Radio Script #434

Little Talks on Common Things

November 15, 1959

We used to hear a lot of harsh comment about the idle rich, especially about the sons of wealthy men who did nothing except spend father’s money. You and I have read about those idlers of the big cities, the sons of the famous 600 families of America, but I am sure neither you nor I ever suspected that anyone ever applied the label of idle rich to anyone in Waterville. Indeed I was just as surprised as you will be to learn that, in 1862, when the Civil War had been only a few months underway, the Waterville Mail editorialized as follows: “Dr. Miller, who is lecturing here upon physiology, made a strong point last Tuesday evening by his unusual reference to the Sabbath. He said that part of the same commandment that enjoined the Sabbath observance also said: ‘Six days shalt thou labor.’ He emphasized that it is just as much a religious duty to work industriously through six days each week as it is to rest on the seventh day. There was a theological sensation in the audience at this somewhat novel declaration, and no doubt some thought it a new article of faith, not to be accepted without caution. That a man whose father has left him a comfortable pile is under obligation to work, came as a shock to loafers, especially of the pious class. Those fellows will be slow to admit that it is not commendable merely to keep the Sabbath and enjoy as much ease as possible on the other six days. Hurrah for Dr. Miller, we say. It is time somebody shocked these well fixed idlers.”

It is interesting to note what the prevailing attitude is today toward sentiments like those expressed in that Waterville Mail editorial nearly a hundred years ago. While there are still persons among us who labor diligently six days a week, some of them even seven days; while it is still true that a farmer’s work is never done and can take no vacation on Sunday, the great majority of American workers are not on the farms, but are in the factories where the six day working week is long a thing of the past. In fact, so rapid has been the progress of automation in industry that many of our best economists tell us that the four-day week is just around the corner, that it is the only way we can avoid, or cushion, unemployment.

Look at the difference merely in retail store hours since Ephraim Maxham and Daniel Wing published the Waterville Mail. When I was a small boy in Bridgton, Sunday was the only evening my father ever spent at home. His grocery store was open every week-day from 7 in the morning until 9 in the evening. Father, like most proprietors of his day, insisted that no one but himself should open that store in the morning and close it at night. So it was only illness or some unusual event that left those duties to father’s head clerk. Promptly at 6:45 every morning father would turn the big key in the store door, and it would usually be 9:15 and on Saturday often as late as 10:30 when he would lock that door again.

When I was about ten years old, the merchants of Bridgton agreed to close two evenings a week, Tuesday and Thursday. The plan worked so well that, in the year when I entered high school in 1905. the stores began to close every evening except Saturday. By the time I graduated from high school just fifty years ago, in 1909, everyone was accustomed to finding the stores closed in the evening. But all through those years the opening at 7 in the morning never changed. How different it is today here in Waterville, to go to one of our supermarkets at quarter of nine in the morning and have to wait fifteen minutes for the door to be opened.

As for the idle sons of the very rich, they are harder to find today than they were even half a century ago. More and more it has become the custom for wealthy families to see to it that their sons are trained to respect work and to turn their hands to it. I suspect this changed attitude has been brought about, in no small measure, by the striking example of the Rockefeller family. Everyone of the sons of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. has made a respectable name for himself by his own endeavors. Not one of them could ever be called an idle loafer.

I remember one of my own few contacts with a member of the Rockefeller family. It was in the summer of 1926. when my family spent a month’s vacation on Highland Lake in Bridgton. During that month I spent a lot of time on the Bridgton Highlands golf course. One day I and the fellow with whom I was playing were approached in the club house by a couple of boys in their late teens and invited to make a foursome with them. The boys were campers from the tutoring school, Long Lake Lodge in North Bridgton. They were both young gentlemen with good manners and affable conversation. As we waited for a preceding foursome to leave one tee. the short. stubby camper asked his tall, wiry companion, “Are you going on the White Mountains trip next week?” “No”, was the reply, “I can’t afford it. I’ve got just about enough to pay for a round of golf next week.” The fellow who seriously and convincingly made that reply was Winthrop Rockefeller, grandson of the person who was then America’s wealthiest living man.

The history books we have been accustomed to read would lead us to believe that every person in every Northern city and town was an enthusiastic supporter of the Union cause in the Civil War. But contemporary accounts in the newspapers of the day show all too clearly that such was not the case. In February, 1863, when the war was already nearly two years old, patriotic leaders in Waterville felt that things needed a decided push. When the war had broken out, enthusiasm had at first been high. William S. Heath, his brother Francis, and other patriotic young men had experienced no trouble raising the local companies that marched off to battle. But the succession of Union defeats and the steadily mounting casualty lists had dampened the enthusiasm in many a northern town.

