Radio Script #411

Little Talks on Common Things

March 8, 1959

We have always supposed that ships, in the old sailing days, were usually named for persons, frequently for women in the owner’s family, but sometimes for men. It is therefore a bit surprising to read in an 1853 issue of the Kennebec Journal the names of several ships sailing from Maine ports at that time.

There were the Dawning Light and the Sea Ranger, the Happy Jack and the Silver Moon, the Star Gazer, the Golden Harvest and the White Swan. And, of course, built right on the upper Kennebec at Vassalboro a few years earlier there had been John Lang’s famous Africa-going ship, the Ocean Bird.

Would you like to rent a whole house at a low price? Well, I fear you can’t do it today, but that is what you could do in Augusta a hundred years ago, for a Kennebec Journal ad in 1858 said “To let — a convenient dwelling house, with wood house and stable attached, near the State House. Rent, $10 a month”.

Right next to that ad was another, showing what fashionable men wore on their feet in those days. “Congress boots manufactured and warranted not to split. J. Frye, 4 Merchants Row, Augusta.”

In March of 1853 the editor of the Kennebec Journal was indignant because of an accident on Augusta’s busy Water Street. He wrote: “Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Hussey of China were badly injured in this city last week by being thrown from their sleigh. Mrs. Hussey’s head was cut and bruised seriously. The accident was caused by a slide of snow from the roof of a store on Water Street, which frightened the horse. We believe the City Council has no authority to compel owners of buildings to place guard rails on the roof, when it is slated. The Legislature, however, might pass some general law to meet this case. Accidents from snow slides are frequent and sometimes fatal. We want visitors to be able to patronize our merchants without hazard to their lives.”

Almost 106 years have passed since the KJ editor wrote that paragraph and though we are seldom in danger nowadays from snow slides, a fatal one did occur this winter in Skowhegan. Furthermore the final sentence in that old KJ editorial may well be considered by the present City Council right here in Waterville in 1959. That editor 106 years ago said “We want visitors to patronize our merchants without hazard to their lives.” He might well have added “We want decent protection for our own citizens also.”

In Waterville the new “Walk” and “Don’t Walk” lights at crossings on Main Street offer considerable improvement for pedestrians safety, but have you ever noticed the situation at the corner of Temple and Elm Streets? At that busy corner, where pedestrians who live west of Elm Street are obliged to cross that street if they want to do any business at the Main Street stores, there are no lights and nothing to help the person on foot, except that occasionally on a Friday afternoon a police officer is stationed there. Crossing Elm Street, especially in the winter, when streets and sidewalks are both slippery and it is difficult for cars to stop quickly, is taking one’s life in one’s hands.

For elderly people the crossing is so dangerous that some of them have given up trying it. Will the City Council wait until someone is killed before they do something about that dangerous corner?

Now while we are in this griping mood, there is something else that would help pedestrians in the winter time. That is rigid uniform enforcement of the city ordinance that owners of business property keep the sidewalk in front of their buildings free from snow and ice. The south side of Temple Street is a disgraceful hazard. Granted there are empty stores along that street. Yet someone owns the property and the ordinance makes the owner responsible.

Well. enough of that complaining. What brought it to mind was the account of that accident in Augusta 106 years ago.

Since the KJ editor referred to the Augusta City Council in 1853, it is clear that Augusta had changed from town to city government at least thirty years before the change was made in Waterville. The fact is that, between the time when it became the state capital in 1831 and 1850, Augusta grew much faster than Waterville. In 1850 Augusta had 8,225 people, while Waterville had only 3,964. But ten years later in 1860 Augusta’s population had actually declined to 7,609, while Waterville’s had increased to 4,392. In 1880 shortly before Waterville became a city, Augusta’s population was up again to 8,800, and Wat~rvillers had almost hit the 5,000 mark. The greatest growth in both cities, percentage wise, occurred in the decade between 1880 and 1890, when Augusta’s numbers for the first time exceeded 10,000 and Waterville’s passed 7,000.

In 1853 Augusta had in the person of G. A. Pettingill a very popular mayor. When he ran for reelection in March of that year, there was no candidate against him, but there was a scattering of write-in votes. Pettingill was reelected by 650 to 19. The city report showed that the total expenditures for the previous year had been $20,800. They had spent $4,000 for schools, $7,900 on the streets and highways, and $3,600 for support of the poor. The fire department cost $253 and the police $304. The combined state and county tax of $7,400 was nearly twice as much as the city spent for education.

