Radio Script #761

Little Talks on Common Things

March 24, 1968

I wonder how many genuine Mayflower descendants there are in the Waterville area. I venture to assert that the number is larger than we would at first assume. We should bear in mind that this area was settled largely by people who came from the Cape Cod region. For instance, all of the first settlers of Fairfield came from the town of Sandwich, and many of those who settled in Vassalboro and Winslow also came from the Cape. Cape Cod, of course, was in the 18th century a part of New England that had large numbers of Mayflower descendants, for on the upper neck of the Cape, at Plymouth, the Pilgrims had landed in 1620.

What leads me to mention the subject of Mayflower descendants today is my long association with the Wixson family of Winslow. Various members of that family have contributed items to this program, the most ardent contributor being Charles Wixson of the Garland Road, who died only a few weeks ago. Not only do the Wixsons themselves have distinguished colonial ancestry; they also married into old New England families So Mrs. Eldwin Wixson is herself of Mayflower descent. Admittedly a long time has gone by since the landing of the Mayflower. and Mrs. Wixson is in the tenth generation from her Pilgrim ancestor, and that ancestor was one of the most famous of the Mayflower passengers. He was William Bradford. the first governor of the colony, and the man who has left us the imperishable record of that colony in his book commonly known as “Bradford’s Relation”.

The given name of Gamaliel was held by many Bradfords, including the distinguished biographer of the 1920’s. The first Gamaliel was the son of Gov. William Bradford, and that Gamaliel had a grandson who came to Winslow with the early settlers soon after the Revolution. He came to settle on lands that still belonged to the heirs of his grandfather Gamaliel. one of the purchasers of the Pilgrim lands in Maine. Recorded in the Winslow town records is the marriage in 1793 of William Bradford and Hannah Parker. Also recorded is the birth of their daughter Lydia who married William Main. They had a daughter, also named Lydia. who married Moses Rose, and Thomas, the son of Moses and Lydia Rose, was the grandfather of Mrs. Eldwin Wixson.

I tell about this one line of Mayflower descent because I happen to know about it. not to exalt it over others. As I said at the start today, there are probably scores of such Mayflower descendants in this area who should be equally honored, and I’ll gladly mention them on the program if you will give me the information.

A picture of the old campus of Colby College that was well known half a century ago was a photograph taken from the top of the hill on Sanger Avenue in 1908. Many copies of it are available, some in large lithographs, others in clippings from newspapers and magazines. It appeared in both the Colby Oracle and several Colby catalogues of the period. The picture shows in the lower left corner the curve the railroad tracks made just before they crossed College Avenue after leaving the Maine Central Station. What later became a rather unsightly spot is shown as a neat lawn with rows of shade trees at the end of the Maine Central land next to Chaplin Street.

On College Avenue, visible in the photo is a Waterville-Fairfield trolley car and the little shelter in front of Champlin Hall where later, under the leadership of Herbert Libby, was erected the Memorial Gate by the Class of 1902. Also on the Avenue is a two-horse carriage, and standing in front of the little gatehouse where the railroad crosses the avenue is the gatekeeper. In the photo appear nine Colby buildings: from right to left, Chemical Hall, Memorial Hall, South College (Colby’s first building. erected in 1822), Champlin Hall (more commonly called Recitation Hall), North College, the Gymnasium. Shannon Physics Building and Observatory. Coburn Hall, and Hersey House. Adjoining Hersey House, and facing the old athletic field is the wooden grandstand.

The reason I mention this picture on today’s program is that I have just received from a lady in California this very picture printed on a large postcard, seven inches long. That in itself is not unusual. Picture postcards were common in the first decade of this century. But the cost of mailing those cards was then one cent. Never before have I seen what is printed on the space where the stamp was supposed to go on this particular card. That printed notice says: “Domestic one cent. With writing, two cents.”

Although I was very much around in those years, this is something I had never heard of. Can any listener. enlighten us? Why did it cost two cents to mail this card if any message was written on it, as was usually done on most picture cards?

