Radio Script #429

Little Talks on Common Things

October 4, 1959

Last year on this program I quoted from various letters written by soldiers in the Civil War. Tonight I want to share with you a Civil War letter written not by a soldier, but by a woman. Just at the close of the war Mrs. Stephen Lougee of Elmira, New York wrote to her cousin Ella Hewitt in Vassalboro, Maine.

Mrs.Lougee and her husband were separated by the war, but he was in 1865 one of those men who was fortunate enough to be, not in the war, but in a war-time office in Washington. Many men served their country quite as effectively in those offices as did the men in the field. The office workers were not even free from danger. More than one of them was shot during the war by some Confederate spy seeking access to important papers. One of those Washington office workers who won deserved praise from his superiors was a Waterville man, a graduate of Colby College in the Class of 1862, Edward Winslow Hall, who after the war served for nearly forty years as Professor of Modern Languages and Librarian at the college. During the war Hall served conspicuously in both the War and the Treasury Departments of the federal government.

It was that kind of job in war time that was held in 1865 by the husband of the woman who wrote the letter to Ella Hewitt in our neighboring town of Vassalboro. Here is the letter:

“Elmira, N.Y., May 12,1865

“Dear Cousin Ella:

“I sit me down this quiet Sabbath evening to write you a few lines in answer to your kind letter I received in due season. I must tell you all about myself and my good Stephen. I had the privilege of seeing him this spring. It is just two months today since I left him in Washington. I went down there to the inauguration of President Lincoln and stayed nearly two weeks. I had a very pleasant time indeed. But there have been many changes since then. How sad to think that our beloved President is no more. But God’s ways are not our ways.

“I am well but would feel better if I could get a good sea breeze. It does me so much good.

“I suppose you will want to know if Stephen is going to get home soon. I wish I could say yes. But I really do not see much prospect of it at present. His time will be out in a little over three months, and as there are no orders for the discharge of the Corps, I have no reason to look for him earlier. As a clerk in the office, he has the duty of making out discharge papers for other men, while he has to remain in his blue clothes. But I do not mourn at all, for I have much to be thankful for. Although his health is not good, at least his life had been spared.

“I had a short letter from Aunt Hannah. Charles got home from the army safe. I hope Aunt Hannah’s husband gets home safe too; she has such a trial with so large a family. It is my busy season now, and I have all I can do, but I hope to come East this summer if Stephen is spared.

“I hear today that Jeff Davis is captured, so I suppose that is the closing act of the war. It is ended, and we have a free government, but at what a price! Think of the hundreds of dead who will never return to their homes and loved ones.

“I will send you a ring that was made by a prisoner at the Rebel camp here. I have one like it; so please accept it with the best wishes of the giver. My love to yourself and your family.

“Sarah W. Lougee”

Some of you recall that two years ago I devoted several programs to the diaries of a Winslow man, Charles Keith, who kept a rather comprehensive journal from 1850 to 1880. Charles had a brother Sidney, who became a judge in Indiana. In 1878 Sidney Keith wrote from his home in Indiana an interesting letter to his brother Simeon in Winslow, Maine. Here is what that letter said:

“Dear Simeon:

“Pat goes to school and is steadily progressing. She is growing fast this winter, and as she gets older and larger she reminds me more and more of her sainted mother. John is hard at his Greek. His head now reaches up to my ears. If no ill luck befalls him, he will be able to enter creditably at Colby next fall.”

Here let me interrupt the letter to say that John Conant Keith did enter Colby, but not until the fall of 1880, and he received his degree in 1884. The father, Sidney Keith, had himself graduated from the college in 1844. Now let us get back to the letter: “Our farming here in Indiana is not diversified enough. Almost everything is staked on corn, wheat, hogs and cattle. As the country grows older and various branches of manufacture are started among us, new agricultural products will be introduced, to the advantage of all classes in the community. Things are now looking up. Capital is seeking profitable investment and confidence is generally restored. I hope the night of financial distress is over.”

Here we interrupt the letter for another explanation. By financial distress Keith referred to the Panic of 1873, results of which were felt as long as four years later. But in 1878 Congress had voted a resumption of payment of the government paper money in gold. Business was definitely picking up. As we now return to the letter, let us note the chief advice laid down by Sidney Keith with respect to business prosperity. He wrote: “The chief thing we need is to pursue the old safe paths of industry and economy, remembering that whatever we have that is worth having has been earned by somebody’s toil.”

Then Keith spoke of news from home. He said: “Robert gets the mail every week. I look it over at once and almost always find evidence of changes in Kennebec. A few weeks ago our good cousin Carmella sent me a number of the Kennebec Journal. It is much larger than it used to be forty years ago, but I don’t believe it is conducted with as much ability as it was when under the control of that plain, sound, true man, Luther Severance. Almost all the advertising names are now total strangers to me. It suggests that I would find myself almost a stranger in my native county if I should return.”

