Gilbert Patten
In early September when William should have been returning to studies at Corinna Union Academy a strange weariness overtook him. Day by day he became weaker and unable to work. His condition worsened until he was bedridden with fever and delirium. He was gravely ill. The doctor diagnosed his condition as typhoid, a bacterial infection usually spread through contaminated food or water. The doctor told Cordelia that her son would probably not survive. Distraught, Mrs. Patten did her best to care for her son. In a moment of consciousness she told him of the diagnosis. William said, “Mother, I am not going to die.”
One night, when he seemed at his worst, Alice spent most of the night at his bedside. When he awoke she was gone but he was better. Soon his health improved and he made a gradual but complete recovery. The doctor was amazed. Patten believed his determination to live had saved him once again. He viewed this as his second escape from death, the first being his self-rescue from the frigid water of the Old Bog after falling through the ice when he was a child.
After he was well recovered and writing again, Alice revealed that her parents were furious that she had spent part of that night at his bedside. They felt she had disgraced herself and the family. Compelled by what Patten described as “some old-fashioned notions about honor” he proposed to Alice and they were married on his twenty-second birthday, October 25, 1888. He did not go back to school.
As his writing career continued to grow William thought more about escaping to the wider world “beyond the blue Dixmont Hills” visible to the South from his home. In the Spring of 1889 he and Alice left Corinna, moving to a house they leased in Camden, Maine. Bill and Cordelia Patten sold their house in Corinna and moved in with their son. During the time he lived in Camden, Patten wrote steadily, selling his stories and novels to a variety of publishers under many pen names. For a while he managed a semi-professional baseball team and wrote for a juvenile monthly magazine, American Young Folks in Manchester, New Hampshire.
William and Alice left his parents in Camden and moved to New York City in 1891. Their son Harvan Barr Patten was born on April 9, 1892. William’s writing career required a somewhat nomadic life. Alice was not suited to traveling and moving around. The incompatibility caused difficulties in their relationship. They were divorced in 1900 after twelve years of marriage. Alice and Harvan moved back to Corinna where Alice felt more at home. With the divorce the connection to his childhood home was severed. Throughout his life William “Gilbert” Patten occasionally returned to Maine to hunt, fish, and visit friends but he never again visited the town of Corinna.
Within a few years Patten married again to Mary Nunn, but the marriage did not last long. He married his third wife, Carol Kramer, on June 27, 1918. They were compatible and lived together until she passed away on August 21, 1938 [7]