Radio Script #443

Little Talks on Common Things

January 17, 1960

In this beginning of the seventh decade of the 20th century we are surrounded by so many marvelous inventions that it is hard for us to believe that man’s most important discoveries and inventions were made many years ago. Of course there will never be complete agreement on what things in man’s march upward from primitive savagery have been of most value to him. But it is difficult to think of anything that has meant more to the human race than five things which man learned thousands of years ago. Not the steam engine nor the electric dynamo, not even the process of making steel has meant so much as five old discoveries. Let us see what they are.

First and greatest of all was man’s discovery of how to use fire. Without it he could never have cooked his food and, what is more important, could never have moved out of the relatively narrow zone of warm climate. Without it he could not have smelted iron nor developed steam. The mastery of fire was for all time man’s greatest technical achievement.

Two other discoveries have been almost as important as fire. They are agriculture and the domestication of animals. When man first learned that he could scratch the soil, put in the seeds of plants, and after some months get a store of food from those plants, civilization was on its way. When he had to stay in the same place to wait for the plants to grow and keep the weeds away from them, man ceased to be a wandering nomad. His settled villages became cities; the cities became city states, and substantial government developed. For long centuries man’s work was limited to the strength of his own body. Then he learned to tame the ox and the horse to carry burdens and pull loads for him. He could train dogs for the hunt and domesticate the cat to keep mice out of his precious grain. The fourth and fifth of those early things that meant so much to man were outright inventions the wheel and the boat. Man could not carry a sizable load very far when his animals had to drag it over the ground. But the invention of the wheel made it possible for him to build carts and wagons. It also made possible the use of water power. In fact the wheel is the basic primeval unit in hundreds of inventions we now take for granted in our daily living.

When at last man found a way to travel on the water, whether by crude dugout made from a log, or by bark spread over a rude frame of twisted branches, he was no longer bound to the land. The streams and lakes, the great rivers and the ocean itself were opened to his travels. Yes, in my opinion, those anthropologists are right who say that mankind’s five greatest discoveries and inventions have been the use of fire, the development of agriculture, the domestication of animals, the wheel and the boat.

This is the time of year when many Waterville people are in Florida. Recently I was amazed to learn that a Waterville couple spent the winter in Florida 88 years ago, only seven years after the end of the Civil War.

A few weeks ago, on this program, I had something to say about Edwin Noyes, Superintendent of the Androscoggin and Kennebec Railroad, who had married the daughter of Waterville’s leading citizen, Squire Timothy Boutelle. In the winter of 1872 Mrs. Noyes was in poor health, and her husband decided to get her out of Maine’s cold climate.

On New Years Day, 1872 the couple left Waterville on the A & K R R. Mrs. Noyes later wrote an account of that journey, and that neatly penned manuscript has recently come into my hands. In Boston Mrs. Noyes mislaid what she calls her waterproof. That was a garment which in the early 1900’s people called a mackintosh, and in our day a rain coat. She did not recover it until just as they were about to leave for New York, after three days in Boston.

Somebody had sold Mrs. Noyes on the virtues of Graham bread. On her first day in Boston she wrote: “My dinner of graham bread and butter tasted good, followed by a cup of tea.” On the next morning her breakfast consisted of a slice of dry Graham toast and a cup of green tea. She says. her husband complained of no appetite for breakfast, but he ate fish balls, an omelet and a hot roll. Of course their stop in Boston was where everybody of any consequence always stayed — the old Parker House.

In New York the couple put up at the Astor House. Mrs. Noyes’ comment was scarcely complimentary: “We were shown to a large, cold, comfortless room where I sat wrapt up until a fire was made. At 6:30 we went down to our tea, though they call it dinner. They now serve meals on the European plan. I ordered dry graham toast, with milk and water. Mr. Noyes had oysters and bread and butter. The service was very poor and our food was forever coming. I spent the time watching a poor old man at another table. He wore a wig and a monocle, but had no manners – just ate like a pig.”

In New York Mr. and Mrs. Noyes spent a day shopping. At that time they had a 24 year old son who was a career officer in the U.S. Navy. All the way South Mrs. Noyes anxiously awaited a letter from Lt. Boutelle Noyes, whose ship was then at Nice, France. Kept ready for him, whenever he had leave, was his room in the Noyes home on Waterville’s Temple Street, and his mother had decided to put new furniture in it. She says she bought for Boutelle’s room that day in New York, a narrow bed, a wash stand, a small table, an easy chair, a combination bureau and bookcase, a writing desk, two wall brackets, and a smoking set. For her own living room she purchased a small sofa, two arm chairs, two ottomans, three tables and a what-not. I wonder how the Waterville merchants viewed those out-of-town purchases.

