Orchard Cook

Orchard Cook (March 24, 1763 – August 12, 1819) was a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts, whose public career was closely associated with the District of Maine during the early years of the American republic. He was born in Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, on March 24, 1763. Little is recorded about his family background, but he was educated in the public schools of his native town. As a young man he engaged in mercantile pursuits, a common path in the commercial centers of coastal New England, which provided him with experience in business and local affairs that would later inform his public service.

By the mid-1780s Cook had relocated to the District of Maine, then still a part of Massachusetts, and began to assume local responsibilities in public administration. In 1786 he served as Assessor of Pownalborough, a community in Lincoln County that functioned as an important local center of government and commerce. His work as assessor placed him at the intersection of property, taxation, and local governance at a time when the new nation was still stabilizing its fiscal systems following the Revolutionary War.

Cook’s involvement in civic life expanded in the 1790s. From 1795 to 1797 he served as town clerk of New Milford, in the District of Maine, where he was responsible for maintaining official records and documenting local governmental actions. He also held the office of Justice of the Peace, exercising judicial and administrative authority in local matters. In November 1798 he was appointed assistant assessor of the twenty-fifth district, a federal revenue position that reflected the growing complexity of national taxation and administration under the early federal government.

In addition to his judicial and fiscal responsibilities, Cook played a role in the development of higher education in Maine. From 1800 to 1805 he served as an overseer of Bowdoin College, which had been chartered in 1794 and was emerging as a principal institution of higher learning in the region. Concurrently, he advanced in the judicial hierarchy of Lincoln County, serving as judge of the court of common pleas from 1799 to 1810. In that capacity he presided over civil cases and contributed to the establishment of legal order in a frontier region undergoing settlement and economic growth.

Cook entered national politics as a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, which was then ascendant in opposition to the Federalists. He was elected as a Democratic-Republican to the Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Congresses, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives from March 4, 1805, to March 3, 1811. During his tenure in Congress, he represented Massachusetts at a time when the District of Maine formed part of that state, participating in legislative deliberations in the Jeffersonian and early Madisonian eras, which were marked by debates over commerce, foreign policy, and the scope of federal power.

Choosing not to seek renomination in 1810, Cook returned to public service in Maine at the county and local levels. In 1811 he served as Sheriff of Lincoln County, assuming responsibility for law enforcement and the execution of court orders in a large and developing jurisdiction. That same year he was appointed Postmaster of Wiscasset, in Massachusetts’ District of Maine, a position he held from 1811 until his death. As postmaster, he oversaw the distribution of mail and facilitated communication in what was then one of the most active ports and administrative centers in the region.

Orchard Cook died in Wiscasset, then still part of Massachusetts’ District of Maine, on August 12, 1819. He was interred in Evergreen Cemetery. His career, spanning local, judicial, educational, and federal service, reflected the intertwined development of Massachusetts and the District of Maine in the early national period and illustrated the broad range of responsibilities undertaken by public officials in the formative decades of the United States.