Radio Script #935

Little Talks on Common Things
May 28, 1972

Sixty years ago, there was discovered on Jewell Island in Casco Bay the remains of an old fort, probably used as a refuge by mainland settlers when Indians attacked the settlements. The fort was erected soon after 1675, when King Philip’s War spread from Massachusetts into Maine. What was then called the Neck, and is now the city of Portland, was at that time mostly woods and marsh. On it were two large swamps and a small pond. The few settlers lived in a cluster of huts close to the harbor near the foot of the present India Street.

In 1676, an Indian raid drove off those settlers and burned the huts. Taking to boats, the victims fled to Cushing and Jewell Islands, and remained on those islands for three years. The fort they erected on Jewell was thus older than any fort built on the Portland mainland. The first maintained fort in that region was Fort Loyal, built in 1680, on what later became the site of the Grand Trunk R. R. station. In ltoo there was put up Fort Casco on the east side of the Presumpscot River. Those two forts, Loyal and Casco, provided protection after the settlers returned to the mainland, but the earliest building to guard them was out in the bay on Jewell Island.

Looking through an old scrapbook, I ran across two contemporary accounts of White House weddings. The first was the marriage of President Grover Cleveland, which attracted a lot of attention in 1893 because he was the only President to have his wedding reception there since President John Tyler half a century earlier. Actually Cleveland was the first President whose wedding ceremony was performed in the executive mansion, because Tyler was married in New York, but he and his bride came to Washington for the evening wedding reception in the White House. The Cleveland marriage saw nearly 1000 guests, representing the great and the wealthy. Gifts were many, and champagne flowed freely.

Another wedding was that of Alice Roosevelt to Nicholas Longworth when Alice’s father, Theodore Roosevelt, was President earlier in this century. That also called out more than a thousand guests. The account says, “After the rites of the Episcopal Church had been solemnized, the bride and groom joined the assembled guests at a buffet breakfast. At 4 P.M. the couple started on their wedding trip in an automobile.” The account continued: “For a week the capital had been held in a grip of ice, but on the wedding day the sun came out warm and the ice melted. The entire White House was filled with floral decoration. White lilies and bridal roses were everywhere. A few minutes before the ceremony, Mrs. Roosevelt descended the staircase, on the arm of her elder son, Theodore Jr. She was followed by her daughter Ethel, on the arm of brother Kermit. Archibald and Quentin followed. The ancient grandfather’s clock in the corner indicated 12:06 as the doors of the state dining room were thrown open, and the President and his daughter, preceded by a double line of ushers, marched to the altar and the service began. The bishop’s voice could be heard far into the corridor, but the responses of Miss Roosevelt and Mr. Longworth were almost inaudible. In eight minutes the ceremony was over and the couple were man and wife.”

There were White House weddings even before that of Pres. Tyler in 1841. In its early existence as the home of Presidents, the house had seen the wedding of Martha Monroe, daughter of the fifth President, to Samuel Gouvenor, her father’s secretary. Two weddings were held there while Andrew Jackson was President. One was the marriage of Mary Eaton, Jackson’s niece, to Henry Polk of Tennessee. The other was the wedding of Helen Lewis of Nashville to the French Ambassador, Andre Parquiel. In 1826, Jackson’s successor, John Quincy Adams, saw his son, John Quincy Jr., married in the White House to Elizabeth Johnson. Pres. Tyler not only held his own wedding reception there, He also saw there the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth to William Walter from the historic town of Williamsburg, Virginia. In 1874 Nelly, the daughter of Pres. Grant, was married to Algernon Sartoris. The very first wedding in the building had been in the Madison adminstration, just before the place was burned by the British in the War of 1812. In that first White House wedding, Ellen Todd, a Madison niece, had married a member of Congress, John Jackson of Virginia.

Now just a few words about a Maine governor of more than a century ago, who came from this part of the Kennebec Valley. In its 150 years of statehood, Maine has had three governors whose residence at their time of election was Waterville: William T. Haines, Edmund Muskie, and Clinton Clauson. That is a pretty good record for one Maine community. Not so well known is the fact that Fairfield also produced a governor. He was Seldon Connor, who served from 1876 to 1879. Son of William Connor, one of Fairfield’s earliest lumber operators, he was born in Fairfield in 1839. At the age of ten he enrolled in the old Waterville Liberal Institution, operated by the Universalists at the corner of Elm and School streets. He then attended Monmouth Academy, where he became so fond of the principal, William Snell, that Connor followed Snell to St. Albans, and after graduation entered Tufts College, receiving his degree there in 1859. Early in the Civil War, Seldon Connor became Cotonel and regimental commander of the Seventh Maine. His regiment was in the Army of the Potomac under General McLellan. It gained distinction at Antietam and Fredericksburg, and later at Gettysburg. Connor said, “We made a 35 mile march in one day to get there!”

