Radio Script #137
Little Talks On Common Things
February 24, 1952
Can you remember way back to those days when we used to look upon Franklin Roosevelt as the champion government spender? Poor Mr. Roosevelt! If he were only around today, wouldn’t he think he had been a miserly skinflint compared to his successor?’! As AI Smith used to say, take a look at the record.
In all of the 156 years that the U. S. Government had been In operation between 1789 and the death of President Roosevelt on April 30,1945, the fed …. era I government took from the peop Ie and the corporations total taxes of 248 billion dollars. In the six years from May 1,1945 to June 30,1951 the pre,.. sent adm I n I strat ion took I n taxes $260 bill Ion – … twelve b 1111 on more than the preceding 32 administrations had taken in a century and a half. Yet, despite the staggering amount taken In taxes, the present administration closed its 1951 books in the red by $7,470,000,000 — a deficit twelYe times as great as that of 1950. But the worst Is yet to come. The deficit for the current year ending June 30, 1952 is estimated at $8,200,000,000. For 1953 it will Jump to $14,400,000,000.
On June 30, 1951 the tota I federa I debt was $252 billion; next June it will be $260 bill ion, and In June, 1953 it will be $275 bi Ilion .. Everybody knows we are a rich country. But how rich? Rich enough 10 spend and spend and spend and tax and tax and tax and still owe 275 billions of debt? Somewhere there Is a limit, and when It comes, beware the crash!
Numerous I isteners have told me during the past week that they expect me to talk about big snow s10rms of the past and compare them with the little flurry we had last Monday. don’t want to disappoint those listeners entirely, but I’m not going to make any comparisons between particular blizzards past and present. I want to make just these brief comments about big storms In genera I. irst, our individual memories are tricky. Most of us remember a big storm because of some unusual personal experience connected with it, and because we have no such personal experience connected with another storm, we forget al I about it. I simply do not remember any big storm in 1935, but the Watervll Ie Sentinel of that year carries the undeniable record of a huge crippling blizzard. But I certainly remember the storm of February 28,1920, which began with rain freezing solid, then topped it with 18 inches of snow. Why do I remember that storm? Because my son was born that day, and I spent 15 anxious hours on a train from Portland to Boston, and didn’t see my son In the Waltham hospital untl I more than 24 hours after he had come into the world.
My second comment is that we are today more helpless In a big storm than our grandparents were. In our recent storm we were fortunate not to lose electric current. But only last winter, within five mi les of America’s greatest city, peop Ie litera II y had to go to bed to keep warm. Not an 0 i I burner cou Id function, there were no I ights, no telephones, no milk deliveries, no transportation. Fifty years ago a big storm was no such problem. The storm didn’t put out the kerosene lamps or shut off the telephone, because in most homes there wasn’t any_ The house didn’t get cold, because there was a wholerwlnter’s .supply of wood out in the shed. Nobody went hungry, because mother had a whole barrel of flour in the pantry and vegetables and fruits of her own canning In abundance. As for mi Ik, if the family lived in the vi I I age and didn’t have a cow, someone put on snowshoes and went to a neighbor in the village who did have one. Yes — we pay a price for our advancing civi lization. The more we have, the more dependent we are.
My third and final comment on big storms concerns the children. That is something that hasn’t changed with the fifty years. They don’t depend on elec~ . tric current or Internal combustion engines. They get out their steds and have a grand time. We who are older and who think we are so much wiser than any child may well take note of this: In a battle between nature and civi Ilzation, a chi Id’s sympathy Is always with nature.
One who delves into the old records about the common folk of the Kennebec Valley in by-gone days, as I love to do, is again and again Impressed by the va I uab Ie service rendered by persons who persuaded aged peop Ie to put into writing, before it was too late, their recollections of pioneer days. We ought to do more of that sort of persuading in our own day. Right here In Water” ville are men and ~omen who ought to put Into written form thei r recollections of sixty and seventy years ago — recollections that may otherwise pass into oblivion.
Hence I am very grateful tonight that a little more than a hundred years ago, In 1848, a man and wife, John and Abigail Nichols, finally induced one of the first settlers of Fairfield to record his memory of the early days. The settler, then an aged man, had come to the wi Iderness that later became Fa I rfield In 1782. He was Elihu Bowerman who, with his two brothers, settled In the Vicinity of North Fairfield, became a prominent citizen and officer of the town, and was the man who made the survey Into lots of the Nye and Dimick purchases -~ those original sixty lots, of which the ten in the southwest corner stl II bear the community name of Ten Lots.
