Radio Script #126
Little Talks On Common Things
December 9, 1951
Some of you will remember how Waterville was honored last June by the presence of Mrs. Gilbreth at the Colby Commencement. Mrs. Gilbreth, you know, was the heroine mother of that very popular book “Cheaper by the Dozen”, written by her son and her daughter. What I find unfamiliar to many Waterville people is the fact that Mrs. Gilbreth’s famous husband, Frank Gilbreth, world-renowned industrial counselor, came from Fairfield, Maine. To be sure, he left town when he was a young child, but back in the 1870’s the Gilbreth family was very well known in Fairfield.
Through the courtesy of Mr. Stephen Wing of the Waterville Savings Bank, I have had opportunity to examine several letters signed by Frank Gilbreth’s father, J. H. Gilbreth. They are all on the Gilbreth printed letter-head, which reads as follows: “J. H. Gilbreth, dealer since 1855 In Hardware, Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Tools, iron, steel, stoves, paints, oils, varnishes, and building material. Manufacturer of tin and sheet iron ware. Corner Main and Bridge streets, Kendalls MI J Is, Maine. Also proprietor of the Fairground Farm (130 acres) where can be seen Gilbreth Knox stock. Also pure Jersey stock, and Cheshire and Yorkshire swine from the best families in the country.”
These particular letters deal with Mr. Gilbreth’s attempt to clean up a matter of land purchase. On May 5, 1871 he wrote to William Dyer, president of the Waterville Savings Bank: up lease do me the favor to write me the amount you and the trustees thought proper for me to pay to have a quit claim of the lot of land and buildings east of the Main Street or County Road, as it is called, at the Bodfish farm. If you forgot to present the subject to the trustees, please think of it at your next meeting. ”
On September 23, when Mr. Gf Ibreth was about to start on a journey, he wrote to Mr. Dyer a letter which contains a final sentence that is typical of the implicit honesty of business men of that time. He wrote: “I could not get to Waterville this afternoon until after your business hours at the bank, so am sending you the Winslow mortgage by mail as collateral with his notes you haw. must leave on a trip early tanorrow morning. If this is not all satisfactory, of course I will do what is satisfactory.”
The last of the three letters is dated December 12. It is signed “Solon Bunker for J. H. Gilbreth” and reads: “Mr. Gilbreth has been quite sick since you were here and wishes me to say that he needs the money very much.” This is all a bit confusing, and we can only conjecture what it was all about. We think, however, that Mr. Gilbreth succeeded In straightening out completely his affairs with the Waterville Savings Bank.
It is a long time since I have seen any stationery like that on which the Gilbreth letters are written, though I saw lots of it as a boy. It is folded into four pages, like modern social stationery, except that it is ruled. At the top of the first page is printed the letter head. And now canes the odd point with which many of you may not be familiar. The entire fourth page is devoted to advertisements. I know in Bridgton fifty years ago that was the way many business men paid for their stationary — by selling advertisements to be placed on it by other business men — I suspect that was done. in Fairfield, when J. H. Gilbreth provided himself with this stationery about 1870.
Who were some of the dealers who carried ads on the back of Mr. Gilbreth’s letters? There were F. Kendrick and Brother, manufacturers of carriages and sleighs; Frank P. Wing, dealer In furniture, feathers, and caskets; Tukey and James, who made curtain fixtures; E. H. Evans, the druggist, who also sold books, fancy goods, and jewelry; J. F. Dealy, the meat man; and S. S. Brown, counselor at law. Since in 1870 Kendalls Mills was a famous center for lumber and wood products, the ads of the lumber dealers and mill operators predominate. There are no less than seven of them: N. Totman and Son; Newhall and Gibson; E. Totman and Co.; John Philbrook. Woodman, Lawrence and Co.; Emery, Bradbury and Co.; and C. and J. M. Fogg.
