Radio Script #561

Little Talks on Common Things

January 20, 1963

There are persons still living who remember a prominent citizen of Kennebec County, who died sixty years ago, in November, 1902. He was George H. Crosby of Albion, known as the inventor of the Crosby Steam Gauge, head of the company in Baston that manufactured and distributed his invention, and even better known in Albion and its neighboring towns as the principal promoter of the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington narrow gauge railroad.

George H. Crosby Was born in Bangor in 1836, a descendant of Simon Crosby, who had come to Boston just two hundred years earlier in 1636. George Crosby’s father was a builder and contractor, who was induced to move to St. John, N.B. because of building opportunities created there by the great fire of 1841.

Then he came to Albion and built several mills. He had determined to make that town his permanent home when another big fire called him to new opportunities. That fire devastated the city of St. John’s, Newfoundland in 1848. Leaving his family in Albion, Mr. Crosby took a large crew of workmen to NeWfoundland, where he built the custom house, a suspension bridge, the city hospital, and scores of other buildings for the government and for private enterprises.

During those years the son George was attending the public schools and for several terms attended China Academy. Then for one year he Was a student at the Waterville Liberal Institute and later spent a year at the Wesleyan Seminary in Sackville, New Brunswick. At the age of 18, when he Was fully prepared to enter college and his father Was well able to finance such a course, the young man decided instead to try his father’s own line of contracting and building, rather than seek a college education. As a builder young Crosby lasted less than a year, but got a job with a firm making engines and general machinery in St. John, N.B. There he learned a lot about marine engines, as well as other types, and when the Crimean War broke out, he sailed for Constantinople, but soon left there to become a mechanical employee of British interests in the Mediterranean, working at Gibraltar, Malta and Messina.

Returning in 1857, Crosby married Sadie Roy of St. John and took her to Boston, where he found employment with the Boston Locomotive Works as a journeyman machinist. He became a serious student of mechanical engineering, gradually advancing until he became foreman of the ascroft Steam Gauge Company.

In 1873 he got an even better job as foreman of the American Steam Gauge Company. By 1876 he had secured personally a number of patents for improvements he had developed on steam gauges and safety valves, and decided to go into business for himself, organizing the Crosby Steam Gauge and Valve Company, of which he was a director and superintendent. His improvements on the steam gauge indicator and other precision instruments gave him a world wide reputation so that, when he died in 1902, his company’s products were to be found in all the principal cities of the United States and Europe. During his lifetime Mr. Crosby took out more than thirty patents. After the death of his first wife George Crosby married an Albion Crosby, Alice,the daughter of Harmon Grosby. At that time although continuing his business in Boston, Mr. Crosby established a permanent home in Albion. He purchased a large farm and built one of the finest residences in that part of Maine. Completion of all the buildings on the place took nine years and called for an expenditure of more than $75,OOO — a large sum for those days.

George Crosby became the most active promoter of the narrow gauge railroad that was finally completed in 1895 from Wiscasset to Albion. That Tailroad had plenty of financial trouble, and Mr. Crosby, who was superintendent until after the whole line had been opened, received much criticism, but he had loyal supporters, some of whom burst out in verse. For instance, when the first train came through to Albion, one versifier wrote:

“The train comes over the fertile land
To the swelling notes of the Crosby band,
By Lovejoy Pond with its cooling breeze,
Where balm is found mid evergreen trees.
Our puffing steed runs o’er the rail
By Crosby’s house in the pleasant vale.
The waving corn on Albion hills,
The lOwing herd by cooling rills,
The leafy tirees and the thorny thistle
All hear the sound of Crosby’s whistle.

A daughter of George Crosby still lives in Albion, Mrs. C. H. Plummer. Among the mementoes she retains of her father is the red cover of what was apparently a small note book and calendar advertising Mr. Crosby’s company. On the cover in gilt letters is printed: “Compliments of the Crosby Steam Gauge and Valve Company, Boston, Mass., U.S.A. and London, England.”

Inside the cover is printed: “Crosby Steam Gauge and Valve Company. J. H. Miller, president; George H. Crosby, superintendent; George Eager, treasurer. Sole proprietors and manufacturers of Crosby Pop Safety Valve, Crosby Water Relief Valve, Crosby Steam Pressure Gauge, Crosby Safe Water Gauge, and Crosby Steam Engine Indicator. Sole manufacturer of the Single Bell Chime Whistle. Importers of Polar Planimeters and Invincible Gauge Glasses. Dealers in all instruments incidental to the use of steam.”

