Radio Script #886

Little Talks on Common Things
March 28, 1971

It is time that this program had something more to say about place names. Androscoggin is an Indian name meaning fish-curing place. Kennebunk is long-cut bank. Cobbossecontee means plenty of sturgeon. Bagaduce, the old name for Castine, meant big tideway river. Damariscotta, very appropriately, is plenty of alewives. Kennebago is simply long pond. Saco is river mouth or outlet. Machias is bad little falls. Mattanawcook means small, broken islands. Matinicus, again appropriately, is cut-off island, for it lies twenty miles out to sea. Medomak is mouth of stream alewives. Mattawamkeag means gravel bar in stream. Macwahoc, on the road from Bangor to Houlton, means simply big bog. Other Indian places signifying distance are Pemaquid (far out) and Monhegan (out to sea). Sabbatus is just a corrupted form of St. Jean Baptiste.

Some interesting Maine places that do not have Indian names are Belfast, named in 1770 by immigrants from Northern Ireland; Linneus, for Carolus Linneus, the great botanist; Mars Hill, for the place where the Apostle Paul preached; Mercer, for Gen. Hugh Mercer, killed at the Revolutionary Battle of Princeton in 1777; Wales, for John Welch, a pioneer from Wales; Wayne, for the renowned Revolutionary General Mad Anthony Wayne. German immigrants introduced into the Waldoboro region by General Samuel Waldo, brought to Maine localities their old country names of Dresden and Bremen.

Now let us, for a few minutes, leave Maine and note several odd and even humorous place names in other parts of the United States. There are Add, Kentucky and Bumblebee, Arizona. How about You Bet, California and Calamity, South Dakota? Careless Creek, Montana goes along with Chance, Maryland. Chipmunk, Colorado has a companion in Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania. Bear Mug, Wyoming gets you ready for Court Martial, Florida, and goes along with Jug, West Virginia. Jim Jam, California matches Jo Jo, Wyoming. All beginning with Fare Fact, Kansas; Faith, North Carolina; Fame, Oklahoma; Fickle, Indiana; and Flea Valley, California. In these days of astronauts, take note of Moon, South Dakota. That state also has a town called Nameless. And how do you like Peppersauce, Arizona; Preparation, Iowa; Prong, West Virginia; and Peroxide, Arizona? At the end of the alphabet come Yum Yum, Tennessee and Zigzag, Oregon.

Now I want to tell you about a man who spent four college years in Waterville more than 130 years ago. He was Samuel Lunt Caldwell, who turned out to be one of the most distinguished Colby graduates of the 19th century. Born in Newburyport, Mass. in 1810, he was 25 years old when he showed up as a freshman at what was then the tiny Waterville College. He graduated in a class of 18 men in 1839. One of his classmates was Stephen Coburn, brother of Governor Abner Coburn, and himself a member of Congress from Maine at the outbreak of the Civil War. Another classmate was one of the few staunch Confederates during that war, Nathaniel Fay. Fay, a Congregationalist in a Baptist college, graduated from Bangor Seminary in 1842, and immediately went to the South, where he served as Congregationalist pastor for 32 years. Another member of that same class, Isaac Chipman, helped develop Acadia College at Wolfeboro, Nova Scotia. Caldwell’s closest friend in that Class of 1839 was Joseph Ricker, for whom was named the educational institution at Houlton that is now Ricker College. Altogether it was a distinguished class for one so early in the college existence.

As for Sam Caldwell himself, he decided to become a Baptist minister, and graduated from Newton Seminary in 1845. After serving several pastorates in Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, he became Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Newton, from which post in 1878 he was called to the presidency of Vassar College, already distinguished among the colleges for women known as the Seven Sisters. There Caldwell served for seven years, then retired to Providence, Rhode Island, where he died in 1889. He was the author of several books, the best known of which was “Literature in Account with Life”.

Joseph Ricker, in his memoirs published many years after that Class of 1839 had graduated, wrote about his first sight of Caldwell. The occasion was Caldwell’s oral examination for admission to the college. Ricker commented: “Caldwell was standing, half bent, by the side of Prof. Keely’s chair. Both had their eyes fixed upon the same page, and the professor was trying to take the gauge of the boy’s knowledge of Latin. The boy was tall and awkward. In fact he was really not a boy at all, because he was 25 years old. He was so diffident and awkward that, if I had predicted that his future would be brilliant, I would only have provoked mirth.”

