Radio Script #695

Little Talks on Common Things

September 11, 1966

With this broadcast we begin the 19th year of Little Talks on Common Things. We first went on the air on November 14, 1948. Ever since we have had a season of 39 broadcasts each year. Until 1966 we went off the air from early June until after Labor Day. This summer for the first time WTVL tried the plan of repeating a number of earlier broadcasts. The thirteen that were thus repeated between June 12 and September 4 ranged over a period of twelve years in their original production. The oldest repeat was of a broadcast first given on April 15, 1951; the latest was one of September 29 1963. When we closed the regular season on June 5, 1966 we had given a total of 694 broadcasts. Those repeats ranged from No. 104 to No. 567. This first broadcast of the new season of 1966-67 is No. 695.

Because the past summer has seen the start of two new. and architecturally two radically different buildings on Mayflower Hill, with a third and even bigger building, a new gymnasium, soon to be started. this seems a fitting time to tell you about the number of different persons who owned land in 1930 that is now all owned and occupied by Colby College.

During the years 1930 and 1931 Walter Wyman, President of the Central Maine Power Co. and a prominent trustee of Colby, obtained on behalf of the college options on land owned by twenty different persons in the Mayflower Hill region, covering a total acreage of 1,378 acres. Not all of those options were taken up, because the land owned on the Hill, when the college started building there, was only a little more than half of that optioned acreage, about 750 acres. The largest pieces of land that Wyman optioned were 200 acres owned by Carroll Holmes, 140 by Ralph Stanley, 120 by Everett Lewis, and 165 by Joseph Bolduc. Other options were obtained from Alonzo Morrill, Wilfred LaPoint, Philip Poulin, Elmon and Andrew Hustus, John Thibodeau, Mount Merici Convent and the Pray heirs. Two residents of downtown Waterville who also gave options on small parcels of Mayflower Hill land were Seldon Whitcomb and William Lanigan. The only woman owning any of the original optioned land was Laura Pelkey with eight acres, but after filing the original list of options, W.R. Getchell of Augusta, who acted as Walter Wyman’s agent in the deals. reported that he had obtained from Sarah Percival the 16 acres comprising what was known as Pray Field. Getchell reported that another land owner in the area was holding out for $10,000 and he wasn’t going to pay any such outrageous price. In July. 1931 Harvey Eaton notified President Johnson that the holdout had finally agreed to sell for $9.000. His gripe had been that the college paid more for his neighbor’s land.

I have not had an opportunity to work out exactly who were the owners of the land on which the college was finally built, but it is interesting to note that the shrewd Walter Wyman got options on twice as much as was needed. Those 1,378 Wyman obtained acres would have cost $166,000, according to the option deals. What was finally bought cost about $100,000. for which the money was collected from citizens and businesses in Waterville. as this city’s contribution to the moving program.

Through the courtesy of Mrs. Eunice Beale of Eastport. I have received a handwritten account of early Sunday Schools in Waterville. As many of you doubtless know, the entire Sunday School movement is not very old compared with the long history of the Christian Church. In fact what we know today as the church school or the Sunday School did not get well under way until the first decade of the 19th century.

Mrs. Beale is the daughter of Rev. I.B. Mower, for many years State Baptist Secretary, with headquarters in Waterville, whose home was on College Place, near the present Boys Club building. The account which Mrs. Beale has sent me was written more than 60 years ago by Mrs. Mary Hall, wife of Professor Edward Hall, the distinguished librarian and teacher of modern languages at Colby College.

Let me quote the brief statement just as Mrs. Hall wrote it: “There was a union Sunday School in Waterville a few years before any denomination had built a meeting house. Soon after the Baptist meeting house was opened in 1826, there was a school started there. The superintendent and many of the teachers were from the college, some of them professors or tutors, but more of them students. One of those early teachers was George Dana Boardman, who before he was ordained in the ministry and became Colby’s first missionary to a foreign land, was a tutor at the college.

“The first superintendent whom Dr. Hall and I knew was Dr. James Hanson, principal of the academy that is now Coburn. Then came Deacon Stevens, a most Godly and devout man who had suffered the tragedy of losing two sons in the Civil War. He served as superintendent for 19 years. Other superintendents have been Dr. Palmer, Professor Laban Warren, Mr. Caswell, and Deacon Horace Purinton.

“Of the teachers. perhaps the best remembered are Mrs. Frank Philbrick, Mrs. George Dana Boardman Pepper and Miss Florence Plaisted. Professor Moses Lyford long taught a class of boys. The kindergarten was long conducted by Mrs. Charles Hamlin, wife of the Colby professor whom Louis Agassiz lured away to Harvard. It was while Mrs. Hamlin was active in this Sunday School that she and the professor adopted Lulu, a daughter of Colby’s Negro janitor, Sam Osborne.