Seldon Connor knew a lot about the Maine woods. His father’s lumber cuttings were mostly in the big wilderness tract south of Moosehead Lake known as the Sapling. There young Connor helped stamp out roads, spent one winter as camp cook, and drove ox teams through the deep snow. He served in both branches of the Maine Legislature before his election as governor in 1876.

In that same scrapbook is a clipping of 1902 about the Maine writer Holman Day. The clipping said: “For more than ten years, a singer devoted to Maine has been publishing his homely rhymes in the Lewiston Journal. Nearly all of those poems concern the Maine farm, Maine woods, or the Maine coast. Born in Maine and graduating from Colby College, Holman Day became a traveling newspaper correspondent in rural Maine. Gifted in the composition of verse, he made himself a laureate of Maine life. He has traveled every mile of the major highways of Maine, and on hundreds of back roads. He has ridden on every mile of Maine’s railroads, including the narrow gauge lines. He has formed acquaintance with people of many occupations, and is our best informed writer on the lumber camps. Some of his best known poems are The Liars Up in Maine, the Lyric of the Bucksaw, the Cruise of the Nancy P, and Double Set of Teeth.”

It has long seemed to me that, because so many of Holman Day’s now forgotten verses were laughable, rollicking incidents, the profundity of his thought and reflections has been overlooked. His Colby classmate, Harvey Eaton once called my attention to one of Day’s poems that has eternal verity and universal application in its humorous allusion to man’s constant propensity for getting ahead by putting someone else out of the way. In those verses we may detect the urge for more territory that caused World War I, Japan’s determination to spread into Southeast Asia, that pushed us into World War II, and Hanoi’s insistence on control of Vietnam; although, except for the First World War, Holman Day never heard of those holocausts. So I am glad to pass on to you what Harvey Eaton called one of Holman Day’s best poems. Here it is, under the title of “Passing It Along”.

“The elephant he started in and made
tremendous fuss
Alleging he was crowded by the hippopotamus;
He entertained misgivings that the earth was growing small,
And arrived at the conclusion that there wasn’t room for all.
Then the hippo got to thinking and he was frightened too,
And so he passed the word along and sassed the kangaroo.
The kangaroo as promptly took alarm and talked of doom,
And ordered all the monkeys off the earth to give him room.
And the monkeys joined the squirrels, and the squirrels joined
the bees,
While the bees gave Hail Columby to the minges and the fleas.
In the microscopic kingdom of the microbes, I will bet,
That word of greedy jealousy is on its travels yet;
All just because the elephant got scared and made a fuss,
Alleging he was crowded by the hippopotamus.”

Several times, during the years of this program, I have referred to Fairfield’s famous Gerald Hotel. Recently I found in an old issue of the Kennebec Journal a reference to that old hostelry which, now a commercial building, still stands on Fairfield’s Main Street. This is what the K J had to say: “Since Amos Gerald first saw the light of day in Benton, he has done many things for the old village of Kendalls Mills at Fairfield. He built the electric car line to Waterville, promoted the electric light company, and put up the new Opera House. But all of his previous accomplishments have now been eclipsed by the new hotel he has opened in Fairfield. Even in a large city the Hotel Gerald would attract attention. It is a $ 60,000 beauty and will surely make Fairfield famous. The building is four stories high, with a frontage of 65 feet and a depth of 112. In the front center rises a main tower, two stories higher, on top of which is a statue of Mercury, messenger of the gods. The lower floor is given over to two stores occupied by Lawry Brothers Furniture and Byrnes’ Gents Clothing.

“The hotel’s most gorgeous room is the dining room, 47 by 28 feet, with walls in empire red, interspersed with seven huge plateglass mirrors. The ceiling is divided into five panels, on each of which are painted figures of cupids and celestial beings. The room will seat 130 persons at banquets.

“Behind the office desk is a switchboard, the first of any hotel in Maine to have telephone connection with every room in the house.”

Year:1972