Radio Script #1060

Little Talks on Common Things
October 12, 1975

This program has frequently turned to the files of the Waterville Hail for information about Waterville and its environs in the days gone by. We are fortunate to have at the Redington Museum of the Waterville Historical Society bound files of that newspaper from its beginning until it changed from a weekly to an afternoon daily in 1906.

It was in 1847, more than a century and a quarter ago, that Ephraim Maxham started in Waterville a weekly paper called the Eastern Mail. He later changed the name to the Waterville Mail. Long associated with Maxham was Daniel Wing, who was editor and publisher at the time of his death in 1885. So it happens that many of the items which we have selected from the Mail, for revival on this program, were written by Daniel Wing, whose spacious home on College Avenue came, after Wing’s death, into the possession of Colby’s Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. On the site now stands the American Legion Home.

In its issue of January 15, 1875, the Mail published a description of Waterville half a century earlier in 1820. At that time, Maine had just become a separate state, and Waterville had been separated from Winslow for less than twenty years. Here is what the Mail had to say about Waterville in that early time.

“The whole territory was little better than a rough pasture, the streets being only rude lanes. There was no Pleasant Street, no Elm Street, with their connecting cross streets; no Chaplin Street, no Spring Street, and only a portion of Front Street at its lower end. Main Street had only one brick building, the Dalton Store at the end of Ticonic Row.

“Although the Baptists were planning a meetinghouse that would soon be built, the only building in the town for religious purposes was the public meetinghouse on the common. The only schoolhouse was a small yellow building beside the meetinghouse. Where had been only five years earlier a growth of birch and other hard wood, stood the first two buildings of Waterville College. In fact, unbroken forest crowded in on the little hamlet on three sides, with the river on the fourth.

“On College Street were only two houses. On Main Street, behind its junction with College Street, were only three buildings until one came to Temple Street, one of which was a tannery. Below Temple Street was Widow Knight’s house, the Hasty and Dalton stores, and the Jediah Morrill house on the corner of Common Street, and just below it the Nourse House and the Williams Tavern, then two small shops, and at the end of Main Street the Gilman Store.

“On the west side of Main Street, between Temple and Silver, Mr. Nourse had a barn. Below it were two small stores, and a dwelling house. Between Silver Street and the end of Main, on the west side, was the Waterville Bank. Directly facing up Main Street, where now is a heater piece, was the Lawrence House, later to be the Continental Tavern. At the junction of Main and Water Streets was the Dalton House.

“There was then no bridge across the river. At what is now the bridge end was James Stackpole’s store. On the west side, where Water Street began, were the homes of Asa Redington and Daniel Moor, and on the hill the home of Elnathan Sherwin.

“On Upper Main Street were only the Jonathan Clark house, the Dunham house, and on the later site of the Elmwood Hotel, the Wood house, where Jeremiah Chaplin had lived and held the first classes, when he came to open Waterville College in 1818.

“On Silver Street, Dr. Appleton had an apothecary store. Then came the Heywood, Stevens, and Gilman homes, and on the south side the Simeon Mathews house, Captain Getchell’s, the Stackpole house, and Aunt Hannah Cool’s. The only other houses were the close-by Balkan house, the Crommett house, and the place of the town potter, Grace Fish. Beyond that were only the Silas Redington house and the Pray house, then a long vacant space to the Emerson Bridge at the end of Silver Street.

“The grade of Main Street was then lower by ten feet just above Temple Street. There the road crossed a swamp by means of a corduroy bridge. The center of the village, long called Ticonic Village, was at the junction of Maine and Silver streets.”

This year, 1975, is the 100th anniversary of the complete remodeling and major addition to Waterville’s First Baptist Church at the corner of Elm and Park streets. When that job was done, an 1875 issue of the Waterville Mail made this comment.

“The Baptist Church has been so completely rebuilt as to be practically a new structure. It cost $17,000, five times as much as it cost to erect the building in 1826. It is now a free church, the individual ownership of its pews having been given up on December 1, 1875. The dedication service was delivered by its former pastor, who served the church during the Civil War, George Dana Boardman Pepper.”

The Mail commented that some distinguished early citizens who had owned pews in that church were Timothy Boutelle, Simeon Mathews, Nathaniel Gilman, Asa Redington, Hoses Appleton, John Cool, and Hoses Dalton.

