Radio Script #937

Little Talks on Common Things
June 11, 1972

Today I want to give you a few biographical sketches of Maine men of days gone by. Let us begin with a man who had quite an influence on Maine politics a century ago. He was Solon Chase of Turner, Maine, leader of the Greenback movement of the 1870’s. In a speech that he often repeated he used the phrase, “them steers” so that it became common allover Maine to speak of “Uncle Solon Chase and them steers.”

Solon Chase had a long life, born in 1821 and dying in 1909 at the age of 88 years. Proud that his great grandmother had been a full-blooded Indian, Chase became a wielder of verbal tomahawks. When he graduated from Gorham Academy in 1842 he was appointed to West Point, but failed its physical examination. Doctors said he had incipient lung fever, what we today call tuberculosis, and he wouldn’t live very long. Uncle Solon proceeded to fool the doctors, living for 67 years after that West Point examination. At the time Solon was so determined to enter the Military Academy that he carried his appeal all the way to President Tyler in Washington, with whom the brash young man got a personal interview. The President turned him down and he returned to Maine, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

Solon Chase was a natural public speaker and, though he never heard of a microphone, he didn’t need one anyway. Folks said that, when he called his cows at Chase’s Mills in Turner, his voice could be heard clear down to Auburn. In 1874 Chase became attracted by the Greenback Movement, which perhaps we had better explain at this point. Greenback was the popular name for U. S. Treasury notes not supported by the gold and silver in the governments possession, but nevertheless accepted as legal tender for most debts. Because these notes were not always accepted at face value, but were subject to discount by the national banks of issue, there developed a movement to alleviate the situation. Leaders of the movement were men, chiefly from the farming areas of the nation, whose debts were acquired while the greenbacks were in circulation. They demanded retirement of the greenbacks and issuance of notes that carried full dollar acceptance. Such a policy, especially right after the Panic of 1873, would have meant disastrous inflation and a collapse of the national economy. But the malcontents were so persistent that they organized a national party, and in a state convention in Ohio in 1874 put up a candidate for governor to promote their soft money policy of flooding the nation with paper money.

Solon Chase became the Maine leader of the Greenbackers. At the Democratic state convention in 1875, he introduced a resolution calling for the party to support the Ohio resolution. It failed and Uncle Solon said goodbye to the Democrats and joined the new Greenback Party. He started a Greenback newspaper, in which he stingingly flayed Democrats and Republicans alike. In 1876, the Maine Greenbackers had their own candidate for governor, Almon Gage of Lewiston. He made very little impression, receiving only 520 votes out of 137,000 that were cast. Selden Connor of Fairfield, the Republican candidate, was easily elected. In those days, Maine elected a governor every year. So in 1877 the Greenbackers tried again, and this time their candidate, Henry Manson, pulled more than 5060 votes, but was still far behind Seldon Connor and Alonzo Garcelon, respectively the Republican and Democratic nominees. Connor was easily reelected.

Then in 1878, strongly backed by Uncle Solon Chase and his newspaper, a new figure entered the arena in the person of Joseph L. Smith, who gleaned 41,000 votes, only 15,000 less than Governor Connor, and actually 13,000 more than the Democrat, Alonzo Garcelon.

In 1879 came Maine’s notorious count-out election, by which Garcelon, who ran third in the popular vote, was finally declared Governor. Daniel Davis, the Republican, polled 68,000 votes and Smith the Greenbacker 47,000, while at the polls Garcelon got only 22,000. To secure certification of the votes by Governor and Council, the Democrats and Greenbackers formed a fusion. It was the height of Greenbacker influence, and thereafter the votes of their gubernatorial candidates steadily declined. The last time the party designation appeared on the state ballot was in 1883.

All through the Greenback years, Uncle Solon vigorously took the stump every summer. He drew large crowds. On one occasion, in Mechanic Falls, the hall was so crowded that Uncle Solon said to the band leader, “You take your band outside and let the folks have your seats. If I can’t make music enough for everybody, I’ll call you back in.”

The way Uncle Solon used to tell it, the origin of “them steers” went something like this. “I bought a pair of steers, 3 years old, for $100. After I’d had them a whole year, they weren’t worth a nickel more. Them steers was all right, but they shrunk as fast as they grew. I’d just completely lost what it cost to keep them steers for a year. If I had bought a bond with that hundred dollars, I would have had the interest. As. it turned out, I was just robbed of my hay. That’s just the way the government handles your money. Let’s have more greenbacks. That’s our hay.”

