Radio Script #731

Little Talks on Common Things

May 21, 1967

At the close of last week’s program I told you some day I would have more to say about that country store up in Clinton. We may as well have it today, while it is still fresh in memory.

It is well known that those old stores handled very little money. Most business was done by barter; so we may expect to find in the Clinton merchant’s records many credits for merchandise. He took in oats, wheat, corn and hay, eggs and butter, mittens, stockings and footings; lumber, laths and clapboards. But many of his credits were for services, such as $2.00 for hauling a load of goods from Kendalls Mills, $2.00 for rental of his horse and chaise, and $1.25 for this interesting charge: “horse to go to wedding”. There were many charges for sawing lumber, such as “Use of plant mill to saw two thousand feet – $2.00”.

That old Clinton daybook is filled with what were called cross charges: “To Sherman Pichon, paid Spaulding by request 62 cents; to Edmund Joy, paid John Whitter $3.00; Robert Fisher, paid Nichols 67 cents.” Here is an example of a cross charge appearing as debit and credit in consecutive items: “Feb. 15, 1848. Osgood Smith, credit by sawing in 1844, $7.09. Isaac Page, to bill for sawing in 1844, $7.09.” Those two items, of course, cancel each other, but notice that it took four years to clean up payment on that transaction.

Some of the credits entered in that old daybook are for a ton of hay 7.50, a fox skin 1.12, a calf skin 1.17, a barrel of vinegar 3.90, a lamb 1.25, and 1,000 shingles 1.67. Many credits are for labor: Orin Spaulding, 7t days driving Williams’ logs, 7.50; George Ellis, for trucking 8 loads of goods from Waterville. 16.00; Richard Wells, for plowing 2.50; Henry Furbush, labor on well 67 cents. If we think chicken is cheap today, consider this item in the daybook: Philip Emerson, credit by 25t lb. chickens, 1.51.

Like so many country stores, this one at Clinton 125 years ago had a post office. In nearly every Maine village a storekeeper was the postmaster. At first glance, the old records seem to show surprising gullibility on the part of that Clinton postmaster. He charged patrons for postage on his store accounts. On the very first day shown in the book are five different charges for postage, ranging from 6 cents to 12 cents.

Does this mean that the postmaster let folks have postage stamps on credit, that he let them mail letters without advance payment? At that time, postage stamps had not been introduced, and postage was paid, not by the sender, but by the receiver of mail. What the postmaster was doing was as risky as if he had given credit for stamps. He let folks have mail addressed to them without paying at the receiving end. It was that practice in 1830 that got young Abraham Lincoln into trouble when he was a partner in the Berry and Lincoln store in New Salem, Illinois. At the end of the year Lincoln, as postmaster, had to settle with the government. Because he couldn’t collect from many of those to whom he had extended postal credit, Lincoln had to borrow the money to pay Uncle Sam.

In the 1840’s no one had to pay in advance for a newspaper subscription, but he was supposed to pay the postal charges on the paper as each copy was received. Most of the newspapers were weeklies, yet if not paid promptly, the postal charge could amount to quite a bit over a period of time. Here are a few of such items charged in that Clinton store: “Postage on “The Pamphlet Guide”, 47 cents; postage on “The Kennebec Journal”, for one year, 84 cents; postage on “The Massachusetts Plowman” for three years, seven months to January, 1847, $2.73.”

All through the old daybook are reflected the changing seasons. In May the merchant began to sell straw hats, the cloth called summer stuff, and papers of seeds. By the Fourth of July, haying had begun, and then his sales of scythes, rakes and whetstones picked up. By November the sale of red flannel had begun, and by February he was giving credit for skins of fox and beaver. In August he had a brisk sale of palm leaf fans. Spring was the season for stepped-up sales of vermifuge (the worm cure) and logwood. In 1846 the great wave of patent medicines had not begun. Half a century later the same kind of country store would be dispensing Peruna, Lydia Pinkham’s and Pink Pills for Pale People.

In Maine country towns the size of Clinton in the 1840’s the saw mill and the gristmill were the only factories. Much of what is now factory work was done in the home. In the hundred pages of that old daybook the only charges for ready-made wearing apparel for women were for shoes and bonnets. All dresses were made in the home. But unlike the days of the mid-eighteenth century, when most cloth was made from wool and flax grown on the farm, women in the 1840’s had access to a dozen kinds of cloth, much of it from overseas, and that Clinton merchant sold a lot of it.