Sidney Keith’s wife had died a year earlier, and he said he had been thinking about breaking up housekeeping and going to a boarding house after his son John went East to Waterville to attend college. But he was beginning to have second thoughts, for his letter to Brother Simeon closed with these words: “I have become acquainted with a sweet-faced, pleasant widow from New Haven, Conn., who was about to return home. When I bade her goodbye, she accepted one of the pictures I had just had taken at a photographer’s in Chicago.”

As you well know one of my favorite old newspapers is the Maine Woods, a weekly paper published at Phillips, sixty years ago, to boost the recreation business in the Rangeley region. In a 1903 issue of that newspaper I ran across a very interesting advertisement. The article advertised for two dollars was called a “Sportsman’s Cushion”. It could be worn around the neck, inflated like a preserver, or it could be used as a cushion for camp or boat. The ad said: “It can be used as a swimming collar for those who can’t swim; a life preserver in case of accident; a cushion while waiting for moose; a yoke to save your shoulders; a protector for your shoulders if your gun is heavy. Carry it in your pocket; it weighs just one pound. While you wait for the whirr of ducks’ wings or the rising of fish, do you want to sit on a cold stone, a wet log, or the damp earth? Don’t do it. Get a Sportsman’s Cushion.”

The Maine Woods reported that up at Haines Landing they were telling about a trout that insisted on getting caught. A fisherman catching a trout that he didn’t want to keep, threw it back. At once the trout turned and took the fly again. Again he was thrown back. The procedure was repeated a third time. When he was again thrown back into the water, he circled the fly for a few minutes, then darted in and grabbed it. The fisherman had by that time had enough of the game. He heaved that trout into the lake as far as he could throw it. That time he was successful. Apparently Mr. Trout couldn’t find his way back. In the old days before the automobile, there were many interesting excursions by railroad and steamboat. Listen to this ad, published by the Boston and Maine Railroad in 1901:

“Boston to New York. $5.00 round trip. The passenger takes the B & M train at Boston and goes through the Hoosac tunnel to Albany, then down the Hudson to New York. The trip back to Boston is via the Fall River Steamship Line.”

When were the last passenger pigeons seen in Maine? On October 2. 1903 H. B. Austin of Phillips and a party of friends. while fishing at Dead River Pond, had seen a pair of wild pigeons. The paper Maine Woods said: “They were the genuine passenger pigeons that were so numerous in these parts years ago.”

Sixty years ago it was not unusual for Maine bear meat to be sold in city markets. On October 2. 1903 Maine Woods reported: “The bear killed last week on the Toothaker Farm in Phillips brought the owners twenty dollars in the Boston market.”

Older people in Franklin County remember the fire that swept the village of Eustis on September 4. 1903, burning everything except nine houses on the outskirts of the village. Seventeen families lost everything, including their clothes. Burned were four stores, numerous wagons, buckboards and sleds. The village’s two inns were both burned with all their contents.

One item in a 1902 issue of Maine Woods brought back memories of my own boyhood. The item said: “J. A. Bennett, General Manager of the Bridgton and Saco River Railroad, with Mrs. Bennett and H. A. Hall and wife, were in Phillips last Wednesday. They made a tour of the Rangeley Lakes, going via the Portland and Rumford Falls Railroad and returning via the narrow gauge roads.”

I have told a little about that B & SR manager, Joe Bennett, in Remembered Maine, but I have never on this program or in print mentioned H. A. Hall. He was one of Bridgton’s leading men, holder of several town offices and owner of the grist mill, where he had a bonanza, for he cornered the local market in flour. No grocer in town stocked flour in the early 1900’s. When a customer wanted a barrel of flour, the grocer got it from Hall’s mill and delivered it for the never changing profit of fifty cents, regardless of whether the price was $5 or $10 a barrel. When I think of the barrels of flour I nudged and kneed up flights of stairs to some second floor apartment in those days when I delivered groceries in Bridgton, it doesn’t soothe me a bit to know that my father usually gave long term credit to the customer, waited months for his fifty cents profit, while he paid Hall cash for the flour.

Hall had another monopoly. He was the only coal dealer in town. Of course the woolen mills bought soft coal in carload lots, but the householders burned anthracite, mostly in those big Round Oak parlor stoves. And anybody who wanted so much as a lump of that coal had to get it from H. A. Hall.

Yes, indeed, in little Maine towns like Bridgton, there were men who knew how to make money sixty years ago.

Year: 1959