Radio Script #104
Little Talks On Common Things
April 15, 1951
Many times I have told you this program is made possible by the constant stream of helpful contributions which pours in from listeners. A few weeks ago I asked who knew anything about the opening of the resort area on Bunker Island in Fairfield. Mrs. Mildred Pettee of Oakland Street, Waterville, has kindly sent me an item taken from the Bangor Daily News of August 15, 1889. It 1:eads:
liThe Watervil1e Horse Railroad Company opened the Bunker Island Park last evening.
Fully 2,000 people from Waterville and Fairfield were present. The city band of Waterville gave a fine concert and afterwards furnished music for dancing in which over a hundred couples participated. The grounds are fitted up in a most convenient manner. A long pavilion, 40 x 50 feet, furnished ample space for dancing, while within a few feet of it is erected a bandstand. On the point of the island the company has built a little observation house, and scatteted allover the park are a large number of folding settees. A baseball ground and a tennis lawn have also been laid out. The island makes an admirable summer resort for local people who are wearied with a day’s toil or seek cool shelter.
The horse rai1road will undoubtedly make a big go of Bunker Island Park.”
There is the proof we sought — proof that the Bunker Island resort was connected with the horse railroad. Mr. Ralph Patterson of Fairfield assures me that his town’s well known resident and builder of the residence called the “Cas-tIe in Spain” was promoter both of the horse railroad and of Bmker Island Park. That man was Amos Gerald, among whose other interests were the Central Maine Fair and Cascade Park, between Waterville and Oakland, which was in its heyday when I was a student in college. It was Amos Gerald who built the Fairfield and Shawmut , Railway, had a hand in promoting Merrymeeting Park Dear Brunswick, and may have been interested in the interurban electric lines that connected Bath, Brunswick, Lewiston, Gardiner, Augusta and Waterville. Quite
a man was Amos Gerald, even if he did put that hideously ornate ceiling on the dining room of the Gerald Hotel, now one of the rooms where the Lawries display their furniture.
When I last talked about Kennebec ice, little did I realize that there exists a documented chart of all ice houses on the river in 1882. Through the courtesy of a listener I have had a chance to examine carefully that old chart.
The listener prefets to remain anonymous. I can only say that this is not the first instance of his help. It was the same man who put me on track of the saddle bags owned by Coolidge, the murderer.
This old chart is a valuable historical item. It bears the heading, “1882.
Issued by T. B. Chase and Son, Dealers and Brokers in Ice, 51 Commercial Street, Boston, and Gardiner, Maine.” On the left hand side is a map of the Kennebec River from the Augusta Dam to Bath, showing boat channels, position of buoys, depth of water, position, capacity and ownership of ice houses. In the lower left hand comer is a list of tow boats on the river. There were nine owned by the Knickerbocker Company: Adelia, Resolute, Knickerbocker, Popham, S. J. Macy, City of Lynn, American Union, Clara and Clarita. There were two operated by the Kennebec Company: the Charlie Lawrence and the Stella.
On the right hand side of the chart are listed the names and capacity of commercial ice houses on the Penobscot and Cathance Rivers, and at ports along the coast from Biddeford to Vinal Haven.
Now this old chart explains something that has troubled me. Some time ago I referred to the Knickerbocker Ice Company of New York. Three different persons have called me to task, saying they remember well the wagons of the Knickerbocker Ice Company in the streets of Pbiladelphia. Yet they admit that Knickerbocker is a good old New York name. It was Washington Irving’s Diedrich Knick- erbocker who became to New York what John Bull is to England.
This chart clearly shows that there were two companies. The KnickeIbocker Ice Company of New Yotk was in 1882 the smaller company, so far as its Kennebec houses were concemed, having only two with a combined capacity of 58,000 tons.
Tie larger company was called the Philadelphia Knickerbocker Company and had six big houses with a total capacity of 188,000 tous. It boasted one of the largest houses on the river, in the town of Pittston, where 65,000 tons of ice could be stored under one roof. But not even that huge capacity was the river’s record.
That was held by the ice bouse of Abram Rich at Farmingdale, where winter after winter were stored 80 ,000 tons. Haynes and IEWitt had a house at Richmond that held 62,000 tons, and 50,000 tons could be stored by the Baltimore firm of Ober and Son at Richmond.
Altogether, between the Augusta Dam and Bath there were 41 ice houses from which ice was shipped to distant ports. Those 41 were in addition to the countless small houses used for storage of ice for local use. The Philadelphia Knickerbocker Company was by far the largest operator, but not to be scoffed at were the four big houses of Russell Brothers on both sides of the river at Richmond and Dresden. Interests from the national capital centered at Pittston, where the Great Falls Company of Washington and the Independents of Washington together accounted for 100,000 tons office a year.
Among these giants, controlled from the big cities, the local operators strove valiantly for control of what was left of the holdings which had once been entirely in neighborhood hands. The Kennebec Ice Company, owned by Gardiner and Augusta interests, had big houses at Richmond and Pittston. Even the small operators hung tenaciously on: G. E. Weeks~ with a house just below the Augusta Dam for a mere 2,000 tons; C. A. and J. D. White, storing 5,000 tons at Farmingdale; George Brown, with his little 2,000 tons near the entrance to Mer’IYmeeting Bay; and Thompson Brothers, with the smallest house of all, storing only 1,500 tons opposite Swan Island.