“Just before Samuel Francis Smith became pastor of the Waterville Baptist Church in 1834, he had written the hymn ‘America’. It had first been sung in the Sunday School of Boston’s Park Street Church. Its first singing in Waterville was at a Sunday School picnic in the grove at the upper end of Ticonic Street.

“Picnics were very popular in the early Sunday School days. Once I remember our Sunday School took a day’s trip by steamer from Augusta all the way down to Seguin.

“Church sociables were considered necessary for the growth of the Sunday School. When a strange young man or woman was asked to join the Sunday School, he or she was invited to meet the members of the church at a sociable.

“The Sunday School library was an attractive feature of the school until the opening of Waterville’s Free Public Library. The books were carefully selected and for many years were under the care of Dr. Hall, the librarian of Colby. Later it was conducted by Deacon Frank Philbrick and Miss Florence Drummond.

“There was a branch of our Sunday School in the Marston schoolhouse on the Oakland Road, where Mrs. Howard Morse was the leader. The French Mission on the Plains had started as a Sunday School and was conducted as such long before it had a settled minister.

“Surely the First Baptist Sunday School has had a noble history”, are the words with which Mrs. Mary Hall ended that interesting account.

In my researches into Central Maine history a name that keeps popping up is that of Rev. William Drew, for many years publisher of a weekly paper called Drew’s Intelligencer, published in Augusta. Drew was an ardent Universalist, but he was a public figure of much wider fame than that enjoyed by most ministers. He was a member of both branches of the Maine Legislature and he held many appointed offices in city, county and state.

There recently came to my hands an original hand-written letter sent to Drew by William F. Moses of Bath on May 27, 1851. It shows the esteem in which Drew was held. Here is what it says: “I see that you have been appointed by the Governor one of the representatives from Maine to the Worlds Fair in London and that you are now making arrangements for going. We have a fine new ship of 900 tons called the New England that sailed from New York about two weeks ago for Quebec, chartered to go from there to London with a load of deals. Now if you would like this means of conveyance to the World Fair, we will give you a passage free and I can raise means here from other persons to pay your expenses to Quebec. You would probably want to leave some time next week. A fair passage from Quebec to London would not be more than twenty days. Captain Manson, commander of the ship, is a skillful navigator and an intelligent man. He has his daughter with him.”

I do not know whether Drew made that voyage on the New England, but he did go to the London Worlds Fair as a representative from Maine.

Along with that letter there came to me recently two other items that once belonged to Rev. William Drew. One is the official notice of Drew’s appointment to the World Fair. It reads: “The Peace Congress Committee for the USA have approved the appointment of Rev. William A. Drew as a delegate from Augusta, Maine to the Peace Congress to be held at London in connection with the World Fair in that city, and hereby certify that he is authorized to take a seat in that Congress.”

That paper reveals that Drew was not going to the Fair as a kind of official sightseer, but rather to the great international gathering that was held to promote world peace. How ironical it was that within a year of that meeting, England was at war with Russia in the Crimea, and ten years later Drew’s own country was torn by Civil War.

The second additional item has significant historical interest. It is a ticket reading: “U.S. Senate. Impeachment of the President. Admit the Bearer, April 1, 1868. Gallery.” The signature is that of George L. Brown, Sergeant at Arms of the Senate. The stub of the ticket says: “To be taken up at the Main Entrance, U.S. Senate, No. 35.”

The mother of a prominent industrial executive in Waterville kept, during the early years of her married life, a careful account of expenses. Let us see what she paid for some items 80 years ago. She bought two dozen buttons for six cents. She paid ten cents for a pickle jar and fifty cents for a wall mirror. She bought three rolls of room paper for thirty cents and really splurged on a couch for $8.75. For her reading she got a book called “Boston Inside Out” for 75 cents, and parted with $8.00 for a six-volume set of Dickens. For her table she had six red napkins that cost her 40 cents, and a dozen white napkins for $1.25. Again she splurged on a photograph album for a dollar. Like all housewives, of course, she baked beans, and her bean pot cost 25 cents.

Food was unbelievably cheap. Listen to what she paid for meat. Sausage 9 cents a pound, haddock 8 cents, roast of beef 12 cents, beef steak 16 cents, pork steak 14 cents, corned beef 10 cents. To make it all palatable she bought a peck of salt for a dollar.

Year: 1966