When in his Senior year as a theological student Mr. Kellogg went to Harpswell to preach for some weeks, his personality and his preaching, his love of the sea and his kindly human qualities, so won the hearts of the Harpswell people that they besought him to return to Harpswell after his graduation, and become their pastor. To their urgent request he yielded, being himself much attracted by the people and their home by the sea. It was in 1844 that he was publicly installed over the church, and the official tie of pastor to the Harpswell church was severed only by his death.
Harpswell, Maine, is a seaboard, almost a sea-girt, town. It is made up of a long, narrow neck of land and forty islands, some containing hundreds of acres, others almost entirely covered by the tide. Indenting the shore of this peninsula and the larger islands are sheltered inlets of deep water well suited to the building and harboring of ships. Hither came, during the first half of the eighteenth century, from Boston, Scituate, York, and other settlements, men and women of Puritan stock and Puritan ways of thinking; and here grew up large families, hardy and God-fearing, some farmers, but most of them fishermen, sailors, and ship-builders.
Elijah Kellogg could not long attend Bowdoin College, only a few miles distant, without being attracted to these sea-going people of Harpswell; for Kellogg was born with webbed feet. When hardly out of the cradle, family tradition has it, he went to sail in Back Cove, Portland, with a sugar-box for a boat and his shirt for a sail. As a youngster he would often steal to the Fore Street wharves to watch the ships, and he was never so happy as when listening to the yarns which the sailors spun. He says of himself, “At ten years of age I began to climb the rigging, and at fifteen went to sea.” His years in the “fo’c’sle,” with all their perilous and disagreeable tasks, only intensified his love for the water. As a Freshman he took supreme delight in sailing with a good comrade, on a Saturday afternoon, in his little cat-rigged boat, the _Cadet_, among the islands of Casco Bay.
One of these half-holiday expeditions affected, as it happened, his whole after-life. The _Cadet_, belated by wind and tide, ran ashore on Birch Island, and “Captain” Kellogg and crew, supperless and weary, sought shelter at the house of Captain John Skolfield. Mr. Kellogg never forgot how cosily the light from the house that evening shone through the hop vines growing over and around the windows. The hospitable islander gave the wayfarers a warm welcome and a plentiful supper; for which hospitality, before the evening ended, Kellogg, full of stories of college and the sea, made his host feel well repaid. Thus began his acquaintance with the Birch Islanders,--the Skolfields, Curtises, and Merrimans,--an acquaintance which was to ripen into a life-long friendship. The men on this island, hardy, powerful, and fearless, at once became heroes in the admiring eyes of this venture-loving student. After this he spent many happy hours building boats, gunning and fishing with Captain John, or spinning yarns and reading aloud with “Uncle Joe” Curtis,--a man who read every book he could get hold of and who remembered everything he read.