You Know …?” That Lincoln Once Had a Lime Kiln?* * (A What!?)* In 1730, Samuel Dakin with his brothers and three other investors had high ambitions. They formed a partnership for “searching after, digging, and improving all such mines or ores as may be found in or upon the land of” Samuel Dakin. Iron ores were highly valued, and bog iron ore—which forms in iron-rich, swampy water—had been found around Iron Mine Brook near Beaver Pond in Lincoln. The partners hoped a lode of bog iron ore might lie buried beneath Samuel Dakin’s land. Dakin’s mining ambitions, however, were a bust. If the partners ever found “such mines or ores,” they were meager. Fortunately for Samuel Dakin, his father had bequeathed to him a limestone quarry and a kiln for roasting limestone at high heat, converting it into powdery, white lime. The quarry and the lime kiln were located on the Dakin lands bounded by modern Sandy Pond and Baker Bridge roads. For Dakin’s neighbors, it might well have been cursed as “the Lime Kiln Field.” The heat needed to roast limestone into lime required large amounts of wood and produced acrid smoke and toxic fumes. The lime kiln cannot have been a good neighbor. [image: Lime Kiln Illustration 3.jpeg] Lime had many uses in 18th century Lincoln. Weaver Joshua Child used “two pounds of the best rock lime” in his recipe for dyeing cloth. Joshua Brooks used lime at his tannery on the North Road to remove hair from the hides before tanning. And in March 1767, the town paid Joshua Brooks for “eight bushels and half of hair to mix with lime for the meeting house.” The town had built a new gallery in the meeting house, and lime bought from Amos Dakin was mixed with sand and the hair from Brooks’ tannery “to plaster under the galleries in the meeting house.” (The animal hair helped bind the plaster together.) Over the years, the town treasurer’s records are sprinkled with payments for lime to be used in whitewashing the walls of the town’s school houses. It is not clear when the lime kiln in Samuel Dakin’s field ceased belching smoke and fumes. In 1788, Dakin sold his land to a Lincoln newcomer, Zachariah Smith. Whatever became of Dakin’s lime kiln, clearly it had not transformed Lincoln into a mining town. Yet perhaps scattered in that field there still can be found a scorched stone or two that once were part of Lincoln’s ancient lime kiln. ------------ This account of the Dakin lime kiln is indebted to Jack MacLean’s *A Rich Harvest*, which can be purchased from the Lincoln Historical Society. Illustration from Historic England, *Pre-Industrial Lime Kilns* (2018). Donald L. Hafner The Lincoln Historical Society
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