So let us give attention tonight to what Elihu Bowerman wrote Mr. and Mrs Nichols about that earliest settlement of Fairfield. Some time in October, 1777 Mr. Bowerman’s father, a soldier In the Revolution, became so III with dysentery, a common camp disease, that he was sent home for rest and recovery. At the same time his mother’s mother was taken violently III. Grandmother and father died within three days of each other, leaving Mrs. Bowerman with nine chi Idren, the oldest only 14 years of age. That oldest was Elihu, and on him fell the responsibility as male head of the fami Iy. For six years, unti I 1782, when he was 20 years old, he faithfully worked to help his mother keep the fam i I y together in the i r Mas sach usetts home.
For some time, apparently, there had been talk of migrating to the Dis .. trict of Maine, and in the spring of 1782 Elihu, with the young wife whom he had recently acquired, came to Fort Halifax. With him also were his two brothers Harper and Zachary. On what is now the Watervi lIe side of the river Elihu hired a room in a private family, where his wi fe could lodge, whi Ie he and his brothers struck farther up the river into the wi Iderness. After Elihu had paid his wife’s room rent for a per i od in ad,vance, he says that the tota I cap I ta I wi th wh I ch the three Bowerman brothers struck out up Martin Stream was only 25 cents. The only way they could get food was either out of the forest, or by working out for one or more of the 01 der !=iett lers down ri ver near Watervi lie. During the summer, Elihu says, he and his brothers worked out about two-thirds of the time, for which they were paid in provisions, never in money; and the rest of the time they felled trees on their own lot and prepared to build a log house in the fal I. When autumn came they did put up the log house and covered it with bark, using bark a Iso, liidd over the bare ground, for a f Iocr.
Their mother was not we”: so It was decided that Harper should spend the winter with her. On the other hand, the log house seemed now ready for a woman, and Eli hu ‘s wi fe moved out of her Waterville room into the log dwe II fng on Martin Stream. Elihu says they were not without furniture, but all of it made only four loads on a hand sled. t n the preceding summer the brothers had ra ised a few potatoes on the farm of Remington Hobbie,the Vassalboro Quaker whom we have previously mentioned on this program. Mr. HOOble allowed the brothers to store their potatoes in his cellar, but the early winter was very severe, and before January the potatoes were a II frozen.
let us now turn to Elihu Bowerman’s own words in his statement to the Nichols: “Our provisions were all gone”, he writes, “and we had nothing left to purchase more with. But soon I met a man In Winslow that would let me have corn and wait for his pay unti I spring. That corn, with about 25 pounds of pork and some smoked herring, with the frozen potatoes, were all the provisions we had for the whole winter. We got our corn ground and carried It home on our backs, a di stance of 17 mi les. The on Iy bread we had for 16 months was made by mixing a little of this corn meal with our frozen potatoes, then baking the mixture like johnny cake over our open fire. We had no vegetable sass of any k I n’d. “late in the winter we hau led about 700 feet of boards four miles on our hand sleds from a saw mi II to our house, put some of them on the roof in the parts where it leaked through the bark worst, and the rest of them on the floor.
That board floor was a lot warmer than the bark on the cold ground. We had no nails and not a square of glass in that log house. It was a hard winter, but never once did I wish myself back in my native land, nor did my wife once murmur or complain. It was a hard life, but we were not discouraged.”
A II that wi nter the iron Iy beverage other than water was boxberry tea, without milk or sugar. How they must have relished the coming of maple sugar time. “That spring”, wr6te Elihu, “we made plenty of sap sugar, which was the first sugar of any kind on our table.” That pioneer life was hard on women. Elihu’s wife had not seen anotherwoman for six months, when in March she decided that the time had come to paya visit to a neighbor who I ived a mi Ie and a half away. So. Mrs. Bowerman put on snowshoes and went to see her neighbor. She made a nice long cal I -~six hours — and came back in fine spirits. When the snow was gone and spring had really come, the Bowermans got possession of two cows, so that mi Ik and butter were then added to the sugar which the maple trees had supplied. Those cows had no fenced pasture, but ran in the woods, and Eli hu says he chased those creatures hundreds of mi les that first summer, often going barefooted, though he was a grown man.
Living conditions were much improved by the fall of 1783. By that time the brothers had burned two acres of fe lied trees, cleared the ground of logs I sowed rye, planted corn, potatoes and beans. So, writes Elihu, “in the fallof that year we had plenty of rye and corn meal, some potatoes and other sass, with mi Ik, maple sweet and butter as much as we could desire.” When winter came, Elihu decided he must make sure how his mother fared down in Massachusetts. He made the long journey only to find her, as he had suspected, in t I I hea Ith and having a hard time financially. So he persuaded her to sell the property and come to live with him in the Maine wilderness. Elihu disposed of the old home for $700, his mother getting her legal third, and the rest d i v i ded among the nine ch i I dren •
For manv years Elihu’s mother had been used to living in a frame house and in the midst of neighbors. When she got her first sight of Elihu’s log dwelling on Martin Stream, she expressed her disappointment. She told Elihu the p lace looked more like a cow shed than a house. But when she was f Ina II V se’ttled in the house, with most of her chi Idren around her — for now all but two of the nine had come to Fairfield, and three besides EI ihu had homes of their own near by — it seemed to her, as Elihu puts it, “like Joseph’s meeting with his brothers in the land of Goshen.” The elderlv Mrs. Bowerman accepted the wi Iderness and the log house grateful IV, for it brought her fam! IV togethe raga in. Elihu says that by 1785, when his sister Waite married Benjamin Swift and settled two mi les away, allof his brothers and sisters except one sister who had recently died, were now married and in their own cabins between his house and the Swifts. This gave his mother opportunity to visit with all of her living children, and it meant a lot to the old lady unti I her death In 1794 at the very advanced age of 95.