Another puzzle I want to solve concerns an old building at North Vassalboro. Raymond Manson, who is very much interested in Vassalboro history, tells me that connected with the first woolen mill there, the little factory that by many years preceded the big mill built and operated by John Lang, there was a small building called the Gillarnee. How did that building get its name? Mr. Manson says it stood on the present site of the big mill, but in 1822 was moved to a new site. For many years, though it had no longer any mill use, people still called it the Gillarnee. I have been unable to find the word anywhere in print. It is not in any dictionary or encyclopedia, including the largest produced in both England and the United States. But I can show that the word was definitely connected with the manufacture of woolen fabrics.

The most comprehensive dictionary of the English language, the Oxford Dictionary, tells us that one meaning of the word gill was a machine, first used in the 1820’s, to prepare flax, hemp, or long wool for carding and spinning. Compounds of the word, having to do with this machine, are gill-frame, gill-head, and gill-box. The gill consisted of a series of points which divided the ribbons of fibre into parallel filaments ready for carding or combing, and for spinning. Concerning the origin of the word, the Oxford says: “Supposed to be an extension of the original meaning of the gills of a fish”.

In the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, a reliable old-timer, we find even more explicit reference to the origin of this use of the word gill. It says: “In making worsted yarn, the gills make the fibres level and parallel with each other, like the filaments in the gills of a fish.”

The Encyclopedia Britannica, in its famous 14th edition, explains the operation of these textile gills in its article on Worsted Manufacture. It says: “After the long wool has been scoured and dried, it is necessarily considerably entangled, and if it were to be combed or carded straight away, a large proportion of the long fibres would be broken. To obviate this destruction the wool is fed as straight as possible into a sheeter gill-box, then through as many as three or more gill-boxes. The primary object is to straighten the fibres in the sliver of wool.”

The word gill is also used as a verb and the process was called gilling. It is therefore clear that down in Vassalboro the building that folks called the Gillarnee was a place where, by the use of gill-boxes, wool was prepared for carding and spinning.

In the early days of the 19th century many Kennebec towns had small carding mills where the wool was carded for the women who spun it on their domestic spinning wheels at home. We know that, at least in our part of Maine, those old carding mills long preceded the earliest spinning mill or weaving mill, and it was well into the century before all processes, including dying the cloth, were consolidated into a single textile mill. That had already happened, however, in various places in southern New England by the time that John Lang started the North Vassalboro mill that displaced the old Gillarnee.

What stumps me is the suffix added to the word gill. Why was that suffix “arnee” attached to the word? And what did the suffix mean? It looks like an Irish ending, but no linguistic reference book at the Colby Library, which has many such books, gives any clue. We do know that early woolen workers in New England came not only from the great woolen area of England, just south of the Scottish border, where the best tweeds are still made, but also that families came from Ulster in Northern Ireland. where woolen manufacture had got an early start. Yet nothing I can find about words coined in either northern England or northern Ireland gives any clue to a word ending in arnee. I think the ending arney is entirely different, as in the Lakes of Kilarney. because the syllable ney designates a kind of place and seems to occur only in Irish place names or in personal names derived from place names.

Some listeners to this program may be able to give us a clue that will solve the problem. So I leave with you the question, “Why was an old building in North Vassalboro called the Gillarnee?”

From time to time I like to remind you how Maine towns got their names. Did you know that five of our towns were named for Maine governors? They are Fort Fairfield, Fort Kent, Kingfield. Perham and Washburn. Six took their names from leaders in the American Revolution: Fayette. Greene, Knox. Steuben, Warren and Wayne. One, the town of Monmouth. was named for a Revolutionary battle. Even literature found its way into Maine town names. That is why we have the towns of Addison, Bancroft and Gray.

The family name of Lord Ashburton. who collaborated with Daniel Webster to work out the treaty that ended the long dispute over the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick, was Alexander Baring. For him is named the Maine town of Baring. Benedicta carries the name of a Catholic Bishop of Boston. Westbrook’s named for the Indian fighter, Captain Westbrook of the early 18th century; and Ellsworth is for Oliver Ellsworth, one of the framers of the U.S. Constitution. But the city of Auburn doesn’t carry any person’s name. When it was incorporated, some poetic soul succeeded in having it named after Oliver Goldsmith’s “sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain”.

And with that reference to the naming of Maine towns, we must say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1968