When George H. Crosby died in 1902, newspapers allover the United States carried his obituary.

On this program I have often mentioned booklets put out by boards of trade or similar organizations in our Kennebec towns. One such was the Winslow Register, published in 1904, a copy of which came to my hands through the courtesy of Carl Hawes of Halifax Street. The volume begins with a section entitled “Indian History along the Kennebec”. It tells about the early Abenakis,’ the establishment of the Pilgrim trading post at Augusta in 1628, the work of the French missionaries, the killing of Father Rasle, “and the disastrous Indian wars. The historical account ends with these words: “Most of the Indians who survived the English raid at Norridgewock in 1724 went to Indian villages on the St. Francis in Quebec, and thus ended the Indian wars in the Kennebec Valley.”

The next section of the book tells of the early settlements, how the Kennebec Grant was made to the Plymouth Council by the British crown in 1629 and was sold by the Council to four men in 1661. We are also told that a trading post, operated by Clark and Lake, had for some years before 1660 been established at Ticonic Falls. So devastating was King Philip’s War, which broke out in 1680, and the subsequent Indian wars, that by 1750 only two families were living on the entire length of the Kennebec above Merrymeeting Bay. But in 1750, under the leadership of Dr. Sylvester Gardiner, a proprietor of the New Plymouth Company that had purchased the grant from the heirs of the four owners of 1661, settlements began to be made in earnest. The company persuaded Sir William Shirley, the Royal Governor of Massachusetts, to build two forts to protect the company’s existing and prospective settlers from further French and Indian raids. Thus were erected Fort Western at Augusta and Fort Halifax at Winslow.

As the booklet puts it: “Fort Halifax was the key to the Upper Kennebec and opened the valley to the axe of the settler.”

As early as 1754, the very year, when Fort Halifax was built, the families of eleven settlers were already there, and in the next few years their numbers substantially increased. What became of those eleven families is uncertain, because it is well established that not until 17b4 was there any cleared land near the fart. In that year9 says the booklet, Morris Fling built a log hut and became Winslow’s first farmer.

When Winslow was incorporated in 1771, it was named for General John Winslow, the first commander of Fort Halifax.

Some of the early settlers who took advantage of the generous offer of the Plymouth Company to acquire land very cheaply along the east bank of the Kennebec, below its junction with the Sebasticook, were John Drummond, Daniel Hayden, Ezekiel Pattee, Ambrose Howard and Joshua Cushman — all surnames that persist in the region to this day.

In an account of the controversy that led to the division of the town and the creation of the separate town of W~terville, this 1 904 Register points to an important fact about which the published Centennial History of Waterville, appearing two years earlier in 1902, had kept discreetly silent. The petition for the division of the town contained the following paragraph: “Josiah Hayden, Esq., being the only selectman of the present town of Winslow residing on the east side of the Kennebec River, shall, after the division, have power to call the first meeting without assembling his colleagues.”

That statement shows that, by 1802,the western side of the river, now Waterville, had become so much more populous and industrially powerful that it could elect two of the three selectmen, whereas 25 years earlier, in. 1777, all three selectmen lived on the east side.

A section of the 1904 Register was devoted to manufacturing in Winslow, a subject that I have previously discussed on this program. On one broadcast, about two years ago, I told about all of the several mills built along the Sebasticook and its tributary, the Outlet Stream, through which the waters of China Lake empty into the Sebasticook and the Kennebec. Tonight I want to speak a bit about the big steam saw mill of Edward Ware, which in 1904 was still standing near Fort Halifax. The Register said: “This large saw mill, built in 1890, stands on the historic grounds of Fort Point, and included the larger part of the palisade enclosure of old Fort Halifax. The main building, 300 feet long, is filled with the latest appliances for cutting and shaping lumber. An engine of 300 horsepower and the labor of 65 men cut nearly a million feet a month besides turning out over three million each of shingles and laths. All this is made from logs floated down the Kennebec.”

The Register makes it plain that Winslow was justly proud of its new paper mill. It said: “The largest pulp and paper mill in Kennebec County has been built in Winslow by Hollingsworth and Whitney at a cost of nearly a million dollars. Sixty acres of land, extending 3/4 of a mile along the river were purchased, and an immense dam was built, with a channel that transformed the whole tract into .an island. The buildings are 800 feet long, requiring in their construction 15,000 cubic yards of solid stone masonry and three million bricks. The mill converts into pulp six million feet of lumber a year, from which are made every day more than 25 tons of manila paper.”

Year: 1963