Radio Script #378

Little Talks on Common Things

April 27, 1958

I am interested to know how many persons in this vicinity are descended from Mary Gorham Phinney, the first white child born in Gorham, Maine. Mrs. Frank Goodrich, who was Ruth Abbott, has discovered that she and I are some sort of cousins, since both of us have that first Gorham white child for an ancestor.

The town of Gorham has had a long, and at times exciting, history. On old Fort Hill, where now stands the State Teachers College, was built one of Maine’s most renowned defenses against the Indians. In colonial times the whole area was known as Narragansett No.7, and its settlement was a direct result of that greatest of the Indian uprisings, known as King Philip’s War.

The township had been given to the soldiers of that war as compensation. In fact the colonial governments had so much trouble raising money to pay the soldiers in cash that the easiest way to meet the obligation was to make the payment in land. The Phinney family had come to America in 1683, when John Phinney became a member of the Plymouth Colony. He married Mary Rogers, granddaughter of Thomas Rogers, one of the Mayflower passengers. So it is that the present day descendants of Mary Gorham Phinney claim Mayflower ancestry through Mary Rogers.

It was the first John Phinney’s great-grandson who came to Gorham in the spring of 1736. His father, the third John Phinney, had been one of those soldiers of King Phillip’s War who had been granted land in the region, but as yet no settler had built upon it. With only a few days’ provisions, John Phinney the 4th and his 14 year old son Edmund made their way up the Presumpscot River in a canoe to Narragansett No.7. They cut a few trees, staked out a place for a cabin, marked trees to be felled to allow a cornfield, then returned to old Falmouth (modern Portland). But before the leaves had turned in the autumn they were back on the new land, this time with John’s whole family. In the crude log cabin which John put up to shelter his family was born on August 24, 1736 a child whom they named Mary Gorham Phinney.

The Phinney family was soon joined by others in the Narragansett township. Among them was the family of James Irish, who had come directly from England to Falmouth, Maine in 1711, and moved to make a new home in the Gorham wilderness two years after John Phinney had gone there. On March 10, 1756 Mary Gorham Phinney married James Irish, Jr., and, as I have said, their Maine descendants are numerous.

If you want to read a stern historical account of old Gorham, you will find it in McLellan’s history of that town. But you will find even more enjoyable reading in a much livelier account written by that prolific Maine writer, Elijah Kellogg. He gave his story of old Gorham the title of “Good Old Times”.

For my mother, who was born in Gorham, it was always a favorite book. Kellogg gives a thrilling account of the effect on the little settlement at Gorham of what is known as the Fifth Indian War. When that broke out in — 1745, the settlement had about 20 families, the most prominent of which were those of John Phinney, James Irish and Hugh McLellan.

For nearly ten years those settlers had been on friendly terms with the local Indians. But by 1745 both the French and the English were turning Indians against the other. It was the French who turned those Saco Valley Indians against the settlers at Gorham. So it happened that John Phinney and Hugh McLellan built the pallisaded fort on the eminence that has ever since been known as Fort Hill. Nine families took refuge within the pallisade; others went to Falmouth for safety. But one family stayed in their wilderness cabin too long. Let us have the story just as Elijah Kellogg told it: “One day when William Bryant and his son were building fence, Indians came suddenly upon them. Telling the boy to hide himself in the woods, Bryant ran to alarm the garrison at the fort. One of the Indians fired and broke Bryant’s arm. He reached the bank of a little brook in front of high ground on which the fort was built. As he summoned his failing strength to leap the brook, he caught sight of a neighbor, Daniel Mosher, coming down the hill from the fort, with a gun on his shoulder. Bryant shouted, ‘Fire, Daniel, for God’s sake, fire!’

“At Bryant’s cry, Mosher leveled his gun at the foremost Indian, who slacked his speed, giving Bryant time to leap the brook. In another moment he would have been safe, but Mosher hesitated to pull the trigger. That hesitation was fatal to Bryant. Two savages, now armed only with knife and tomahawk, jumped the brook and buried their weapons in Bryant’s skull.

“Mosher returned to relate his tale to the inmates of the garrison, by whom his failure to fire was never forgotten or forgiven.

“Bryant, when he left home, had charged his wife to keep the children near the house. So she told them that, if they would stay near the door, she would give them some maple syrup and let them boil it down into maple sugar. She went down cellar through a trap door in the floor, telling the children not to follow her or they shouldn’t have a drop. So the youngsters got down on their knees, trying to see where their mother kept the prized sweetening.

“There they were — Mrs. Bryant in the cellar, and the children clustered around the trap door — when the savages rushed into the cabin. The children set up a cry of terror. The mother thrust her head up the trap, but an Indian slammed the door down upon her. In a few minutes the frantic cries of the children ceased, the door was thrown open, and the anguished mother beheld the children, mangled and scalped, lying in their own blood upon the floor.

