Radio Script #728

Little Talks on Common Things

April 30, 1967

A few weeks ago I had something to say on this program about Norridgewock. Today I want to add a bit more about very old days in that historic town.

In 1908 Herbert Milton Sylvester published a series under the general title of “Maine Coast Romances”. In one volume of that series is a sketch entitled “The Priest of  Narantswock”. That, insisted Sylvester, was the original anglicizing of the Indian name that later became Norridgewock.

Rather interesting is the way Sylvester locates that place: “The southeast corner of old Norridgewock laps upon the northern edge of Fairfield. Going up stream on the Kennebec north from Merrymeeting Bay, one passes Augusta, then Waterville, keeping to the river as did Arnold’s army in 1775. With the Fairfield boundary on the west bank, the traveler comes at length to Skowhegan, where the river makes a sharp bend. Following this almost right angled turn, still going upstream above the falls, one reaches the center of historic Norridgewock, with the village buildings on both sides of the river. Here one encounters another sharp turn to the northwest, on to the river’s headwaters issuing from Moosehead Lake. At Norridgewock Village the river makes the angle of a square, and four or five miles upstream is Old Point, where plainly visible from highway or railroad is the monument marking the site of Father Rasle’s Jesuit Chapel at the old Abnaki village.”

Sylvester goes on to explain the importance of Old Point in Father Rasle’s time: “The place was easy of access, for here was a natural highway from Canada to the sea. It was not far by overland trail to the villages of the Penobscots, while to the westward were the wigwams of the Sacos. Because Rasle was regarded as the leading priest among all the Abnaki tribes, the Norridgewocks had had least contact with the English and were regarded as the most peaceful.”

“Rasle’s Christianized band of Norridgewocks, with permanent buildings at Old Paint, was only five days’ journey from Quebec, but at least two fifths as far from the nearest English settlements. In that comparative isolation, Father Rasle consecrated his life to the missionary service. Highly educated, of noble lineage in old France, once accustomed to an easier life, this Jesuit priest had voluntarily buried himself in the American wilderness far from his sunny France.”

Listeners to this program are familiar with the tragic ending of the Father Rasle story, how in 1724 he was killed at the door of his modest house by English forces that attacked the village. We know today that there are definitely two sides to that story. On the Anglo-American side was the assurance that the Norridgewock Indians, dominated by that French priest, were on the side of the French, and that from Old Point issued many a deadly raid on English settlements. In favor of Father Rasle was his religious zeal and the personal devotion of the Indians to him as their spiritual leader.

With the wiping out of the Indians at Old Point, when Father Rasle was killed, the strategic importance of the place vanished so far as Maine Indians were concerned, but in 1775 it achieved new importance. In that year it was at Old Point that Arnold’s Army rendezvoused for their final dash to the carrying place below The Forks, and it was there that the first serious trouble hit the army, causing within a few days the desertions that depleted Arnold’s ranks.

So it came about that, before the village of Norridgewock down the river had any importance at all, the upstream location at Old Point was the best known place on the Kennebec between Swan Island and Moosehead.

Now to turn to a subject we briefly discussed a few days ago: how Maine towns got their names.

Of the many towns with the same name as places in foreign lands, let us now consider a few. Fayette was, of course, named for General Lafayette at a time when the famous French friend of America was still living in 1795. Two years earlier, in 1793, memories of the French Revolution were very much alive, and that was when the Maine town of Paris was incorporated.

The year 1821 saw independence come to several South American nations, and it was in recognition of one such country’s freedom that a Maine town was named Peru. The Oxford County town of Hanover was not incorporated until 1843. It got its name not from the German city, but to honor the British house of Hanover of English kings.

Of six Maine towns, the acknowledged authority on Maine place names, Miss Ava Chadbourne, has this to say: “Solon, Athens, Corinth, Troy, Rome and Carthage must each have had some admirer of ancient cities present when their counterparts were clustered in the Maine forests.” I wonder if it is not possible that this sudden wave of classicism may well have been caused by the rapid rise of the academy system in Maine education at that very time.

Oxford County is actually older than the town of Oxford, and it was the county that took the name of the famous university town. The town of Cambridge, up in Piscataquis County, owes its name to the fact, when its inhabitants wanted to separate from the town of Ripley and set up an independent town, the decisive meeting was held at the home of Isaac Hooper, whose daughter Sarah was given the privilege of naming the new town. Having just read a story about the university town of Cambridge, England, she said: “We’ll call the town Cambridge.”

