Radio Script #639

Little Talks on Common Things

January 31, 1965

I don’t pretend that much I say on this program has historical importance, so there is nothing earth-shaking about a coincidence that recently occurred in connection with the program. It is just interesting as an example of how the broadcasts, seemingly unrelated, can have a curious relationship.

A few weeks ago I told how the great New England writer, James Russell Lowell, stopped overnight in Waterville on his way to Moosehead Lake more than a hundred years ago. Several times this fall the broadcasts have referred to the Morrill family of Waterville’s Winter Street and the Ilsleys, to whom they were related by marriage. I now learn that the Ilsleys and the Lowells were related. In fact the father of the present Dr. Morrill Ilsley of California and of his sister, Mrs. Priscilla Koelb, now a resident of Waterville’s Mayflower Hill Drive, was named Reuben Lowell Ilsley, Colby 1891. His mother, the wife of George Boardman Ilsley, Colby 1863, was a Lowell, a member of the Maine branch of the same family that claimed James Russell Lowell in its Massachusetts clan. Such is the trick of coincidence.

At least once a year I like to tell you about some old-time school committee report. Here’s one of 95 years ago. It comes from a little pamphlet with the title “Annual Report of the Superintending School Committee of the Town of Hartland, March 7, 1870”. Like other reports of the time, this one spares no feelings and pulls no punches. Apparently up there in the woods of Somerset County they had just as many school problems as the folks had in Hallowell, Gardiner or Waterville.

It was the day of the district school, and Hartland was divided into ten districts. Of the teacher in District 1 the report said: “She is a young lady of good education, but in discipline she seemed deficient. Some of the rude boys took advantage, and being egged on by others, so annoyed the teacher as to destroy good order and impair the purpose of the school. Instead of applying the oil of birch to the sterns of those errant sons, some parents countenanced the bad behavior. In the winter term the school was taught by a man who had matters well in hand. Of course it costs more to get male teachers, but it is better to employ them at additional expense than to accept the labors of some teachers as a gift.”

District No.1 was in Hartland Village. No.2 on Huff Hill had a good teacher, but a schoolhouse that the supervisor could find no effective language to condemn. He wrote: “The place is cold and horribly arranged. It has a leaky stove-pipe, hacked benches, and in the teacher’s platform is a hole big enough to drop a calf.”

Both District 3 in the Rand neighborhood, and District 4, the Church school, came in for praise. Of the latter the report said: “Miss Charity Higgins is a good teacher. She has physical power as well as brains, and she will tolerate no fooling”

The Fuller School in District 5 was uneventful but the Bean School in District 6 was the scene of winter disorder. The report said: “A disturbance occurred on account of the roguishness of the scholars, together with indiscretion and ill temper of the teacher, and she quit the school.”

In the other districts the school year was uneventful. The report ended with admonition about buildings: “We need and must have better school houses. You cannot expect your scholars to manifest much interest in education when you make them attend school in buildings unfit for sheep or cattle. You know perfectly well that some of our school houses are inferior to your own barns.”

Recently I came upon an old letter written 113 years ago, that casts light on an important marriage. Many years afterward a prominent Waterville widow would marry the man who, before his death, established a record for the longest period of continuous teaching on any college faculty in America. That man, of course, was Professor Julian D. Taylor. the distinguished teacher of Latin at Colby, and his wife was Mary Keely Boutelle, the widow of Dr. Nathaniel Boutelle, a well known Waterville physician and son of Waterville’s wealthy pioneer lawyer, Timothy Boutelle.

On an earlier program I told you about my discovery of the wedding announcement of Professor Taylor and Mrs. Boutelle. Now I can tell you about the reaction of that woman’s father many years earlier, when she contemplated marriage with the young physician son of the old squire.

Mary Keely’s father was Professor George Washington Keely, a man whose name looms large in Colby history, for twice when the college was without a president and in desperate danger of extinction, Prof. Keely came to the rescue and personally raised the money to keep the college doors open. He stoutly refused to accept the presidency, which was offered him at least as many times as Julius Caesar was offered the crown in Rome, but he modestly performed all the duties of president for several years.

