Radio Script #1024

Little Talks on Common Things
November 3, 1974

I am sure many of you have seen some of the old hand-forged nails and spikes, laboriously turned out in colonial days before the invention of machines to make nails. A collection of those items is among the many exhibits in the Redington Museum of the Waterville Historical Society.

Next year the Arnold Expedition Historical Association will duplicate the trip of Arnold’s army up the Kennebec, celebrating the 200th anniversary of that event. They will use big bateaux, replicas of the ones Arnold used. But it was easier to build these replicas than it was to build the originals. Not only was it easier today to shape the wood, but there is no problem
about nails.

When Major Colburn, for his shipyard at Pittston, accepted General Washington’s order for 200 bateaux, he knew where he could get the wood and the workmen, but he wasn’t sure about the nails. Two hundred of those big boats would take a lot of nails. We have no record of exactly where Major Colburn got those hand-forged nails, but we do know he had a lot of trouble to get them from half a dozen different suppliers.

It is interesting to note how those old nails were made. The first extraction of iron from crude ore gives what is called pig iron. When that is melted and hand-puddled, the result is wrought iron. As early as the late 17th century it was learned that repeated heating, hammering or forging caused the carbon to be slowly absorbed, thus producing steel. But the process took so long and required so much labor that it never became fully practicable until the 19th century, when the Bessemer process was discovered. However, the best cutting tools at the time of American Revolution were made from that first kind of crude steel. It formed the axes, the saws, the mauls and sledges and other implements used by the workmen who made the bateaux for the Arnold expedition.

Now let us get more specifically to the making of the nails. The process began when a rod of iron from two to three feet long and square shaped was heated at one end in the forge, then the hot end was hammered on the anvil to a tapered point. Then the desired length of nail was cut off on the anvil’s edge. The cut-off nails were reheated and a head hammered out. Old hand-wrought nails found at the Colburn place are T-headed square nails about two inches long. They provided crude, but effective means of fastening wood, much more durable than the wooden pegs that proceeded them.

Did you ever see a shaped board known as a bosom board? Housewives used them to iron the old stiff-bosomed dress shirts, that the men wore with their Sunday, go-to-meeting clothes. Mr. Joseph Mason of Winslow has one of those old boards – one which, in fact, was made in Waterville exactly 100 years ago in 1874, by G. Whitman. On the board is this inscription: “Will enable the most common domestic to iron a shirt bosom, obtaining the polish and gloss of the steam laundries. The small sum of $1.00 will bring great happiness on ironing day.”

In 1874, while most shirts were ironed at home, some were sent to the Waterville Steam Laundry, which had opened only a few years before. That explains Whitman’s reference to steam laundries in his ad. But the biggest place for shirt ironing in Waterville at that time was a factory that turned out new shirts. Before they were sold, those shirts had to be ironed. Consequently the largest group of Charles F. Hathaway’s employees were the women who ironed his factory’s shirts. So predominant in number were those ironers over the cutters and stitchers that in 1874 the common name for Mr. Hathaway’s plant was not the shirt factory, but the laundry. In the Redington Museum, among a number of stereoptican views is one labeled the laundry. It is a picture of the Hathaway factory off Appleton Street.

There are possibly a few older residents of Waterville and Winslow who remember John Cusack. Left an orphan at an early age, he spent his youth as a lumberman on the upper Penobscot. Unlike many of his fellow woodsmen, John did not blow his earnings in a spree of rioting every spring when he came out of the woods. He saved his money and at the age of 26 he had accumulated a tidy sum.

By that time he had observed how much better men did in the world if they had education. John could not read or write, and he was determined to overcome that disadvantage. Visiting a friend in the Waterville area, John became acquainted with a prosperous Winslow farmer with whom he made a deal. He would work diligently for his room and board if the farmer would let him go to school. Being a member of that household, John went to the one-room school with the children of the family. He made rapid progress and mastered the primer in a few weeks. He attended the weekly lyceums and became a spirited debater. In a short time he had learned all he could at the little schoolhouse, and he enrolled under Dr. Harmon at Waterville Academy, the school that later became Coburn. He next went to the Maine Wesleyan Seminary at Kents Hills, and for a long time after he left, visitors could see his name over the door of his room in Sampson Hall.

