Radio Script #703

Little Talks on Common Things

November 6, 1966

As everyone knows by this time, Little Talks is a program that turns our attention constantly to the past. But I assure you the purpose is not to provoke worship or undue reverence for the days of long ago. During the eighteen years of this program what we have constantly striven to do is to point out the truth so forcefully expressed in the words carried over the entrance to the beautiful new building that houses the National Archives in Washington. Those words are “The past is prologue”.

Because the past is indeed but prologue to the present and the future, we need to preserve carefully and make readily available the previous records of the past. That is why organizations, states and nations have what are called archives. So, when you go to the polls tomorrow, I urge you to vote Yes on the referendum to approve a bond issue to erect a bUilding to house for our state its archives, its state library and its museum.

Not until last July did Maine have any such officer as an archivist. Then, pursuant to an act of the most recent legislature, Samuel Silsby, Jr. was appointed to that position. Already Mr. Silsby is establishing some order in the midst of chaos. Records stored in odd corners of the State House, in an abandoned elevator shaft, and in buildings allover Augusta are being listed and collated. But they will remain largely inaccessible until there is a building in which to place and protect them, to say nothing about the need to display the most precious of them for public exhibition. Who of you has ever seen the original Constitution of Maine, or the act of Congress granting Maine statehood? Who of you has examined colonial maps of Maine made before the Revolution? Those and many other precious documents will be placed on display in the new building.

This referendum on the ballot tomorrow is not a partisan issue. Democrats and Republicans alike favor it and urge it. Both party platforms endorse it. Both candidates for governor are for it. Both industry and labor urge its approval. Benjamin Dorsky of the Maine Federated Labor Council has said: “All three aspects of the building — archives, library and museum — deserve public support, but it should be stressed that the facilities of the building will help teachers and schools in every Maine community to provide better education.” A prominent industrialist, Ellerton Jette of the Hathaway Shirt Company, has said: “Approval of the building to house Archives, Library and Museum makes good sense, not only as an economical measure, but also as a means of enriching the lives of all the people of Maine.”

Mr. Jette’s statement that the building makes sense as an economical measure is supported by experience in Massachusetts. The organization of the archives under a competent archivist saved the state two million dollars in two years. The record management program authorized in the new Maine archives law will save space, time and useless storage of many papers, and all that means savings in dollars. A much smaller state in population than Massachusetts, Maine cannot expect its savings from archives management to run into millions. But a very conservative estimate sets Maine’s potential saving, after the new building is in use, at $200,000 a year.

So I urge you to vote yes on that issue tomorrow. You can make Maine a state with pride in its past as well as faith in its future. Vote YES for Maine’s cultural building.

Recently I have been away from Waterville on an interesting assignment. Last spring I promised that, if I could possibly do so, I would spend two weeks in my native town of Bridgton, helping the Bridgton Historical Society prepare a history of the town to be published in connection with the 200th anniversary of its settlement. Since that anniversary occurs in 1968, it is obvious that the first settlers came to Bridgton in 1768, seven years before the beginning of the Revolutionary War.

For more than a year already the Bridgton Historical Society has been at work on this interesting and important project. Various aspects of the town’s history have been assigned to different persons, and now, more than a year before the anniversary, most of the manuscripts have been submitted. One is an exhaustive study of the land grant and its settlement; another covers thoroughly the industries of the central village; others deal with schools, churches, transportation, organizations, the town’s part in the nation’s wars, and other topics. A dozen papers tell the story of the settlements outside the central village with such intriguing names as Sandy Creek, Hio, Side City and Punkin Valley. My task has been to help the editorial committee get this material into one consistent story without duplication. It was a fortnight of work, but included a lot of fun.

Bridgton is a town of about 3,000 inhabitants, situated some forty miles north of Portland, near the New Hampshire line, in the foothills of the White Mountains. It is on the so-called Roosevelt Trail, Route 302, from Portland to the mountains.

Historically there are two unique facts about Bridgton. One is that it was founded by mistake; the grant that caused its settlement was intended for another location. The second fact is that the central village of the town, long known as Bridgton Center, has one of the longest, if not actually the very longest, Main Streets of any village in Maine. It extends for three miles, and has four different business sections along its route.