Right in the middle of the century, ten years before the opening of the Civil War, Prof. Keely had occasion to write a long letter to his brother in Saco, Maine. As a part of that letter on November 24, 1851, this is what George Washington Keely had to say: “Since Mary’s return from Wenham has formed a matrimonial engagement with Dr. N.R. Boutelle of this place, son of Hon. Timothy Boutelle, of whom you have often heard me speak. This has upset two or three favorite plans for my family life, and has not only put me out to sea, but for months I must be without any ultimate course.

“They will be married next fall, if nothing unforseen occurs, and the question is, ‘Shall they live with us?’ That question, as well as the fact that I am very probably fastened down in Waterville for life, affects deeply some plans I had sketched out with relation to your son, my favorite nephew George. I do not expect to continue my connection with the college many years longer. I must work out the whole matter soon.”

George Keely need not have worried about where Mary and her husband Dr. Boutelle were going to live. The old squire, Timothy Boutelle, solved that problem for him. He built for his doctor son a big brick house on College Avenue. next door to the Keely’s own home. The Keelys lived in what a later generation called the Boutelle House, because in the early years of this century it was the home of the doctor’s son and the old squire’s grandson, George K. Boutelle, a well known attorney, treasurer of Colby College, and president of the Ticonic Bank. The brick house, where Dr. Nathaniel and Mary Keely Boutelle took up residence in 1852, later became the home of presidents of Colby College. The last college president to live in it was Julius Seelye Bixler,whose home it was during the years of the Second World War. It houses the offices of Dr. Howard Hill, his ophthalmological associates and several other physicians.

When the College Avenue underpass was recently constructed, two old houses were demolished — the big house in which Mary Keely had lived as a girl, and the smaller house north of it, next to the railroad track, where she spent her last years as the wife of Professor Taylor. Long before they were torn down, both houses had been converted into apartments.

Dr. Nathaniel Boutelle died in 1890, and his widow then married Professor Taylor. She was a very gracious lady, who made the Taylor home a center of refinement and culture.

Now let us turn to a favorite subject of mine, old-time advertisements. I have often talked about the ads in old newspapers. Tonight I want to tell you about a hand-bill type of ad, something very common in the early years of the 19th century.

There recently came to my hands one of those old fliers advertising the bookstore of M.B. Cox at Hallowell. It is dated December 22, 1825, and this is what it says: “Miscellaneous and Law Books at half price. M.B. Cox offers at the Kennebec Bookstore, Hallowell, a large assortment of books at half price for cash. Among them are the following law books: Acts and Laws of His Majesty’s Province of Massachusetts, Ancient Charters of Massachusetts Bay, Bee’s Admiralty Reports, Chitty on Bills, Gilbert’s Evidence, Marshall on Insurance, Abbott on Shipping, Jacobsen’s Sea Laws, and Newland on Contracts.”

There is no doubt that Cox sold these books for not more than a dollar apiece.

Today some of them are almost priceless historical items in legal libraries. A Colby man who died only six years ago at the age of 95 was H. Warren Foss of the class of 1896. During his years of retirement at the old family home in Mount Vernon, Maine, Foss did a great deal of writing, especially about persons and events connected with his family or their Mount Vernon neighbors. One such neighbor, Leon Gordon, died alone on his Mount Vernon farm, and some of the items found in the house were brought to Mr. Foss for possible identification. One was the photograph of a lady whom Foss came to call the Mystery Woman in the Dark Suit. He recognized the picture as that of Miss Matilda Atkinson, a minister of the Society of Friends, who used to hold services in various Kennebec towns. Foss said her mission on Augusta’s Water Street became very well known. Then Foss told this remarkable story.

Miss Atkinson left Maine and went to far-away Alaska, where she established another Quaker mission. Returning to the west coast of the States, she met and married Dr. Henry Minthurn of Oregon and became much attached to the doctor’s orphaned nephew who had, after his parents’ deaths, lived in the doctor’s home. She helped the boy to achieve his ambition for a college education, and when Leland Stanford University opened its doors he was in its first class. Many years later Mrs. Minthurn visited her old places of work in Kennebec County. When the time came for her to leave, she said she was going to stop over in Washington. And she did. The Woman in the Dark Suit, once a Quaker preacher in Kennebec County, Maine was entertained by the boy whom she had befriended in Oregon many years before. Yes, she was entertained in the White House by President Herbert Hoover.

Year:1965