In 1875, it was found necessary to remodel the old town meetinghouse on the Common. Doing the job, contractor Increase Robinson found the sills and girders had been pine logs sawed into huge pieces, 13 by 16 inches, and some of them incredibly long. In 1796, the building had been opened after it had been boarded, shingled and glazed, but before it was finished inside. The interior was not completed until 1802. In 1875, the place was in such bad shape and so open that swallows flew in and out without hindrance.

On August 6, 1875, the Mail told about an elderly lady who had come to Winslow in 1784 when she was three years old. She was Mrs. Roxanna Foss, who said that in her girlhood the area was mostly wilderness without roads or bridges. The few houses on the west side of the Kennebec were all log huts except for Obadiah Williams’ frame, house. On the hill near the Bay, was a shanty occupied by an Irishman named McKin.

The first horse Mrs. Foss remembered seeing in the community was owned by Lt. Brown on the Sebasticook. He had no carriage, but suspended two poles behind the horse, dragging on the ground, Indian fashion. Mrs. Foss was ten years old when the community got its first sleigh owned by Esq. Rice. There were already a few two-wheeled carts with their enormous wheels to allow clear passage over boulders in the road, but no carriage until after the dawn of the 19th century.

For some time the nearest mill was at Augusta, to which corn was carried by boat. The first mill here was McKechnie’s on Emerson Stream. She recalled attending church services at Fort Halifax before the town had any settled minister. Few present Waterville people know that there was once a railroad station on Front Street at the foot of Temple. An item in the Waterville Mail tells us what happened to it. It burned on February 4, 1876.

That station was on the Somerset and Kennebec Railroad, while the station for the earlier Androscoggin and Kennebec was near the corner of Main and Pleasant streets. There was then no central station in Waterville. The two railroads were of different gauges, the older A and K having the wide gauge of 5 feet, 6 inches, while the Somerset and Kennebec had what later became the nation’s standard gauge of 4 feet, 8 inches.

The Sand K had to cross the tracks of the A and K to get on to its terminus at Skowhegan. The crossing was in Fairfield near the Waterville – Fairfield line, and the rivalry between the two roads for traffic between Waterville and Portland led to a controversy known as the battle of the gauges, which ended when both roads merged to form the nucleus of the Maine Central system in 1870. Soon afterward, the wide gauge of the A and K and its extension, the Penobscot and Kennebec to Bangor, was changed to the standard 4 feet, 8 inches.

It is a fact, however, that from 1856 until 1876, a period of twenty years, Waterville had a railroad station near the heart of its business section, right at the foot of Temple Street.

In April, 1877, the Mail paid tribute to a Waterville pioneer, Asa Redington, who has long been commemorated since that newspaper account by the Redington Funeral Home, Redington Street, and the Redington Museum. In 1877, the Mail noted that Asa Redington had come to Waterville in 1788 with Nehemiah Getchell, while both still lived in Vassalboro, to build a sawmill at the foot of Ticonic Falls. With remarkable foresight these two related men (Getchell was Redington’s father-in-law) envisioned great developments at the falls if the water could be properly harnessed. So in 1792, they built a dam from the west shore to the island, not all the way across the river. A person passing over Ticonic Bridge today will notice that the dam from Waterville to the rock island is in a straight line, somewhat at an angle with the stream, while the later section from the island to the Winslow side shoots off at a different angle. Building the original dam only to the island enabled Getchell, Redington, and other enterprising businessmen who corporated with them, to control for their mill sluices the water of the Kennebec, diverting it to the Waterville side.

In the next year, 1793, Redington moved his family to Waterville and continued the enterprises that made him a wealthy man. But he never forgot his humble origin, nor the seven years he had put in as a soldier of the Revolution.

In 1794, he left the partnership with Getchell and went into business for himself. By that time he owned one-third of the largest sawmill, a comfortable dwelling house, and a store. He built and operated one of the four shipyards at the foot of Ticonic Falls and conducted a profitable farm on the Plains. In 1831, with his sons William and Silas, Asa Redington bought the important Dalton mill privilege at the Falls, and got it at a bargain, after a big flood had swept away the Dalton mill. On the ruins the Redingtons erected a large flour mill with four runs of stoves, which became very profitable as the only mill equipped to turn out flour from the local farmers’ wheat.

Year: 1975