REV. NATHANIEL WEBSTER.

Rev. Nathaniel Webster, Harvard College 1769, was ordained April 14, 1779, the third settled minister of Biddeford succeeding to the pastorate of Rev.
Moses Morrell. He is believed to be the son of Rev. Samuel Webster, D. D., who, graduated at Harvard College 1737, was the minister of Salisbury, Mass.,
and died 1796. The subject of this sketch partook largely of the talents so readily conceded to the name, and acquired the character of a pious and
devoted divine. His ministry closed with his life, in 1728, after being extended thirty-nine years.

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REV. JOHN ADAMS.

Rev. John Adams was the first minister in Washington plantation, incorporated a town February 26, 1794, by the name of Newfield. He was the son of
Mathew Adams, an ingenious and literary mechanic of Boston, whose writing in the New England Journal raised him to public notice. He died in 1753 leaving several children without any other inheritance than an estimable reputation. His son John, above named, born 1732, was graduated at Harvard College in 1745, the father having anxiously labored to give him a liberal education.    Having completed a theological course of reading, he was ordained in 1748 at Durham, in New Hampshire,1 the nephew of Rev. Hugh Adams, the first minister settled in that place. But, unfortunately, the subject of this notice was connected with a people whose opposition, fanaticism and indolence gave him great discomfiture. For in the words of Dr. Eliot, " any man who received a liberal education, who wore a band or black coat, and held a regular service on the Lord's day, was called hireling, thief, wolf, or anything that would make him odious.  So insulted, he was often enveloped in gloom, ready to sink into despondency.

In his best days, however, he was very much the sport of his feelings. Sometimes he was so depressed, as to seem like a being mingling with the dust; then, suddenly, he would mount up to heaven with a bolder wing than any of his contemporaries. This would happen frequently in the pulpit, so that when he had been all the week preparing a sermon which was, according to his own expression, as dull as his feelings, he would take a new text and give a flow to his sentiments and expressions, which were much better than he was ever able to utter with previous consideration. His delivery was then as lively as his fancy." he was called in another publication, u a man of superior natural talents, but rather eccentric in his genius." At length the people became weary of supporting a man they did not like, and of paying their money which they thought they needed more for other purposes in time of war; therefore, they dismissed him in 1768, and it was a dissolution which ministered much to his own relief and comfort.

In a couple of years the proprietors of Newfield believing a preached gospel to be of the first importance in new settlements, freely gave him four hundred acres of land in consideration of which he removed his family into the plantation in February, 1781, when it contained only five or six families. Indeed, the population in 1790 was only two hundred and sixty-two souls. Mr. Adams was a physician as well as a minister, and rendered himself exceedingly useful in both professions, continually doing good, for he preached constantly, somewhere, and practised physic in Newfield, Lexington, Parsonsfield and Limerick till a short time before his death. His home was in Newfield and he died there June 4, 1792, aged sixty years, leaving a character for faith and good works which will not, for ages, wholly be lost in oblivion.

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