While he was at Kents Hill something happened to change John Cusack’s life. Instead of entering on an active career as an educated man, as he could have done, John became a hermit recluse. Nobody ever discovered the reason, but it was suspected that unrequited love drove the man to his decision. Anyhow, in 1865, just as the Civil War drew to an end, John Cusack left Kents Hill for the region of Moosehead Lake. He bought a little island in the Lake called Moose Island, and took up his abode, with only wild creatures for company. There for more than thirty years he lived a hermit.

John Cusack never lost his skill as a woodsman and log driver. Often on Moosehead Lake he was seen riding a log, using a slab for a paddle. Once, when the Kineo steamer was puffing down the lake in a gale, people on the steamer saw this old man of the sea standing breast high in the tossing waters in seeming pursuit of a small dog that sat above the surface a few feet ahead of him. The steamer slowed down to pick up John, who was making a four mile voyage on an old log, with his dog for company as a passenger. Standing on the large end, he thus raised the other end enough to bring the dog above the water.

On his island John developed a productive farm, where he raised some of the finest cattle in the Moosehead region.

A Waterville man who had known John Cusack when he was at the academy, but had not seen him for many years, encountered John one day when fishing at Moosehead. John knew him at once and inquired about folks in Waterville. He wanted especially to know what happened to those Winslow children with whom he attended school. Although a hermit, John was by no means wholly unusual. He always welcomed visitors to his island, and he surprised many of them by the wide range of his knowledge and the intelligence of his conversation. The Waterville man who told him about the folks said that as he left John Cusack, the old man boasted: “Tell the folks I’m as fresh and rugged as ever, and I can still best any man who wants to challenge me at riding a log.”

I recently happened on a program of the Colby Commencement of 1889. By that time the customary August commencement had been advanced into July, and in 1889 it was held on July 9. The oration, which had become an annual feature, was that year delivered by one of Colby’s most widely known graduates, Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler of the Class of 1888. Probably no other Colby man has been such a controversial national figure. In fact, at Colby there has been considerable dispute as to whether the college ought to be proud of him or ashamed of him. On my part, while recognizing his obvious and spectacular failings, I have long felt that his accomplishments greatly outweighed his defects. I have told his story in a chapter of the History of Colby College.

Of the 1889 appearance of Butler, the Fairfield Journal said: “General Butler was greeted by one of the largest audiences ever assembled in this city. His oration was an able and exhaustive argument for the United States to annex Canada.”

In that 1889 Class at Colby there were two Peppers. The better known was Charles Hovey Pepper, son of George Dana Boardman Pepper, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Waterville during the Civil War, and in 1889 seeing his last year as President of Colby. The son Charles, to whom Dr. Pepper handed a diploma on that July day, became a recognized artist, and several portraits by him may now be seen at Colby.

The other man with the same surname was John Lyman Pepper of Norridgewock. After graduating from Colby he studied medicine at the Maine Medical School attached to Bowdoin College, and had a long, distinguished career as a family physician in Madison, Maine.

In that same Class of 1889 was Harriet Parmenter, for many years a neighbor of mine on Waterville’s Winter Street. A highly cultured lady, Miss Parmenter kept for many years a diary, now preserved at the Redington Museum. It is filled with social and educational events in Waterville from 1890 to 1950.

Another member of the class was Beecher Putnam, who became a leading lawyer of Aroostook County, served in both houses of the Maine legislature and on the Governor’s Council, and was for many years a trustee of Colby.

Others were James King, long associated with the International Harvester Co. in Chicago; Lincoln Owen, an author; Hiram-Farnham, who went to Missouri and became President of the St. Joseph Life Underwriters Association and Edward F. Steve, long the distinguished director of the Pratt Institute Free Library and its renowned library school in Brooklyn.

There were only two women who graduated in that class with 15 men. Besides Miss Parmenter, the other was Mary Lillian Tobey of Norridgewock, who was a teacher at the famous Eaton School at the turn of the century, and who married M. E. Holt.

Those of us who saw more than 350 seniors receive their degrees at Colby last June find it hard to realize that 85 years ago Colby had only 17 graduates.

And with that we must say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1974