Radio Script #38
Little Talks On Common Things
October 16, 1949
We make no apology ~or talking on and on about railroads. Many listeners tell us they can stand a lot more railroad stories. So here goes with the grand old story of the old Grand Trunk.
John A1fred Poor was born in Andover, in the northern end of Oxford County, up above Rumford in 1808. He taught school at Bethel, then became a lawyer in Bangor. He was a big man, six feet two, and weighed 250 pounds — not puffy fat, but al1 bone and muscle.
Poor went to Boston to see his first train on the old Boston and Worcester line on April 16, 1834. Though only 26 years old he there had a vision that never left him — the vision of a railroad system that would embrace all New England. Early, half-hearted schemes of others had contemplated a railroad from Belfast to Quebec, or from Portland to Lake Champlain.
Poor made a thorough personal study of the region between Portland and Montreal, actually drew plans for a proposed railroad, and called it the Atlantic and St. Lawrence. In 1843 Poor petitioned the Maine Legislature for a charter. By this time he had even expanded his already ambitious plan, for he was no longer content with a road from Portland to Montreal, but envisioned a later extension from Montreal to Chicago, and another line from Portland to Halifax across the Province of New Brunswick.
Hitherto railroads had been considered conveniences to old, settled communities. Poor was the first man to plan a railroad for the development of new country. He engaged James Hall, a civil engineer, to survey a right of way from Portland to Montreal. Hall recommended by-passing the White Mountains by way of the Androscoggin River valley and the Dixville Notch. He estimated the cost from Portland to the Canadian border at $2,250,000. Meanwhile a group of Montreal men, led by A. T. Galt, prepared to build the line from Montreal to the U. S. border.
Then the Boston financiers got busy. They wanted a road from Boston to Montreal and this Portland scheme was getting in their way. Abbott Lawrence and Harrison Gray Otis secured a charter for a road they called the Boston, Concord and Montreal.
Poor heard of the Boston plan on February 4, 1845, just as one of the worst storms on record had started. Yet, shortly after midnight Poor started out by horses and sleigh for Montreal. He sent a man ahead to arrange for relays of horses. Finding one brave soul willing to accompany him, and against the protests of friends and relatives, he set out.
For a while the travelers held to the road, but soon found themselves encountering unseen. stone walls, fences and woodpiles. The snow changed to sleet, cutting men and horses alike. They took six hours to reach Teak’s tavern in Falmouth, only seven miles from Portland. In the morning the snow stopped but the cold increased. Nearly two feet of snow covered the road. Yet, before dark, they reached the Waterhouse Inn . at Paris. By that time Poor had a frozen nose and frost-bitten ears.
The next day, with Waterhouse breaking a road ahead, they reached Rumford in the afternoon, where they got half a dozen men to ride ahead on horse back and break a horse track to Andover. Beyond that town there was no road or track of any kind. Here was real wilderness — the big woods.
For the 40 miles from Andover to Colebrook Poor had to make his tedious way without road breakers or even a road. He covered only two miles an hour. At Errol, New Hampshire came the great test. How would he get through the Dixville Notch? But luck was with him. At Errol four men agreed to help Poor get over the height of land. At the entrance to the Notch, with temperature 18 degrees below zero, Poor encountered terrific gusts of wind. He later related that all he could see was “perpendicular mountains of snow”. With snail-like pace, a few feet at a time, Poor and his helpers finally got through the Notch.
On the fourth day out of Portland Poor reached Colebrook and went on at once over a road now broken out to Sherbrooke, Quebec. Then he drove all day and all night to reach Montreal on Monday morning, for Poor had learned that, at ten o’clock on that morning of February 10, the Montreal Board of Trade would meet for a final decision on the Boston proposal.
Arriving on time, but with nothing to spare, Poor presented strong arguments: the superiority of Portland Harbor; that Portland was 100 miles nearer to Montreal than was Boston; that the route was easier.
While the Montreal Board still deliberated, unexpected assistance came to Poor. William Pitt Preble, determined as was Poor to get the road for Portland, had started out only a day behind Poor, waiting only for the storm to subside. In fact he had taken good advantage of Poor’s trail. Now here he was, before the Montreal Board, to support Poor’s case. Preble had brought with him a handsome charter, with its great red seal and its beautiful script, for the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad, granted by the Maine Legislature only a few days before.
The vote went for Portland. Ground was broken on July 4, 1846, but at the end of two years only 50 miles of track had been laid in Maine, and only 30 miles in Canada. Early in July, 1851, five years after breaking ground, the road entered New Hampshire, not through the Dixville Notch, but by way of Gilead and Shelburne. Late in 1852 it crossed the Connecticut River at North Stratford and reached the border early in 1853.
In July of that year the entire 292 miles were complete and the line was leased to a new company, the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada, on a 999 year contract, on which the new company agreed to pay all outstanding bills and a six per cent dividend on the common stock. Nearly a hundred years afterward, in .1946, Alvin Harlow wrote in his “Steelways of New England”: “The Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railway still has a corporate existence. Though most of the stock is held in England, some of it is still owned by Maine residents who receive that comfortable six per cent every year.”
Now Poor had on foot a much vaster scheme~The European and North American Railroad. This was to extend from Portland across Maine through New Brunswick to the farthest point in Nova Scotia. From there steamers would run to Galway, Ireland in five days. From Galway special trains would speed across Ireland to Dublin, then fast steamers would run to Holyhead, England, and a final, fast rail jump would land the traveler in London in record time.