There was little outright opposition to the war; the copperhead movement never gained real strength in Waterville, but there was a lot of lethargy, a lot of feeling to try to forget about the war and carryon business as usual.

So it came about that Solyman Heath, whose son William had been killed at the battle of Gaines Mill in June, 1862, persuaded a number of Waterville citizens to join him in a call for a public mass meeting to be held in the Waterville Town Hall on Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1863. When the day came, the hall was crowded. On motion of Solyman Heath, the people voted to form a Union Association to promote vigorously the prosecution of the War. Edwin Noyes, Superintendent of the Androscoggin and Kennebec Railroad and son-in-law of Waterville’s recently deceased leading citizen, Timothy Boutelle, was elected president.

Vice-president was the head of the college, James T. Champlin. Daniel Wing was secretary, and the executive committee was composed of Solyman Heath, E. L. Getchell and T. W. Herrick. A committee to draw up resolutions had on it Professor Moses Lyford, F. P. Haviland, Edwin Maxham, J. R. Elden and William H. Hatch.

Let us now see how the Waterville Mail told the story of that mass meeting: “After prayer by Rev. Dr. Sheldon, Hon. Benjamin Kingsbury of Portland administered a scathing rebuke to the Peace Democrats and earnestly exhorted all who love their country to stand by the Administration. The meeting adopted the following resolution: ‘Resolved, that next to treason in the hearts of her enemies, the danger that most threatens our Union is the apathy of its friends. We call upon all patriots to shake off this lethargy and gird themselves anew for the conflict. This Union is one and must remain so. We no more approve the counsels of those who would at this hour bid our wayward sisters go in peace than of those who would win them back by the sacrifice of all we hold dear. To our government, in its efforts to crush this rebellion, we pledge our unqualified support. We propose to arm our hands against treason, whether it be in South Carolina or in Maine. “‘

A year or more ago I told you how a Gardiner newspaper paid its respects to Waterville in 1858. It called Waterville a pretty but quiet town. It said: “No one who wants to work for a living is needed in Waterville, but those who live on the interest of their money will find it a paradise.”

What I didn’t tell you at the time was the contrasting account the Gardiner newspaper gave of Fairfield. It said: “Kendalls Mills is just the reverse of Waterville, just as homely as Waterville is pretty, just as busy as Waterville is qui et. Everybody works for a living and the place is growing. ”

Of Waterville the Gardiner paper had said: “The noisy sect of Methodists have no society there.” Of Fairfield it remarked: “There the Methodists have the biggest society and they run an annual camp meeting. The ladies do not faint if they see a man in shirt sleeves. The gardens are filled with potatoes in preference to hyacinths, and with onions instead of daffodils.”

The liquor question has always been with us, and rival newspapers allover Maine were telling how much worse conditions were in some community other than their own as long as a hundred years ago. In 1859 the Bangor Whig commented: “Waterville has the meanest rum-sellers of any place in the world of its size.”

The Portland Journal responded: “If the rum-sellers of Waterville are any meaner than those in Bangor, it must indeed be a God-forsaken place.”

Last summer, traveling the southern shore of the lower St. Lawrence, I was interested to see the huge wood piles stacked up beside every house. I had no idea so much wood was still being used as the principal fuel anywhere in North America. Yet there are many persons still living who well remember when wood was the leading fuel in Maine. It was certainly so in the Cumberland County towns I knew best in my boyhood days. It was with peculiar interest, therefore, that I ran across an item in the Waterville Mail for June 18, 1860. Here is what it said: “The French Canadians who have an extensive Waterville settlement at the Head of the Falls, catch most of their wood in the river, the women doing no small share of the work. Two of them, each having a child in the boat, were engaged in that labor on Friday afternoon when, approaching too near the falls, they were drawn over and drowned.”

That little newspaper item shows that a hundred years ago there were people living in Waterville who faced danger and death just to get wood for the kitchen fire.

Many of the newspaper advertisements during the Civil War showed business going on as usual. One such in the Waterville Mail for October 16, 1863 said: “A. J. Muzzey would give notice that he has removed his Bread Shop to the Head of Silver Street, where he has fitted up a dwelling and shop, and intends to keep all kinds of eatables usually kept in bread stores.”

Right beneath that ad appeared one directly concerned with the war. It read: “Wanted – twenty good men for Captain Randall’s company, Col. Fessenden’s veteran regiment. This company is composed of picked men from the country towns. $502 bounty paid for veterans; $302 for raw recruits. Apply immediately to the recruiting office in Apple Hall, Waterville.”

Year: 1959