But the most interesting ad of all is one printed upside down in the lower left-hand corner. It was obviously placed there by Mr. Gilbreth himself. It pictures a trotter, harnessed to a high-wheeled sulky leading a heat of nine entries to the wire in front of the judges’ stand at a race track. Beneath the picture is printed: “Gilbreth Knox, 2:26 3/4; best half in a race, 1 :10*; best quarter, 34i seconds. The sire of Lothair, sold for $5,000 when three years old. Gilbreth Knox was awarded the two highest prizes at the New Eng land Fair in 1869.
First prize, Maine State Agricultural Society, 1868. J. H. Gilbreth, his owner, is also a dealer in hardware, stoves, agricultural tools, etc. and is agent for the Clipper Mowing Machine for six counties. Comer of Main and Bridge Streets.”
Inasmuch as we have started out with Kendalls Mills tonight, let us keep on with some more facts about the tQl/n of Fairfield. It was originally in both of the same counties’;with Waterville. Did you catch what I said — both of the same counties? For Waterville and Fairfield alike were originally In Lincoln County, which covered at one time a huge tract of land noW divided Into six counties, and parts of a seventh and an eighth. Kennebec County was formed in 1799, and from that year until 1809, both Waterville and Fairfield were in Kennebec. Then with the organizing of Somerset County in 1809, the county line passed between Waterville and Fairfield, placing the latter in the new county. Like Waterville and Winslow, the land titles of Fairfield go back to the year 1661, when Artemas Boris, Edward Tyng, Thomas Brattle and John Winslow purchased from the Plymouth Colony what is known as the Kennebec Patent. It embraced all the land west of the Kennebec River between Topsham and Norridgewock and certain lands on the east side of the river above Augusta.
More than a century later, In 1781, John Winslow, a descenoant of one of the four who purchased the Plymouth rights, granted, together with his associates, heirs of the other purchasers, a certain tract of land to Joseph Nye of Sandwich, Massachusetts, and Joseph Dirnmock of Falmouth, Massachusetts it was described as “a parcel of land lying on the west side of the Kennebec River above Fort Halifax and Tlconlc Falls, In the county of Lincoln, containing by estimation 11,700 acres, exclusive of roads. For that tract, covering nearly all of the territory now occupied by the town of Fairfield, Nye and mirriffioce”paid 1,800 pounds, lawful silver money. One hundred and twenty years earlier, the first John Winslow and his three associates had paid 400 pounds for the entire vast tract from Topsham to Norridgewock. But of course that was only shortly after the notorious purchase of Manhattan Island by the Dutch for $24. Under the terms of the purchase Nye and Dirnmock were required to layout “a road, eight rods wide, to be completed across the tract within five years, and kept fit for trneling by carts. They were also required to divide the tract into sixty lots and obtain settlers. Nye and Dimmock proceeded to sell lots to acquaintances in Falmouth” Sandwich, and other Massachusetts towns, at a price of thirty pounds per lot. Among those first settlers were three Nyes, four Bowermans, five Tobeys, two Lawrences, two Blackwells, two Atwoods, and such other well known Fairfield names as Wing, Kendall, Shepard, Emery and Holway. In the early days the largest settlement was not at what is now Fairfield Village, but at Fairfield Center, with North Fairfield running it a close second.
On what was later known as the Abel Hoxie farm, was born Alden Bowerman, the first white child born in Fairfield. There had been settlers near the river, however, not far from the present Fairfield Village, as early as 1776, when one who is called in the records Peter Pushard (was he actually the first of the Pishons of Pishon Ferry fame?) built a log house not far from where the Fairfield railroad station now stands. Fourteen years later, in 1780, general William Kendall built another log cabin south of Pushards. He also built a bulkhead across the mill pond and erected a small grist mill, bringing his mill stones up from Gardiner as far as Ticonic Falls by boat, and from there to Fairfield by ox team.