That was the time when Maine was experimenting with what became known allover the nation as the Maine Law — its famous statute prohibiting the sale of liquor. In 1851, under the dynamic leadership of Neal Dow of Portland, Maine passed its first prohibitory law. It had some defects, and when the legislature convened in 1853, revisions were considered necessary. The legislative committee which considered the revision bill reported as follows: “The object of our committee has been to maintain the integrity of the principle of the original law, making sure of the destruction of the liquors and the certainty of the penalties, and to remove any ambiguous language that may cause doubt and uncertainty about the statute. Your committee believes that to search dwellings into which rum has retreated will not be, if made under due safeguards, an infringement of the right of citizens to be protected from unreasonable search. If rum creeps into a dwelling house, let it be seized and dragged out as a thief would be.”

The report went on to say: “The bill imposes a penalty on the liquor agents for selling to minors or intemperate persons, or for any purpose other than those allowed by law. All fines go not to arresting officers, but to the city or town in which the offense occurred.

“The object of this law is not to dictate to men what they shall drink. If men will be so besotted as to be drunk at home and thereby not disturb the public peace, nor that of their families or the neighborhood, the law should not interfere. But when the drunkard leaves his filthy den and staggers out into open daylight, the nuisance to all, it is time for the law to restrain him. The law indeed must reach farther and take into its grasp the man who draws his living from such disgusting objects. That is why we approve strengthening those parts of the law which place penalties upon the seller of liquor.”

Of course there was always difficulty enforcing the Maine prohibitory law. But those of us who look back upon it during the first twenty years of the twentieth century know that, in spite of the violations and some of the political corruption that surrounded it, that law made conditions in our towns and cities much better than it is today, with our open beer parlors and our general acceptance of social drinking. Notice how the language has changed. Today there is no such thing as a drunkard. He is a confirmed alcoholic. Today a person is seldom said to be intoxicated; he is just slightly under the influence. It is only older persons like Ima Wanderer in the Waterville Sentinel who dares call the taverns by their old time name of rum shops. By whatever name you call them, they don’t smell sweet.

For years — yes, for centuries — alcohol has been a continuous curse to mankind. Just as those Maine legislators had their problem with it in 1853, so do all of us — legislators, city officials, and just plain citizens find it still a perplexing problem in 1959.

Our older people remember how deep was mud, not only on country roads, but on our main business streets before the days of the automobile. It is interesting to know that a little more than a hundred years ago, ;n 1855, the city of Augusta was considering paving.itsprincipa1 business street. Mayor Pettingill advocated, at that time when not a single paving block had yet been laid in either Augusta or Waterville, that Water Street in the state capital be paved. He said: “I am informed that quite an extensive business is carried on in parts of our state by exporting blocks of granite to other states to pave their streets. With great abundance of material close at hand, it would seem to be economy to begin to use it here. This kind of pavement, once laid on Water Street would endure for ages.”

So it happened that Augusta’s Water Street was paved, and about ten years afterward, soon after the close of the Civil War, paving stones were laid on Waterville’s Main Street, at first only from Silver to Temple, then from Temple to what is now Post Office Square; and finally, before 1875 the paving had reached all the way from Lockwood Park to the Maine Central crossing on upper Main Street.

When Maine’s first State Board of Education was established in 1847, it had advocated normal schools to train teachers. But seven years later in 1854 nothing had been done about it. The editor of the Kennebec Journal could not let the matter drop, however, and in March, 1854, he came out with an editorial which said: “The greatest need of our common schools is competent and well paid teachers. In the first place, however, they need to be qualified and to adopt teaching as a profession, not as just a casual occupation. School teaching requires a peculiar and distinct line of study to qualify a person for its proper pursuit. To produce teachers of a character to give steady and uniform advancement of public education we should have normal schools established for this particular purpose. We approve the plan to have general school supervisors, but if we cannot have both them and normal schools, let us by all means choose the latter.”

Well, Maine did get normal schools along with normal courses in the old academies. The latter did some good, but were really pretty feeble attempts to give adequate teacher training, and they are now happily a thing of the past. But the normal schools – at first only two-year institutions — have become four-year, degree-granting teachers colleges. In 1958 for the first time one of Maine’s teachers colleges — the one at Farmington — received accreditation. Think of it! Maine had to wait until nearly the end of the sixth decade of the 20th century before we had a single nationally accredited teachers college. It will not be long now before equipment, faculty and standards are so increased at Gorham that it too will be an accredited college, and in due time the schools at Presque Isle and Machias will enjoy the same standing.

That old editor of the KJ would say today: “To produce teachers of a character to give steady and uniform advancement of public education we must have teachers colleges worthy of national accreditation.”

Year: 1959