How did Eli hu Bowe rman happen to come to the Kennebec Va II ey I n the first place? Soon after his father’s death in 1777, although Elihu was only a boy of 14, he was determined to get Into a region where land was cheap and opportunity for its development good. So he says: “It was in 1700 that I made my first journey TO the Kennebec on the lookout for land.” That summer he worked for John Taber at Vassa I boro. Taber persuaded the youth to attend Friends Meeting at the home of Charles Jackson, a little below Vassalboro town landing. At that time no member of the Bowerman family had Quaker Inclinations. Although the Bowerman manuscript does not say 50 exp I icftly, the reader can eas I I y I mp I y that the Bowe rman fam Ily got the i r chance to sett Ie In th I s reg ion through the kind Iy he I p of the Vassal boro Quakers — Jackson, Taber and perhaps most of all Remington Hobbie. They helped the Bowermans get their land and unquestionably helped them in many ways through the first, most difficult years. And it was because of them that the Bowermans became resolute Quakers and finally established the active and Influential Friends Meeting at North Fairfield. But at first, of course, they had to go far to attend a meeting. In fact, Elihu says he subscribed $6.00 which he earned by working In the hay field for a Sidney farmer at 75 cents a day.
The Friends of Fairfield were thus attached to the Vassalboro Quarterly Meeting, and It was quite a journey to attend services there. Elihu wrote, “At that time our roads were no better than cow paths, and we had no horses. Men and w.ornen had to go on foot to attend meet i ng at Yassa I boro, an d a fte r the meeting corne back on foot to Fairfield, a distance of 14 miles. In winter, before we had horses, I have known our young men to take the ox sled and some of our women on it, and carry them to Vassalboro meeting. They went and came as lively and cheerful as though they had been in a superfine four~ wheel carriage. “After we obtained horses, the trip to Vassalboro was faster, but there were sti II no real roads, only beaten trails. Of course there were no bridges.When the water was low in the Kennebec and the Sebasticook, we often rode across. Sometimes, when the water was half way up a horse’s side, a woman would have a man on each side of her to prevent her falling off into swift water. remember that once a man and a woman, riding on the same horse, both fe II off, but fortunate Iy Into shoa I water. They went back to shore, wrung out their clothes as best they could, and rode on nine mi les to meeting with “” out dry cloth ing. ‘~here we usually crossed the Sebasticook was a narrow ledge with uneven bottom. The water ran swift oVer the ledge, and on Its lower side” where the horse had to go, was four or five feet deep. It was a dangerous place” especially for a woman.
“At our Kennebec crossing the bottom was covered with small, round rocks. It was not easy footing for a horse. We started diagonally down, then in the middle of the river turned diagonally upstream to a sma I I island, then straight across on the treacherous round rock bottom. We took this route scores of times, often in miserable weather; yet’ never heard man or woman speak of the danger or show any fear.”
After ten years the settlers at North Fairfield decided they ought to have a meeting house of +heir own. On the knoll where in 1952 the Friends Meeting House at North Fairfield still stands there was then an unoccupied house of two rooms. There the Friends convened. On bus lness meeting days the men and the women separated. On one such day, while the men conducted business, the floor gave way and let them down a foot or more. That experience, wrote EI ihu, “set us thinking how we could get a better meeting house. At last we concluded to bui Id a house 25 feet square. We infor,med our Vassalboro Friends of the plan. Eefore building we decided we needed a larger house, so we bui It it 30 feet square, with a partition In the middle. We gathered and hewed the timber, our Vassalboro Friends supplied nal Is and glass; and at last we had the meetl ng house ready. At first we sat on loose seats, and be Ing very empty handed, it was many years befofe we got better ones. person in the community had contributed what he could — money, materials or labor. When the house was finished, no one had done too much, no one person had done a II. So we met together in our new meeting house and in love and friendsh I p, somewhat Jl ke Joseph and hi s brethren.”
Six years after he wrote his fascinating account to John and Ablgai I Nichols, Elihu Bowerman died at the age of 96, a true patriarch of old Fairfield. With complete fitness he was buried in the Quaker cemetery at North Fairfield almost a hundred years ago, on May 24,1854.
Year: 1952