General Kendall is said to have been Fairfield’s first freemason, becoming such in 1804. On his death in 1827 he was buried with masonic service in the 0ld cemetery on Emery HiII. He was the first of Fairfield’s many mill operators, not only grinding grain but also sawing lumber in considerable quantity. When we remember that General Kendall had come to Fairfield in 1780, It Is remarkable to note that his son, George Kendall, lived until 1900, dying at Fairfield in that year, six months after he had passed his one hundredth birthday. He is one of the few men I have ever heard of whose life spanned exactly all the years of the nineteenth century.
Fairfield was incorporated as a town in 1788, thus making it 17 years younger than Winslow, but fourteen years 0lder than Waterville. The first town meeting was held at the home of Seth Fuller on August 19, 1788. The first selectmen were Josiah Burgess, Elihu Bowerman and Joseph Town. Samuel Tobey was both town clerk and treasurer. Lemuel Tobey and Daniel Wyman were elected tithingmen. The importance of lumber to the tewn was shown by the choosing of James Lawrence, Daniel Shepard, Jonathan Emery, and John Nobel as surveyors of lumber. Gideon Holway was constable, and Thomas Blackwell was elected to an office common in old England but less common in American towns, that of hog reeve. James Huston was appointed to see that “the snares were not made waste of”. Does anyone know what that meant?
The records of that first town meeting in Fairfield show that the custom of letting out the collection of taxes to the highest bidder goes back at least as far as 1788. For at Fairfield in that year Joshua Blackwell offered to collect the taxes at ten pence upon the pound, and the tam voted to accept his offer, although the clerk wrote it “except”. That clerk was authorized to provide himself with books for the town and to bring in the charge at some future meeting for the town to pay. We have some knowledge of what taxes Collector Blackwell had to round up, for ten years later taxes were assessed on 90 Fairfield residents. The highest tax paid by anyone of the 90 was $3.23.
As we have said the first houses were log cabins. The first frame house is said to have been built by Gideon Holway near what was called the Moosehorn, and the first frame house in Fairfield Village was the William Emery house, where Benedict Arnold spent several days waiting for his bateaux to be tarred before his expedition continued up the river. It was five years after incorporation as a town that for the first time Fairfield raised money to support schools. The amount was 25 pounds to be paid in grain and produce.
After General Kendall’s mills there were several small saw mills erected, and between 1820 and 1830 developed the big block of saw mills for which Kendalls Mills became famous. These were completely destroyed by fire in 1853 at a loss of $100,000. They were rebuilt, even expanded, as photographs taken in the 1870’s clearly show. Another devastating fire in 1895 wiped them out, and only a few were ever rebuilt.
The first store in the village was run by that giant of all trades, General Kendall, and the first post office was in the store next north of Lawry Brothers. From 1848 to 1873 the toll bridge was operated by Captain William Bodfish. Did you know that Fairfield once had an academy? In 1857 a school called Bunker’S Seminary operated in a brick building at the comer of Lawrence Avenue and Newhall Street. lowe so much to Mr. Stephen Wing for a large part of this information about old-Time Fairfield, that I want to conclude this program by paying respects to his family line, which goes back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Only two years after Winthrop had founded that colony in 1630 a widow, Mrs. Deborah Wing, came to Boston the ship “William and Frances”, with her four Sons and her father. They settled at Saugus and founded the Wing family in America. As time went on, one of the Wings moved to Sandwich, where he became a neighbor of the Nyes. By 1700 some of the fami Iy had come to Maine, settling chiefly in the general area of Liveriypre, Wayne, Canton and Peru. Stephen is a name that frequently appears in the Wing genealogy. From one of Deborah’s sons, Stephen, born in England in 1621, down to the present Steve Wing of Fairfield, there are nine generations and five of the nine names are Stephen. The present Stephen Wing’s father was named for a president of the United States, for he was called Franklin Pierce Wing.
And with that salute to the wings I bid you good night.
Year: 1951