After a day in Washington Mr. and Mrs. Noyes took a boat down the Potomac  to Aquia Creek, passing Mt. Vernon, at which Mrs. Noyes says they gazed curiously and reverently. “At Fredericksburg”, she wrote, “we crossed the little river near the place so fatal to so many of our poor fellows, for only a few miles away was Chancellorsville, and just north of it that fearful spot, the Wilderness, so full of harrowing memories. All along the road were the old earthworks.”

When they arrived at their hotel in Richmond, Mrs. Noyes commented. “Our room is dark and damp, not exactly ‘lovely’, as the poor, old dilapidated Negro assured us it would be. And how dirty it all is, but I suppose we must get used to Southern dirt.”

Mrs. Noyes saw Jeff Davis’ home and the old State House. but she was disappointed to be obliged to leave Richmond without a visit to Libby Prison, where less than ten years earlier boys from Maine had literally starved.

By slow stages on railroads that were only partially rebuilt after the ruin of war, the couple reached the proud old city of the South. Charleston. They went down to the Battery and as Mrs. Noyes puts it, “We walked back and forth where the proud South Carolinians had so often looked out upon our beleagued soldiers in Fort Sumter. exalting in their Southern strength and the fancied weakness of the Yankees.”

The next day in Charleston Mrs. Noyes saw what she called a tournament. This is how she described it: “It was one of those institutions peculiar to Southern chivalry, when the men trick themselves out in finery, fancying they are like knights of old, who fought for the smiles of fair ladies. Some were ridiculously rigged up on horseback. One short, fat fellow wore a black velvet roundabout. crimson breeches fastened at the knee, and long cotton stockings drawn over his fat calves. Another had on a short Cavalier cloak of blue velvet spangled with silver.”

From Charleston the couple took the ferry across the Ashley River, where they again boarded a train, which Mrs. Noyes called the shabbiest she had yet seen. The route, she tells us, seemed one long, level stretch all the way to Savannah, passing cotton fields, rice paddies, and Negro huts swarming with pickaninnies.

Of Savannah she wrote: “We saw on the streets some fine turnouts with well dressed ladies in them. But the houses look worn and out of repair, no such places as you see on Beacon Street or in the Back Bay in Boston.” That was rather ungracious of Mrs. Noyes. Sherman’s army had not wrought havoc on Beacon Street or in the Back Bay as it had in Savannah. Perhaps Mrs. Noyes’ dislike of the town was intensified by interruption in her diet. She tells us: “I could get no Graham bread this morning — the first time since I left home.”

Sixteen days after they left Waterville Mr. and Mrs. Noyes arrived at their southern destination, St. Augustine, Florida. Of the boat trip up the St. John River she notes little except their sight of one house. Everyone on the boat gazed at it — the home which Harriet Beecher Stowe had taken far down in the South where she was so cordially hated for her “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”.

They had planned to stay at a home that a Mrs. Gardiner had opened for winter visitors, but after one night there Mrs. Noyes insisted on going elsewhere. She wrote: “It is an ugly old place on one of those narrow Spanish streets with scarcely a ray of sunshine. It has a narrow, crazy old balcony running along the front opposite a building inhabited by an old Negro woman.”

Even when she had moved to more inviting quarters in St. Augustine, Mrs. Noyes said: “This house is kept by a widow lady and her daughter, undoubtedly slaveholders and rebels.” They called on Gerard Gilbert, whom Mrs. Noyes describes as a carpet bagger held in great contempt by the people, but really a kind, generous man. “His place”, said Mrs. Noyes, “is so much better kept than any other in St. Augustine, of course the people are envious.”

Mrs. Noyes was troubled by the cold. She wrote: “These houses are built solely for warm weather. I have scarcely slept warm a single night since I came here. Only when I get in the sun do I stop shivering. It is as much as one’s life is worth to get the servants to build a fire. They don’t see why we need one.”

Mrs. Noyes gives us an interesting picture of St. Augustine in 1872. “Its principal building material”, she wrote, “is a unique conglomeration of fine shells and sand known as coquina rock, found in large quantities on Anastasia Island at the entrance of the harbor. The streets are very narrow. One of them, a mile long, is only 15 feet wide, and the widest is only 25 feet. Many of the houses have hanging balconies which almost touch each other over the narrow street. The houses are built around open courts, so when you pass through the main door you find yourself still in the open air. It is all strange to northern eyes. Built as a military town, it still has the gateway of its old 16th century wall with Moorish towers and loopholed sentry boxes. What was once the moat outside the wall is clearly marked as it runs from shore to shore. The old fort, originally named San Juan, is now Fort Marion.”

Mr. and Mrs. Noyes did not leave St. Augustine until April fifth, and it was the twentieth of that month before they returned to their Waterville home. Mrs. Noyes admits that her health had improved, but she just didn’t like Florida.

Year: 1960