The now all but defunct town of Edinburg was indeed named for Edinburgh, Scotland, at the request of the Scotsman, John Bennock, who in that area of the Maine community built the important Bennock Road. Thomas and Roger Stinchfield, the first settlers of Leeds, decided to honor the British town from which their father had come to America. He had come first to Gloucester, Mass., then to the Maine community that took its name from the Massachusetts town and was called New Gloucester. So because John Stinchfield had come from Leeds, England, his sons soon lived in Leeds, Maine.

I told you on a previous program that both Bangor and China were named for hymn tunes. Strangely, the same is probably true of the Maine town of Poland. There is, of course, a tradition that it got its name through Anlorican admiration for the Polish patriot Kosciusko. Another story says it is an Anglicized corruption of the name of an Indian chief. But most plausible is the account that, like China and Bangor, Poland was named for a hymn tune. Moses Emery, representative to the Massachusetts General Court and the man who presented the bill for incorporation, simply seized upon his favorite hymn and decided to abandon the old settlement name of Bakerstown for Poland.

Yarmouth, a very old Maine town that once included what is now Portland, originally when incorporated in 1680, had the name North Yarmouth, to distinguish it from Yarmouth, Mass. The name came, of course, from the port of Yarmouth in England, from which put out many sailings for America.

The town of Wales is really named for that part of the British Isles. John Welch, an early settler, was a native of the British Wales.

Early in the 1800’s Nehemiah Leavitt came from Royalton, Vermont to a region north of Bangor, not far from the present Island Falls. He was a Methodist minister, and apparently he never told anyone why he chose to call the new town Smyrna, because that ancient city had no Christian significance. It had been a Moslem city for 900 years before Leavitt was born. But to name the Aroostook town Smyrna was exactly what he did.

The last Maine town incorporated before Maine became a separate state in 1820 was a place in Penobscot County called Crosby Town. When, years later, someone asked Benjamin Friend, who presented the incorporation bill in the Massachusetts legislature, why he chose to name the place after the Sicilian mountain of ancient fame, what indeed he knew anyhow about Mt. Etna, Friend replied that, seeking a name for the town, he had simply leafed through Webster’s Bluebook Speller until he found a name that sounded just right to him. That name was Etna.

It was said that, in the next community beyond Etna on the way to Bangor, the Rev. Paul Ruggles preached all his sermons from the Old Testament prophets, and that at least four times a year he preached on the marvelous experience of the prophet Elijah when the fire of the Lord consumed the sacrifices to Baal on Mt. Carmel. It was natural, folks said, that Ruggles should name their town Carmel.

Now let’s take a look at Waterville at the turn of the present century in 1900. What a time we used to have with carpets half a century and more ago. My earliest recollection of really hard work as a small boy is beating carpets, hung over a line in our back yard at every house-cleaning time in the spring. What a job it was to tack down, straight and firm again, those cleaned carpets. So I suppose Waterville people in 1900 must have been well aware of what the Waterville Mail called the carpet room of J.H. Grondin’s furniture store at 10 Main Street.

Because, like most furniture dealers of the time, Grondin was also an undertaker, the paper said of him: “Mr. Grondin sells everything from cradle to grave.” Rival of Grondin was the firm of Redington and Company, that had recently moved into its new building on Silver Street. The paper said of it: “The Redington business was first located on Main Street, on the site now occupied by Harriman’s jewelry store. In their new block they carry one of the largest stocks of crockery and glassware to be found anywhere in Maine. All their carpets are sewed by machinery in place of the old, slow method of hand work.”

This leads us to a word about Waterville industries at that same time, 67 years ago. In a volume published that year by the Waterville Board of Trade, the Hathaway Shirt Factory actually received less notice than H~wker’s drug store, where a young man named John OeOrsay had recently gone to work. But the publication did give some interesting statistics about the Lockwood Mills. The capital investment was $1,800,000 and there were three mill buildings with 108 looms and 81,952 spindles. The mills employed 1,300 persons and consumed annually 150,000 bales of cotton. Its annual run of manufactured cloth totaled 18 million yards. Now that the Lockwood Mills have been gone for a number of years, it is getting harder and harder for us to reqlize what they once meant to Waterville.

Few Waterville persons remember that there were once two industries on Toward Street up near the Maine Central Yards. One was the Jaynes Creamery, which during the summer months 70 years ago turned out 30,000 pounds of butter and cheese every 30 days. Nearby was the grist mill of H.C. Moore, of which the Waterville Mail proudly said: “Contents of the railroad cars are carried by electric elevators to sixteen big bins at the top of the mill.”

And with that reference to elevated grain up on Toward Street we must say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1967