The mistake about the land grant is interesting. In 1761 Joseph Frye petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for a tract of land in the Upper Saco Valley, suggesting that a settlement well toward the mountains would attract other settlers and make the adjoining lands more valuable to the government. Frye was granted a tract six miles square. Within a year he had set up his own home in the wilderness and was busy inducing other families to join him. His settlement became the town of Fryeburg.

Joseph Frye’s close acquaintances in Andover, Mass. included Thomas Perley and Moody Bridges. Long before those men were born the seeds of future settlement had been sown by the conflict between the English and the French for possession of what is now Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, as well as northern New York. It was a Maine man, Sir William Phips, who in 1690 led the expeditionary force designed to capture Quebec and Montreal. They did take Port Royal in Nova Scotia, but were defeated by the French and Indians before Quebec.

The Province of Massachusetts had undertaken this expedition alone, without help from other colonies. Consequently the Province lacked the money to pay the soldiers and sailors who took part in the enterprise. Although Massachusetts had no money, she did have a potentially valuable asset in vast acres of uninhabited land in what is now the State of Maine. So the General Court was quite willing to pay the soldiers of 1690 with grants of wild land. On behalf of 55 veterans of that campaign there was filed in 1736 a petition for a township grant. Those petitioners, who included James Bridges of Andover, were granted a township of 36 square miles in a place called Rowley Canada. Then it was discovered that the land lay across the line in New Hampshire and did not belong to Massachusetts at all.

A quarter of a century elapsed. Then, to correct the error of 1736, the General Court made a new grant, this time to a grandson of James Bridges, Moody Bridges, and two of his Andover neighbors, Benjamin Mullikin, and Thomas Perley. The grant was made “in lieu of a tract called Rowley Canada, in unappropriated land belonging to Massachusetts, provided only that the grantees locate the township east of the Saco River and adjoining some other grant already located.”

The land still available and bordering on an existing grant was that south and east of Joseph Frye’s settlement at Fryeburg. That land, granted to Bridges, Mullikin and Perley, was a tract of approximately 36 square miles in what are now Bridgton. Harrison and Naples. That is the story. If the grant in Rowley Canada had not been in error, and if Joseph Frye had not already brought settlers to his township of Fryeburg, Bridgton would certainly not have been settled as early as 1768.

Now for that three-mile Main Street. It is a result of a stream known as Stevens Brook, which empties Highland Lake into Long Lake, the northernmost of the navigable chain that consists of Long Lake, Brandy Pond, the Songo River, and Sebago Lake — the route of the excursion steamers of half a century ago known as the Songo River Line. Stevens Brook drops a total of 250 feet in its three-mile course to Long Lake, and on the way has twelve water power sites. Those sites meant the development of industry: sawmills, grist mills, carding mills, and finally three big woolen mills that made Bridgton an industrial town. The principal power sites were four, and around them sprang up homes and stores along with the mills. And in time those four places became the trading centers called Upper Village, Post Office Square, Pondicherry Square and Lower Village.

So distinct were the areas that they can be illustrated by the practice of my father’s grocery store sixty years ago. His driver, calling at homes for orders in the morning and delivery in the afternoon, covered two routes: Upper Village on Monday, Wednesday and Friday; Lower Village on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

Bridgton Center was and still is a long, stretched-out area on both sides of Stevens Brook.

The most distinct impression of my recent Bridgton visit is a new appreciation of how little we got around in the horse and buggy days. This time I visited places in Bridgton and its bordering towns that I never saw before, although I lived the first 18 years of my life in that town. I actually knew Portland better than I did many places less than ten miles from home. We could board the narrow gauge train, change for the broad gauge at Bridgton Junction, and be in Portland in less than two hours — all without using a horse or even hitching a ride. But to go to such a place as Fryeburg Harbor, 18 miles away, and not to be confused with the larger Fryeburg Village, was so unusual that I never saw the place until about three weeks ago.

Well, our time has run out and I must say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1966