Anyhow the items set down in the crabbed handwriting of that storekeeper tell us much about how people up on the Sebasticook lived 125 years ago.

Now let’s consider again the subject of Maine town names. We have already talked about some twenty. Here are a few more.

Canaan was first called Heywoodstown in honor of an early settler. When the name was changed to Wessersunsett, that name like Heywoodstown was considered to be too long. So in 1778 the religious zeal of the settlers and the fertility of the region caused them to call the place Canaan, land of plenty. Later when Skowhegan was set apart as a separate town and the boundaries of the present town of Canaan were fixed, the original town, especially the part along the west side of the Kennebec south of Skowhegan Falls, was called Old Canaan. So today we speak of the old cemetery just a few miles south of Skowhegan on the road to Waterville as being the site of Old Canaan.

As most of you know, the name Skowhegan is unique. As the folks up there will proudly remind you, there is only one Skowhegan in the world. One of the many wrong explanations of Indian place names is to confuse them with English words or expressions having somewhat the same sound. So the tradition became prevalent that Mooselookmeguntic Lake, up near Rangeley, was not an Indian word of esoteric meaning, but was really “Moose Look me gun tick”. Likewise there were two such versions of the name Skowhegan. One said it referred to a boat that went over the falls “skow he gone”. The other story was more tragic. It was an Indian woman that was lost over the falls, and the name was originally “squaw he gone”. Both versions are nonsense. The Indian word from which the name Skowhegan was formed meant “place of the watch”. In the days before dams were built down the river, the waters below Skowhegan Falls were favorite places for salmon fishing, as the fish rested in the pools between their efforts to leap the falls.

A little settlement up the Kennebec above Bingham petitioned for incorporation in 1812. That was the year of Napoleon’s tragic winter retreat from Russia. In their relief that the menacing Frenchmen had at last been given a set-back, those Maine folk called their town Moscow.

Two of Maine’s towns are named for sisters. In the region near Newport, Dr. John Warren of Boston had been granted two townships. When they later became incorporated as separate towns, they were named for the doctor’s two daughters, Corinna and Palmyra.

When the first town to be incorporated on the Penobscot, either river or bay, sought a name, an early settler asked that it honor his birthplace in Ireland’s Ulster — Belfast. The new town was located in part of the Waldo Patent. Encouraged by the first Queen Elizabeth’s successor, James I, a body of Scotch Presbyterians had settled in Ulster, and many of them came afterward to the New World.

In 1718 nearly a hundred of those families arrived in Boston. Some of them founded the town of Londonderry, N.H. On a trading voyage to Penobscot Bay, one of those immigrants became greatly impressed by that region. He and a number of his Londonderry friends purchased on the Bay a township which became the City of Belfast.

Farther up the Penobscot is the town of Frankfort. That name had first been given to the settlement on the Kennebec that later took the name of Pownalborough, and was for a time the county seat of all Maine land east of the Androscoggin. Frankfort was the name of the German city from which several of Pownalborough’s earliest families had come. When the Kennebec town gave up its German name, it was taken by the newer town on the Penobscot. Of German origin also is the town of Dresden. It was, of course, part of the old town of Pownalborough. Just as some of that community’s families had come from Frankfort, others came from the porcelain city of Dresden, brought to America in the big migration stimulated by Gerard Samuel Waldo, whose German settlers were also responsible for founding the town of Waldoboro, where to this day their old German Church still stands.

It was natural that Maine’s very earliest towns, so close to British patronage, should have English names. Maine’s first town was Kittery, named for the British manor house in Kingsmere in Devon, across the River Dart from the English town of Dartmouth. That old manor house still stands. From the same locality came the Shapleigh family, who gave their name to another Maine town.

Maine’s second town was York, named for York, England, which had been taken by Cromwell’s army in 1644, after one of the bloodiest battles of the English Civil War. York, Maine was incorporated only eight years later; in 1652, eight years before the British monarchy was restored under Charles II.

The patent holder of all those lands east of the Piscataqua was Ferdinando Gorges, and it was Gorges himself who named Maine’s third town Wells, in honor of his own English birthplace. Those first three Maine towns were all incorporated in the 17th century, getting their charters respectively in 1647, 1652 and 1653. Another York County town, Lebanon, was the first Maine town to be given a Bible name.

Year: 1967