Now I want to say a bit about several local men whom older people still living well remember. The first of these is Dr. Frederick C. Thayer, for which our Thayer Hospital is named. He was the grandson of a much earlier Waterville physician, Dr. Stephen Thayer, who had begun his practice here in 1836, and was said to be one of the last men in town to wear the knee breeches of an older day.

Stephen’s son Charles kept a store in Fairfield, but moved to Waterville in 1838, became a director of the Waterville Bank and served several times as selectman. He married Susan Tobey of Fairfield, and their son, Frederick Thayer, was born in Waterville on September 30, 1844. After preparing for college at Johnson’s School of Boys in Topsham, Frederick entered Colby in the Class of 1865, but withdrew to attend Union College, where he was a student for 18 months. He left Union to study medicine under Dr. James Pomfret in Albany, New York. There he also attended lectures at the Albany Medical School. Meanwhile the Maine Medical School, attached to Bowdoin College, had attained a fine reputation. So Frederick Thayer enrolled in the Maine school and received from it his M.D. degree in 1867. He at once set up practice in Waterville.

Dr. Thayer gained a reputation as physician and surgeon that spread his fame far beyond Maine’s Kennebec County. Twice he went to Europe for further medical study in London, Paris and Berlin. He served as Maine’s Surgeon General, and was a member of the International Medical Congress in Berlin in 1880.

Always interested in industrial and public affairs, the Doctor became the first president of the Waterville Trust Co., President of the Sawyer Publishing Co., and also of the Riverview Worsted Mills, predecessor of The Wyandotte. He was an original director of the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington R. R. He served in various city offices, longest on the school board. Dr. Thayer was a prominent Mason, and served as Grand Master of the Maine Commandery. In 1902, he was chairman of the Waterville Centennial Committee, that celebrated the 100th anniversary of Waterville’s incorporation as a separate town.

One of the tallest men in Waterville half a century ago was John Burleigh, civil engineer, a descendent of the John Burleigh who had come to Waterville in the 1780’s. The John, to whom we now refer, was the son of Hall Burleigh, well known developer of Hereford cattle in Maine, and was born when that cattle breeder lived at Fairfield Center in 1865. He received a Civil Engineer degree at the University of Maine, then called Maine State College, in 1887. After doing engineering work in the Boston area for ten years, John Burleigh came to Waterville in 1897. He was chief surveyor for the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington R.R., popularly called the W. W. & F., and by its detractors the Weak, Weary and Feeble. He laid out the new county road from Augusta to Togus, and several facilities there (including the Veterans’ Cemetery), and he planned the Lakewood Cemetery in Oakland. When the Waterville and Oakland Electric R. R. was organized, Burleigh became its chief engineer.

A well remembered man of a century ago was Moses Foster, whose five daughters made memorable marriages. Foster was born at Newry, Maine in 1827, near where his paternal grandfather had cleared a Sandy River farm in the 1780’s. Moses’ father, Benjamin Foster, was a Methodist minister for more than fifty years. Moses graduated from Bridgton Academy, then served as a carpenter’s apprentice in Hanover, Maine. After plying that trade as a master carpenter in Portland for six years, Moses moved to Beehel and became a contractor-builder. He built the ornate Grand Trunk Station at Island Pond, Vermont, and then his buildings spread from the banks of the Potomac to the tides of Fundy. In the national capital,,l he built two large churches, and in Augusta he built the post office and the addition to the State House. At Houlton, he put up both the court house and the custom house. His work, too, were the court house in Bangor, the Maine Central station in Brunswick, and Williston Church in Portland.

Now for Moses Foster’s five daughters. Eva married a druggist in my own native town of Bridgton, Dr. F. E. Stevens, the man who owned the building where my father had his grocery store. The other four girls all married Waterville men. Ada was the wife of Warren Philbrook, a justice of the Maine Supreme Court. Angie married Dr. J. Fred Hill and became the mother of Doctors Ted and Howard Hill. Allison was the wife of Fred Arnold of the Arnold hardware family, and Carrie married Frank Redington, descendant of the Waterville pioneer, Asa Redington, and himself president of the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington R. R., as well as prominent in city affairs for many years.

There are many more men of Waterville and other Central Maine towns who deserve remembrance, but our time is now up, and we must say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1972