Radio Script #1088

Little Talks on Common Things
May 23, 1976

Maine political leaders in the 1820s were concerned because such a large proportion of Maine land was under absentee ownership. A circular published in 1827 referred to those owners being of three kinds: (1) those who were indifferent to the development of their land and did nothing to improve it or to encourage settlers. Such owners were interested solely in taking off valuable cuttings of timber. A second group did spend some money to open roads, build bridges, erect mills on the streams, and make arrangements with settlers, thus increasing the value of their lands. A third group expended large sums on such improvements as roads, bridges, mills, and even in erecting dwellings, as did Sylvester Gardiner and his principal heir, his grandson Robert Hallowell Gardiner. Such proprietors were willing to spend money to clear additional land. It was those holdings that became the most prosperous Maine villages.

The report lamented that this third group was a small minority of the land owners and even smaller in respect to total acreage of the absentee owned lands. Part of the trouble lay in the reason why these Boston merchants and other men of wealth living outside of Maine invested in Maine land in the first place. Some had bought in the hope of rapid turnover at a profit, what we call today short-term investments. They were the get-rich-quick fellows, but their hopes were by no means generally fulfilled. A second group bought for longer investment, though they were often reluctant to spend more money to make improvement that would encourage settlers. Then there was a third group who were considered involuntary or unwilling owners. They were the Boston money-lenders, who had advanced capital for other speculators to buy Maine lands, and the security for those loans were mortgage liens on the land. Many of those mortgages remained so long unpaid, including the accumulating interest, that the lenders had to foreclose and take over the land themselves. This they had never meant to do, and as unwilling owners, their subsequent aim was to sell the land for at least enough to recover the mortgage. Some of those lenders eventually lost considerable money in the venture, and they became bitter opponents of land ventures in Maine.

There had been a marked movement for settlement directly after the Revolution, but when Maine became a state in 1820, that movement had become a mere trickle. In 1816, the Kennebec Proprietors, that had once held the huge 30-mile wide strip on the Kennebec River from Merrymeeting Bay to above Skowhegan, had dissolved their company, selling the last of their lands at auction. The decline in immigration, combined with the economic instability that accompanied and followed the War of 1812 had lowered the price of land, put much of it into the hands of private speculators, who could care less about any development that would cause them to risk more money.

Even those men who had bought wilderness land for twelve cents an acre could expect little profit under existing conditions. Even that was not the worst of the story. In 1827, a total of 116 million acres of Maine wild land remained unsold. It was public land, still in the possession of the state, and thus produced no taxation.

The report noted that new people coming to the state wanted to make their homes where there were already settlements, not far into the wilderness. The report said: “That kind of settler is not tempted by the difference in a few dollars per acre as price of the land. He shuns a region where there are no roads, settlers are far apart, and where he must encounter hardship and privation that have become unknown in the more settled towns. Even at a higher price, he prefers the comforts of society and education for his children. Hence, all possible encouragement must be given to a different kind of settler – those who are willing to overlook the temporary disadvantages of remote, wilderness living, who are willing to settle where land is cheap, and who perhaps actually see some advantage in escaping the responsibilities of society.”

The report concluded: “Unless action is taken to improve the situation, Maine inhabitants of the interior will for a long time be scattered, too poor to provide education for their children, and too indifferent to instruct themselves. Thus a generation grows up in ignorance, habituated to disorder, and unaccustomed to the restraints of a well-ordered society.”

Thanks to changes, many of which those legislators of 1827 could not possibly foresee, that situation has been overcome, though there are still in Maine vast stretches of uninhabited land.

Now I want to tell you about a Waterville physician of the early years of the present century. I admit that historically any date beginning with 19 seems comparatively recent, but we might remind ourselves that the first year bearing those initial numerals was 76 years ago, six years longer than the biblically allotted three score years and ten.

