Radio Script #14
Little Talk On Common Things
February 13, 1949
Comment about the narrow guage railroads has stirred up a lot of interest. Within ten minutes of the close of the program two weeks ago, Basil Higgins of the Maine Central Railroad, who long ago worked on the Sandy River line, called to tell me that he believed the Sandy River was once three different roads, and this week he called again to confirm the fact and name the roads.
Mrs. Harriett Holmes of High Street, waterville was the first of several persons to tell me about the old two-foot line from Old Orchard to Ocean Park and Ferry Beach. Robert Gay of Silver Street thinks that road was broad gauge, but David Howard of Nash Street supports Mrs. Holmes. Perry Morse of Carter’s Flower Shop says there was once an old two-footer at Searsport, connecting with the wharves. He thinks it might at one time have been two or three miles long.
Harry Jones, who now lives in what was once the East Vassalboro Station of the Wiscasset, waterville and Farmington, tells me that the little road suspended operation into Winslow in 1908 or 1909, about the time when the electric road was built through from Augusta.
In spite of his present place of residence, Mr. Jones says he is more familiar with the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes line. He is one of half a dozen listeners, including Galen Eustis of Mayflower Hill Drive (a native of Strong), who support Basil Higgins’ statement that the Sandy River was once three separate roads. The original one, called the Sandy River, ran from Farmington to Strong. Then there was the Franklin and Megantic from Strong to Kingfield, with a later branch all the way to the foot of Mt. Bigelow. The third was called the Phillips and Rangeley, with a link to the original road between Phillips and Strong. Later a line was built from Dead River Station to Coflin, and Mr. Jones says that branch was called the Eustis Railroad.
Mr. Jones adds an important historical touch when he assures me that the road bed and culverts on the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington Line were originally graded for standard guage, and that the decision to build the narrower track was a reversal of early plans. Speaking of road beds, they last a long time after the line has been abandoned and the rails taken up. Hunters in the Mt. Bigelow region tell me that the old road bed of the narrow guage spur out of Bigelow Station still makes a convenient and recognizable trail.
How many of you are aware that the old road bed of the Maine Central, along the west bank of the Kennebec back of the old Colby campus, is easily recognized to this day; yet I think no one now living remembers when trains ran on that road bed instead of crossing College Avenue at the south end of the campus. F. D. Wood of Clinton sends the information that the railroad from Burnham Junction to Belfast was originally planned as narrow guage. Miss Littlefield of the Waterville High School faculty tells me that the little Monson road always had the local nickname of the peanut bender.
Several Franklin County residents say that the traveler from New Sharon to Farmington can still see Where some of the work was done in preparation for the intended, but never completed, line from Waterville to Farmington. The grading of embankments for bridge-heads and culverts, and other signs of such preliminary work, are still visible.
Who is my authority for the· statement that there were once ten of these narrow guage roads in Maine? He is Linwood W. Moody, author of a little book called “The Edaville Railroad”, the story of Ellis Atwood· s reconstruction of the narrow guage roads of Maine on his cranberry. bog on Cape Cod. I quote from page 3 of Mr. Moody’s book: “The ten two-footers in Maine boasted 212 miles of line. They were built and run like big railroads, and were iImnensely vital to the loves and lives of the neighborhood. Their smoky smells were just as alluring and they could holler just as loud.”
Is Mr. Moody right? Were there once ten of those narrow guage roads in Maine? Well, we know there were the Bridgton and Saco River, the S.andy River and Rangeley Lakes (originally three separate roads), the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington, the Kennebec Central, the Monson. That makes seven if we count the separate roads that made up the Sandy River. Now we know there was an eighth at Old Orchard. What was its name, by the way? And if Perry Morse is right, there was a ninth at Searsport. Where was the tenth, or is Mr. Moody wrong in his arithmetic?
When I attended the funeral last week of Somerset County’s leading woman citizen, Helen Louise Coburn, I was struck by the thought, what a long period of time only two generations can cover. The time from the birth of Miss Coburn’s father to her own death last week encompassed the .entire history of Colby College to date. For Miss Coburn’s father was born in 1817, the year before classes were first held at the Waterville College. There had been only eleven graduations when he entered the college in 1835, and it was 72 years ago when Miss Coburn herself received a Colby diploma. She was four years old when her:· father served· in the thirty-first Congress during the first administration of Abraham Lincoln.
Only twice previously in my life have I been reminded of the long expanse of time a few generations can sometimes cover. In my early teaching days at Hebron Academy I became a close friend of an aged lady, Miss Carrie Tripp. She remembered well her grandfather, Elder John Tripp, who had come to Hebron from Massachusetts in 1799, and who lived to be a very old man. Elder John Tripp had once shaken hands with George Washington. It may seem a very trivial thing to you, but it has always made an impression upon me that I knew well a person who had frequently talked with one who had shaken the hand of WaShington.
