What’s in a Lewiston name: Edward Little

Across the Androscoggin River in Auburn, atop Goff Hill, the public high school is named for Edward Little, a 19th-century lawyer and philanthropist.

The Person

Born in 1773, Edward Little was a lawyer in Newburyport, Mass., before moving to what is now Auburn in 1826.

After inheriting a large amount of land, he worked to realize the area’s civic and economic potential. This was long before Benjamin Bates and his fellow industrialists arrived from Boston. Praised by Lewiston’s Evening Journal for his “energy, zeal, and liberality,” Little died in 1849.

The School

Edward Little donated seven acres of rye field and $3,000 to establish Lewiston Falls Academy in 1834 on a small hill overlooking the Androscoggin.

It was renamed Edward Little Institute in 1866 and became Auburn’s public high school in 1873, with the condition that the school always be named for Little, that a portrait hang in the school, and a statue should stand outside.

A new Edward Little High School building was opened in 1961 at the top of Goff Hill. And earlier this month, that building was replaced with a modern facility, adjacent to the old high school.

The Sculpture

Near the high school is a bronze statue of Edward Little. Unveiled in 1877, it was the work of Franklin Simmons, a prominent 19th-century sculptor who attended the Maine State Seminary before it became Bates College.

In 1961 the statue and a portrait were moved from the old downtown building to the new high school.

Among Simmons’ most famous works is a marble sculpture on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Promised Land, an Old Testament phrase inscribed around the sculpture’s base.

According to the Met’s description, the sculpture “depicts a young Hebrew woman in a long sleeveless gown resting against the stump of a palm tree. She wears a laurel wreath indicative of her impending victory, which is her arrival in the land of her forebears.”

The Mascot

Lore has it that Little’s ghost roams the school hallways, which is why the teams were originally called the Red Ghosts (red being the school color).

The nickname evolved to the Red Eddies by the 1940s (it’s not clear why), but the ghost of Edward Little is still part of the school logo.

The House

Edward Little lived in a home on Main Street in Auburn that today is the city’s only remaining example of Federal architecture, according to its nomination to the National Register of Historic Places.