“One big Indian pointed to the bloody scalp at his belt and in broken English assured her it was that of her husband. He then raised his hatchet to cleave her skull, but it was instantly wrested from his hand by another Indian. At this period the Indians usually refrained from killing women, because it was more profitable to sell them to the French for servants in the families at Quebec and Montreal. So, ransacking the house, they hurried into the woods, carrying Mrs. Bryant into captivity.

“Meanwhile the Bryant boy who had been with his father obeyed instructions to hide in the woods. Fearing the Indians would overtake him, he plunged into the brook, thrusting his head under the roots of a tree that overhung the bank, while his body was immersed up to his neck in the water. There he remained until darkness came. Then he crept from his hiding place and concealed himself in a hollow tree that grew near the brook. It was there the next morning that he was found by a party returning to the fort from their belated and futile search at the Bryant house.

“Within the safety of the fort, young Stephen Bryant learned that his mother was a captive, his father dead, and all his brothers and sisters, even the tiny baby slaughtered by the savages. ‘Then”, he said, ‘I’ve no father, mother, brothers or sisters. There’s no place for me to go and nobody to take care of me.”

“But Elizabeth, wife of Hugh McLellan, was equal to the occasion. She at once comforted the weeping boy. ‘I’ll be a mother to you’, she said. ‘You shall come to live with us, and as long as God gives me a crust, you shall have part of it. ‘”

Such is Elijah Kellogg’s account of a tragic incident of the Fifth Indian War. During the hundred years of Maine history between 1670 and 1770, that kind of incident was repeated many times. Every valley in Maine — the Saco, the Androscoggin, the Presumpscot, the Kennebec, the Sebasticook, the St. Georges, and all the rest — became veritable valleys’ of the shadow of death.

But none of the hundreds of incidents have been more vividly told than Elijah Kellogg’s story of the Bryant massacre in old Gorham.

American industry has moved constantly forward because patient, ingenious men have found ways to improve the processes of manufacture. That fact is by no means confined to the billion dollar corporations like General Electric snd General Motors. It has happened right here in Central Maine. In fact it has happened to the sponsors of this program, the Keyes Fibre Company.

A prominent elderly citizen of Waterville, who retired from his position at Keyes several years ago, has told me about one such instance of manufacturing development. He is Galen Watson, who was intimately connected with the installation of the first rotary or drum type machine for the manufacture of paper plates.

The machine was invented by Merle Chaplin, and the design was drawn under the supervision of Mr. Chaplin, with the assistance of Walter Randall, who is still with the Keyes Fibre Company. The original machine, following the Chaplin-Randall design, was built by the Torrington Machine Company of Torrington, Connecticut. But it was not until the machine had been moved to the plant of the Hyde Windlass Company at Bath, Maine that the final, operative machine took shape. It was erected at Bath by James Bonney, James Knight and Galen Watson, under the direction of Fritz Klippel, factory superintendent.

As happens when most new devices are first attempted, be they simple gadgets or earth satellites, between the drawing board and the smoothly running machine are many booby traps. Some of these are unforseeable short of an actual trial run. The Keyes Fibre Company machine was no exception and many discouraging problems made an unwelcome appearance as the operation of its various mechanical functions were tested. But Yankee ingenuity prevailed as it usually does and in the fall of 1927 the machine had passed its trial tests and proven itself ready for production.

In 1927 economic conditions were bad at Bath. The plant of the Bath Iron Works, so hummingly prosperous during World War I, had been stripped, and everything of value had been sold for scrap. The Iron Works thus had several empty buildings, and into one of them was moved the new plate-making machine, where Mr. Watson operated it successfully. Just as the faithful Penelope of Greek legend had woven cloth by day, then pulled out the threads by night, so Galen Watson, day after day, made plates, then beat them up into pulp again. He was just making sure that the machine would give practical service.

When, in December. 1927, Watson became affiliated with the Keyes Fibre Company, the machine was moved to the Keyes plant at Waterville. There it was set up under the direction of Watson, assisted by Joseph Fecteau, and there it was operated continuously for thirteen years until it went into honorable retirement in 1940. Its first tender was Philip Corey, and the first beater man was William Barteaux. That new type of machine, in which Galen Watson took such a prominent part and which was responsible for Mr. Watson’s becoming a citizen of Waterville, proved so successful that it became a forerunner of many which replaced all of the original machines installed by Martin Keyes.

Thus modern industry marches on, because original ways of manufacture are constantly being improved. But let us never forget that there would be no such improvements if some remarkably ingenious men had not devised the original method on which the improvements are made. The great modern machines one now sees at the Keyes Fibre plant on Waterville’s College Avenue wouldn’t be there at all if, more than half a century ago, a persistent fellow named Martin Keyes, with the help of other skillful and determined men like Bert Williamson, had not perfected the first successful machine to make plates out of molded pulp.

Year: 1958