Ricker continued: “Caldwell’s financial resources were very limited. He got the job of ringing the college bell. I can still see him with one hand grasping the bell rope, and in the other hand a book.”

“When Caldwell was at Newton”, wrote Ricker, “the air was filled with philosophical speculation. Emerson was at the height of his fame and Theodore Parker was beginning his work in Boston. Transcendentalism wrestled at Brook Farm. The seminary students plied their teachers with embarrassing questions, aroused by the rising tide of Unitarianism. The classroom debates spilled over into the dormitories. Caldwell began to doubt whether he had a serious call to the ministry. But he finally decided to see the course through and enter a Baptist pulpit. Little did he, or any of his Waterville or Newton classmates, think he would someday be president of a prominent college for women.”

It was truly remarkable that so many of those Colby graduates of 1839 should have such distinguished careers, for the college was not only poverty-stricken in those days; it was also woefully understaffed. The President was the only man who ever served twice in that office, Robert E. Pattison. His first term coincided with Caldwell’s last three college years, 1836-39. He was again called to head the college in 1854. Two men who had served on the faculty with the first president, Jeremiah Chaplin, were still there when Caldwell was a student, George Washington Keely, Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, and Calvin Newton, Professor of Rhetoric and Hebrew. Until the beginning of Caldwell’s senior year the only other full-time member of the faculty was Phinehas Barnes, Professor of Greek and Latin. But a man who gained national fame was a part-time teacher of Modern Languages. That man was the pastor of the Waterville Baptist Church, Samuel Francis Smith, who won distinction as the author of the hymn America, that begins with the words “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty”. So during Caldwell’s freshman, sophomore and junior years the college faculty had only four full-time teachers, including the president.

Then in the fall of 1838 came Justin Loomis as Professor of Chemistry and Natural History. He made chemistry an important subject at Colby, and was so highly regarded that, when Waterville’s first murder occurred in 1847, and it was suggested that the contents of the victim’s stomach be sent to the Bowdoin Medical School for analysis, Dr. Stephen Thayer declared there was no need for that. Right in town at Waterville College was Professor Loomis, fully capable to make the analysis. And Loomis did it satisfactorily.

Perhaps a bit of explanation is in order about the titles of Professors Keely and Loomis. Keely’s was Mathematics and Natural Philosophy; Loomis’ was Chemistry and Natural History. In the early 19th century there was no such subject as physics. The various physical laws that had come into men’s knowledge, especially through the brilliant work of Isaac Newton in England, were grouped under what was called natural philosophy. The term physical science had not then been formulated, and the new field of chemistry was regarded as quite different from physics and not a natural science at all. Though no one taught such a subject as biology in the 1830’s, there was considerable interest in botany, physiology and human anatomy. Young Louis Agassiz was just beginning his work on the anatomy of animals, as well as deepening his botanical knowledge. What we call the life sciences was then called Natural History. So in 1839 Colby had a professor of Natural Philosophy and a Professor of Natural History.

Recently I found further information about Isaac Ilsley, whom I told you on a broadcast about a year ago was the first contractor employed by Governor Shirley in 1754 to build Fort Halifax at Winslow. Although other contractors, including the well known Gershom Flagg, worked on the Fort before it was completed, Isaac Ilsley was first. A friend recently sent me a Xerox copy of several columns in the Portland Transcript in April, 1892, under the heading “Old Houses and Builders”. This is what it said about Isaac Ilsley: “A noted Portland joiner was Isaac Ilsley who was probably the architect as well as the builder of some of Portland’s best known early houses. He came to Maine from Newbury in 1735 and stopped in Kittery long enough to build a meeting house. He came on to Falmouth, now Portland, and became its most prominent builder. More than that, he was a bold, adventurous man, an officer of the expedition that captured Louisburg in 1745, and captain of many scouting parties against marauding Indians. In 1759 he remodeled Portland’s Old Parish Church, cutting it in two and inserting a big addition. He was the master builder of the five timber buildings at Fort Halifax. After erecting many homes and public buildings in Portland, Isaac Ilsley died in 1781 at the age of 78. One of his sons, Daniel Ilsley, was a Representative to Congress. Two other sons, Isaac, Jr. and Enoch, followed their father’s trade of carpenter and builder. But Enoch left carpentry for merchandising and became Portland’s wealthiest merchant at the turn of the century in 1800.”

And with that salute to the first builder of Fort Halifax, we must say good by until next week.