Even while working on his big. scheme, Poor was active in promoting other railroads: the York and Cumberland, the Portland and Rochester, the Belfast and Moosehead Lake, the Bangor and piscataquis. In 1870 he got a charter for a road with a prodigious name: the Portland, Rutland, Oswego and Chicago, and was working hard at it the day before he died.
John Poor was a railroad fanatic, but unlike many fanatics, he made some of his dreams come true. Maine, very early in its history as a state, secured valuable ties of communication with the rest of the nation. And that accomplishment was made possible because neither blizzards nor Boston financiers could lick a man from Andover, Maine, a man named John Alfred Poor.
Did you ever hear the story of the Loud’s Island duck? Well, Loud’s Island is a mighty interesting place where, according to legend at least, anything could happen. That little island, scarcely a long–stone’s throw off shore from the little village of Round Pond on Route 32 between Waldoboro and New Harbor, was for many years not even in the United States. Through an un-explained error, it was left off the map when the U. S. Geological Survey charted the region. Hence from soon after the Civil War until 1905 the four or five score inhabitants of the island refused to pay taxes to any government. They weren’t on the map, therefore they didn’t exist.
But more about the history of Loud’s Island at another time. Just now we are concerned with the Loud’s Island duck. The oldest residents of the island say they had to doubt the Bible story about the whale swallowing Jonah, seeing as how a whale’s throat ain’t built for any such job, and anyway how could a man get air to breathe inside a whale’s innards? But their experience with the duck .made them wonder whether Jonah might not have encountered a peculiar kind of whale. Leastwise, Egbert was a peculiar kind of duck.
He was a tame duck somebody first saw one fall when the hunting season was on. He came down near a house and the women folks, seeing· he had a busted wing, tended him till he was all right. They fussed over him and babied him so much that, when he got well, Egbert wouldn’t leave. But instead of getting soft and easy-going, the longer he stayed, the meaner and uglier he was. He’d chase every cat that came in sight, and there wasn’t a dog in the neighborhood that didn’t give him a wide berth. But his big, pet hate was the gulls. They weren’t picking up any food in his harbor, not if Egbert knew it.
Well, Egbert was monarch of all he surveyed until the day he met up with the goose fish. Didn’t ever see one, you say? Well, sir, they’re a good sized fish, thirty or forty pound, with little green eyes and looking something like an overgrown sculpin. Their mouth runs two-thirds the way to their tail, with little sharp teeth along the jaws, and they got about the littlest gullet that don’t fit that kind of mouth at all. Well, one day the tide was real low and Egbert was paddling around sort of bossing things in general, when all of a sudden he give a flutter and a squawk, and then he just wasn’t there at all. Something had dragged him clear underwater.
Somebody grabbed a fish spear and ran down the wharf. Sure enough, lying quiet on the bottom just at the end of the wharf was one of them big, lazy goose fish. The water was clear and the fellow with the spear could get good, straight aim. He eased the spear down slow then let mister fish have it, close to the tail. He figured Egbert was aboard, and he didn’t want to drive the spear through him.
Well, they dragged that fish ashore and they could see a big lump in him squirming and heaving, so they cut him open mighty careful. Yes sir, there was Egbert, beat up some and looking like a gnat in a rain barrel. But he was alive and gave the fellow that released him a good healthy nip to prove it. They wiped Egbert off and laid him out in the sun to get back his strength. He lay there for a while, muttering and cussing under his breath, now and again stretching and shaking himself. pretty soon he stood up and took a quick swipe at a kitten that had come too close. But he wasn’t yet fully recovered. It was a good six weeks before he risked swimming again, and then he stuck mighty close to shore.
The story sayeth not whether they changed Egbert’s name to Jonah.
It is not often that our quiet little city of Waterville gets attention from the foreign press, but that is just what happened last week. Furor broke out in London — or at least a tempest in a teapot — over the speech delivered here in waterville on October 7 by Mr. G. C. Cheliotti, managing director of General Electric Limited. Mr. Cheliotti was the principal guest speaker at the Business Management Institute conducted at Colby College.
To us who heard him, Mr. Cheliotti seemed unusually fair, going out of his way to speak kindly of the parties sure to contend against each other for power in the coming general elections in England. In fact, before I had heard of the furor in London, I had intended to mention Mr. Cheliotti on this program, as a fine example of the well known British sense of fair play. And I still insist that he was such an example.
But evidently the British do not think so. Same dozen irate letters have reached the college and Waterville citizens. I have personally received one such letter denouncing Mr. Cheliotti as a traitor to England and especially to the British workers.
What happened? It seems that the London papers seized on certain statements in Mr. Cheliotti’s speech and played them up with bitter exaggeration.
I understand that the Old Thunderer itself, the staid old London Times, played up the speech with emphasis and with a stinging editorial. I have personally seen a clipping from Lord Beaverbrook’s paper, the London Express, with a four-column headline. The burden of the British complaint is that Mr. Cheliotti said the highly praised output of the British worker in war-time was much overrated, that one trouble with the British people is their feeling of self-pity, and that the seeds of the present economic distress lay deep in British psychological failure to change stubbornly conservative ways after the first World War, and was not to be blamed on the Labour Party.
Evidently Mr. Cheliotti is in for a hot time when he gets home. Meanwhile a lot of Englishmen who never before heard of Waterville, Maine now know there is such a place.
Year: 1949