A low red-painted house at the corner of Elm and Center Streets in Waterville, where now stands the Sears Roebuck store, was the residence and medical office of Dr. E. W. Boyer. His account books, now preserved in the Redington Museum of the Waterville Historical Society, reveal that, in addition to his private practice, he was under contract to serve as official doctor for several industries, including Hollingsworth & Whitney, Lockwood Mills, Wyandotte, and the Maine Central Railroad. In addition, he frequently billed other companies for medical services to their employees. These firms included Proctor & Bowie, the Waterville Steam Laundry, the Kennebec Boat and Canoe Co., Berst-Foster-Dixfield of Oakland, Horace Purinton Co., and the Harris Baking Co. The names of many prominent local citizens appeared on Dr. Boyer’s books in the 1920s. Carroll Perkins and John Davison, George Marr and James Dean, Fred Arnold and Charles Flood, Andrew Ware and Harvey Eaton, Edgar Brown and George Fred Terry.

Among the women who consulted Dr. Boyer were Miss Exerene Flood and Miss Sarah Lang, Helen Meader, Helen Redington, Elizabeth Crommett, and the well-known newswoman, Lyda Berry.

On the same day in 1926, Dr. Boyer treated Charles Farrington, the chief of police; William Knauff, founder of the Federal Trust Company; and E. C. Wardwell, the dry goods merchant.

Some of the notations for treatment of factory injuries are interesting. Without giving names, let us share a few of Dr. Boyer’s notations – “Hand jammed between pieces of wood, causing fracture of middle phalanx of little finger. Treatment, setting, dressing and x-rays – $12.” “Finger caught in carding machine gears. Compound fracture. Removed pieces of bone, cleaned and dressed the wound. Permanent disability not yet determined. $3.50.” “Fell from coal scales, striking on back and shoulders. General shaking up and strains. $2.50″ ”Wooden horse under staging gave way. He fell, striking the slender frame. Severe contusion on right thigh and several flesh wounds. Bad shaking up. Cleaned and dressed the wounds and sent him home. $3.00″

“Fell on wagon rim when horse run away. No fractures, but numerous scrapings of skin. Treated and bandaged and sent him home. $3.00” “Hit by a train at Winslow crossing. Multiple bruises and flesh wounds. Both elbows and left ankle cut. Contusion on back of head. Permanent disability not yet determined. $7.50” “Fell from stack to concrete floor. Fracture of skull. X-rays. Called Dr. Risley in consultation. Later visit to him at hospital besides treatment at the plant. $12.50” “Crushing injury to toes of right foot when a transformer wheel fell on it. Complete amputation of three toes, and part of fourth. It will be a permanent disability. He will be at Elm City Hospital for at least six weeks. I performed amputation, Dr. Percy Merrill gave gas anesthesia. $25.00”

I am sure, as I have recited these cases you have noticed Dr. Boyer’s fees. In that last $25 case, the fee included several visits to the patient in the hospital as well as original treatment and operation. While, in the 1920s, doctor’s fees were commensurate with wages, no family or industrial physician could hope to get rich, though some of them did very well financially.

In the first decade of this century I knew in another part of Maine a man who was reputed to be the town’s wealthiest physician. But the fact that when he died there were on his books unpaid bills of patients amounting to nearly $20,000 shows that his wealth did not come from medicine. The fact was that he saw the potential value of land in what was then a region just beginning as a summer resort. He bought a great deal of that land, cleared off its fine timber by profitable sales to the Portland Star Match Co., sold numerous cottage lots, and made money.

I suspect that on Dr. Boyer’s books, when he too left us, there were numerous unpaid bills. We owe much as a society to those old-time general practitioners. They did a lot of devoted medical work for which they received not a cent of pay – and they did it the hard way, by night calls to distant homes, delivering babies by dim lamplight, sometimes performing an operation on the kitchen table.

How grateful we should be to the splendid advanced scientific care given by medical science today, saving thousands of lives impossible to save fifty years ago. But, in our gratitude for today’s medical care, let us not fail to pay tribute to the old-time physicians, who with devotion and sacrifice did the best they could with what they had, and with little thought about recompence.

Year: 1976