Thanks to this chart we know that the Kennebec held the record for the harvest and export of Maine ice. For, here recorded, is a complete list of all commercial companies in Maine which shipped ice out of the state. On the Penobscot River were 15 companies, storing and shipping in 1882 a total of 146,000 tons. On the cathance River were 12 companies with 39 ,000 tons.
Along the coast from. Biddeford to Vinal Haven were 34 companies with 349,BOO tons. And on the Kennebec were 41 companies with the huge total of 1,029,200 tons. The grand total for Z,Jaine’s exported ice in 1882 was 1,563,000 tons, and that is a lot of ice.
Perhaps you are getting tired or just plain sore to have me keep referring to prices in the old days. I cannot refrain, however, from. bringing to your attention the cost of painting a house half a century ago. I have before me an old account form, showing the cost of painting the big two-story house at 275 Main Street, Waterville, opposite the end of Boutelle Avenue. ‘!be owner engaged the well remembered local firm of Spaulding and Kenniston to paint that house in May, 1900. Here is what their bill called for:
100 lb. lead $ 6.00
4 gal. oil 2.40
Color for blinds 1.50
Priming for blinds 2.00
Paint for steps and floors 2.00
Paint for sash .20
Total for material 14.10
Labor for painting house 25.00
Labor for hanging blinds 5.00
Total for labor 30.00
Complete cost of job $ 44.10
During the past month I have seen the homes of four of the fOlmders of our nation: George Washington, our first president; Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence; James Monroe, prcmolmcer of the independence of the western hemisphere from the domination of Europe; and John Marshall, the great chief justice who, more than any other man, molded legal precedent in the nation.
I also walked the same streets where once walked George Hason, author of the Virginia Bill of Rights, which became the model for the first ten amendments to _our federal constitution, the document which we call the American Bill of Rights.
In a vehicle which his ingenious mind would readily comprehend, though the internal combustion engine was undreamed of in his day, I rode through Benjamin Franklin’s long, straight Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, devoutly wishing that old Ben were with us again to resolve some of the hopeless confusion that now befuddles the national capital.
And I had some serious thoughts as I contemplated the lives of those men of Revolution and Construction, those men who risked all to face the anger of a British king, and succeeded in what we today know to be a harder task than winning a war, the task of winning the peace. For out of thirteen bickering, jealous, quarreling colonies, those men and their gallant compatriots from Massachusetts to Georgia made a united nation.
But it was not their political achievement, their successful statesmanship, that focused my attention on my recent visit to the old colonial capital of Virginia. It was rather the evidence which surrounds the visitor at every turn that those great Americans of the late eighteenth century were, above all else, broadly educated men. They were not men of fixed specialization, ignorant of, and uninterested in all fields except their own specialty. Washington surveyor, fanner, professional soldier, statesman, courtier — was a man who read books on many subjects, who liked to talk about music and art, about philosophy and religion. Mason knew the law; he was a master of jurisprudence but he also knew flowers and trees and birds, and he was absorbed in several aspects of medicine. John Marshall, giver and interpreter of our laws, was a great classicist, to whom Latin and Greek were as familiar as English, but he also carried on interesting experiments in what he called natural philosophy, and what we would call physics and chemistry.
Probably the outstanding examples of liberally educated Americans of all time were two of those founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Either could have been called the American Leonardo da Vinci, for as with the great Florentine no subject the mind of man could touch was foreign to their interest. Everyone knows that Franklin was printer, scientist, author, editor, inventor, statesman and diplomat. He signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, secured the friendship of France for the colonial cause, reconciled the belligerent Philadelphia merchants and the peace-loving Quakers, and was a great national figure; but he also identified lightning with electricity, made the Franklin stove, organized America’s first municipal fire department and first public library, started the academy which was to become the great University of Pennsylvania, and in his famous Junto Club was ever ready to discuss intelligently any subject under the sun.
Those of you who have visited Jefferson’s stately home at Monticello have seen with your own eyes the numerous objects which sprang from his inventive genius. For this statesman and political philosopher was not only an architect, designing his own Monticello and the magnificent buildings of the University of Virginia; he also made clocks and thermometers, double doors both of which swung open when one was turned, musical instruments, revolving tables and desks, laborsaving devices for cooking and other household tasks.
Yes, these American forefathers of ours were broadly educated men. They had succeeded in doing what we so much yearn to have the modern college do for its students — make them not narrow specialists, but truly educated men and women. We think that we live very busy lives, but perhaps by the standards of Washington and Jefferson our lives are merely hectic rather than busy. They too were busy men. But, when we read their diaries and their notebooks, and the long, seemingly leisured letters that comprise their correspondence we know they did something too few of us ever deign to do — they took time to think.
That is the lesson I brought back from Old Virginia — the lesson that perhaps the great changes in modem civilization, the multitude of its technological gadgets, don’t make so much difference as we like to think. In 1951, as in 1776, we still need men of broad understanding who take time to think.
Year: 1951