George E. Morgan (October 9, 1870 – 1969) was a Maine folk artist. Early life George Eugene Morgan was born to George William and Vesta Rowena Farnham Morgan of Chelsea (three and a half miles west of Gardiner, Maine). As a young man and as most in the area, Morgan found work along the Kennebec, first in Augusta with a furniture maker, then for many years as a harness maker, and then for even more years he worked in the shoe factories of Gardiner (Commonwealth Shoe Company and then R. P. Hazzard Company). He was ranked a sergeant in the Maine Militia and when World War I broke out, Morgan already forty-seven was deemed too old for service. He married twice and had five children. Artistic career In the spring of 1962, Morgan was ninety-one years old and living in a rest home in Gardiner. Morgan was not one to sit idle and though sketching on paper and cardboard occupied him for some time, he ached for something more. Word got out and apparently through some connection at the home, Morgan was introduced to a local folk art and antiques dealer, Anne Wardwell of Farmingdale. When Wardwell met Morgan she must have seen something that inspired her. In the words of Howard Rose, from Unexpected Eloquence, "Mrs. Wardwell seems to have had one of the great prophetic eyes in dealerdom." Wardwell became his benefactor or more so his enabler, providing him with brushes, paints, turpentine and canvas boards. Over the next eighteen months Morgan created twenty plus remarkable memory paintings. A number of factors come to play as to why Morgan chose the subjects that he did and how he painted them—the bicentennial of Hallowell (which fueled a desire to see the Kennebec River towns for what they once were), his age (an old mind best remembers events and details of one's youth than of the more recent), a lack of mobility (living in a rest home and having an indifference to car travel limited his ability to paint these towns en plein air), and though it is usually said of writing, it could be inferred that he thought of the adage, "write [paint] what you know." As a resident of Kennebec County for nearly one hundred years, Morgan knew the environs of Hallowell, Gardiner and Randolph better than anyone alive. It is true that for most the immediate attraction