My second incident of this sort occurred here in Central Maine. For many years I had known that fine old gentleman, Horatio Adams, who remembered as a boywatching his father make on the kitchen stove America’s first chewing gum. Surely all the old timers have not forgotten Adams I Gum. After several years of cherished acquaintance with Mr. Adams, I came to know his charming wife. One day she told me this incident. When She was a little girl of ten She was visiting in the home of her g:tTaridmother on Long Island, and the grandmother told her how, when She herself was a child of six, Aaron Burr, hiding from public wrath after the duel with Hamil ton, took refuge in her parents’ home, the very house where grandmother was now telling the story to granddaughter. So here again· I was talking with one who had talked with 9- person who had seen the men of prominence in the founding of our nation.
Yesterday was the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, born 140 years ago, in a one room cabin on the Sinking Spring Farm, four miles from what is now the village of Hodgeville, Kentucky. It was a scorching July day in 1939 when I visited that spot, now a great national memorial. High on a hill, which one mounts by a hundred granite steps, stands a beautiful marble edifice within which is enclosed the one-room cabin of the pioneer.
To this cabin, on the day following Lincoln’s birth, came nine-year old Dennis Hanks with his aunt Betsy Sparrow. Telling of the incident years later to Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, Dennis Hanks said: “Nancy let me hold him, and she said, ‘Be keerful of him, Dennis, fur you air the fust boy he’s ever seen!’ I swang him back and forth and he begun to yell bloody murder. So I says to Aunt Betsy, ‘You take him. He’ll never amount to much.’ It Even to nine-year old Dennis Hanks a baby was a common thing. There were lots of them in the cabin homes of the Kentucky frontier. But prophecy is always dangerous, and Dennis was far from the truth when he predicted that little Abe wouldn’ t amount to much.
We live at a time When environment counts for a lot, or at least is believed to count for a lot. With the writer of the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” we like to believe that
“Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.”
How does the poet explain it? “Their lot forbade”, he says. The environment kept these geniuses from having a chance.
According to that theory, if a child has a drunken father and a slovenly mother, don I t expect the child to grow up to amount to anything. And we know, alas, that there is much truth in the theory. If a child comes from a home of poverty, in these days of plenty and social security, don’t expect anything to come of him.
Now the career of Abraham Lincoln is a constant rebuke to that theory. Environment would have made him anything except a great statesman and our most loved President. He might easily have spent his life flat-boating on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. He might perhaps ,have been just a wrestling, storytelling, rail-splitting day laborer of the Sangamon Valley. But he didn’t spend his life that way. He became a reader of books, an eager listener to the talk of men of affairs, he became fired with ambition to rise above the level of the Carey Grove gang, whose leader he had twice out-wrestled. Not in the environment around him, but in the spirit within himself lies the explanation of Abraham Lincoln’s rise to fame. “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?”, scoffed the scribes and the Pharisees. Men talked the same way in 1860. Could a President of the united States come out of the uncultured prairies? Impossible! You can’t get blood from a turnip.
But Abraham Lincoln was elected President. The boy who never attended school so much as a whole year in his life-time, the boy whom the church influenced scarcely at all, the boy who oo.uldn It find out the name of his own maternal grandfather, the boy who, growing to be a young man, found retail trade a road to bankruptcy and his post office the brim of his own hat — that was the boy who led a nation through a great fratricidal war, the boy who was to say in 1865, “With malice toward none, ‘with charity for all”. One of the most misunderstood and most wrongfully condemned of persons is the stepmother. Fiction likes to picture her as the cruel, ruthless persecutor of her husband’s children. But that kind of fiction is often most untrue to fact.
Such was the case with Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps the crucial turning point in his life was the day when Thomas Lincoln brought his new wife, Sarah Bush Johnson, into the boy’s third cabin home on the Indiana prairie. A year had passed since that mournful day when he and Dennis Hanks had shaped wooden pegs with which his father fastened together the rough planks that made the crude coffin in which they carried Nancy Hanks Lincoln to her grave.
For a whole year Sister. Sarah, now only twelve years old, had cooked the meals and done what housekeeping she could. Then came the stepmother — a woman of sympathetic understanding, strong mind and good sense. Long afterward she told Herndon: “Such a mess I never saw before. That cabin was filthy. I washed and dressed up those children so they looked more human, and I kept after Tom until he made bedsteads, a proper table, better stools and two’ hickory chairs.”
It was this stepmother who encouraged Lincoln’s reading, who protected him from his father’s taunts about his physical laziness, who saw that he came to the notice of men like James Gentry, the squire of Gentryville. Al though Lincoln never saw his father again, after he became a Springfield lawyer, he kept in close touch with his stepmother. He protected her small inheritance from the schemes of her own son; he frequently sent her money; he often spoke of her with deep appreciation. She lived to see h±m President and suffered the agonizing news of his assassination. And at the last she said, “Abe was a good boy and a good man. He seemed closer to me than my own children.”
Yes, when we are inclined to speak ill of stepmothers, let us remember Sarah Bush Lincoln, the woman who did more than any other person to change a motherless, Shiftless boy, seemingly destined for an eventless life on the frontier, into a great man, a great statesman, the savior of his nation.
Year: 1949