BOURNE, THOMAS PERKINS (1798-1863)

BOURNE, THOMAS PERKINS, doctor; b. Kennebunk, Me, 27 Dec 1798, s/o John Bourne and h/w Mrs Eliza Wildes; m. 1st, Rowena P. Beckley, of Kennebunk, and 2nd, 1832, Olivia Sarah Weston, of St Stephen, N.B.; d. Newcastle, 22 May 1863.

Thomas P. Bourne's father was a veteran of the Revolutionary War who became a prosperous shipbuilder and merchant at Kennebunk when it was still part of Massachusetts. He was also a representative in the Massachusetts State Legislature.

One of six children of his father's third marriage, Thomas P. Bourne received a gentleman's education at Bowdoin College (BA 1819), after which he was trained as a physician at the Medical School of Maine (MD 1823). The school, which was also on the Bowdoin campus, required a thesis for graduation, and he wrote his on "Insanity." He practiced medicine for shorter periods at Kennebunk and Lubec, Me, and then at Calais, where his first wife died. In March 1832 he was examined for a New Brunswick license, and at the same time married Olivia S. Weston, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a St Stephen physician. He and his bride, who was a niece of High Sheriff Richard S. Clarke, then took up residence in Newcastle.

In the spring of 1832, only Dr Alexander Key had an established medical practice on the Miramichi, and it would appear that there had been no doctor settled at Newcastle since the death of Dr Alexander Stewart in 1827. However, Dr Stafford Benson came to Chatham in the fall of 1832, and Dr John Thomson opened a practice in Newcastle, which left two doctors in each town from 1832 onward.

Bourne had two daughters from his first marriage and was left a son by his second wife, who died in 1834, at age twenty-three. He did not remarry. He raised his son, John Bourne, who died in 1864 at age thirty-one, and gave his name to an illegitimate child, Charles F. Bourne, a Newcastle jeweler, who died in 1879, at age thirty. One of the daughters of his first marriage, Olive P. Bourne, died in Kennebunk, Me, in 1872, at age forty-six, probably at the home of her uncle Edward E. Bourne, who was a well-known barrister and jurist.

The absence of Bourne's name from the newspapers of the day shows that he had a private and outwardly uneventful life. The records of Bowdoin College reveal, however, that he was "a most congenial, agreeable companion, and a musician of rare excellence." His performances on the violin were "simply wonderful, and he was almost another Paganini." In the census of 1861 his religious affiliation was noted as Methodist, but he and the members of his family were previously associated with the Anglican church.