Radio Script #1174
Little Talks on Common Things
October 22, 1978
In 1976 the Bicentennial Committee of the Town of Belgrade decided to observe the 200th anniversary of our nation’s birth by publishing a pictorial booklet “Belgrade Past and Present.” They produced a paperback of 64 – 11 by 8 inches – pages, filled with illustrations taken from all parts of the town that lies surrounded by three of the Belgrade Lakes.
At the time of that publication, many people regretted that the committee did not undertake a more ambitious project – a full length history of their historic town. The short sketch of the town contained in Kingsbury’s “History of Kennebec County” which covered only the period from the first settlements up to the year 1892, was enough to convince all persons interested in local history that a study in depth up to the beginning of the last quarter of the 20th century, would indeed be a worthy project.
One person who believed that more detail was deserved was H. Leslie Brown, now a resident of Fair Haven, New Jersey, whose childhood and adolescence were spent in the village of Belgrade Lakes. So Brown has patiently put together a series of sketches covering the Belgrade Lakes Village he knew in the 1920s and 1930s. It is not a chronological account, but simply a number of varied items about places, people and events as Brown remembers them.
Leslie Brown’s manuscript may never be published, but we hope it will be carefully preserved for reference by future historians, and, what he has done for the Lake’s Village, others ought to do for other parts of the town: the Depot, the village that sprang up near the station of the Androscoggin and Kennebec Railroad in 1849; the North Belgrade RR station and its adjoining Advent Camp Ground; the village of North Belgrade itself, with its well remembered Salmon Lake House, and its summer colony that dates back to the dawn of this century; and, of course, the area around the historic Old South Church.
But right now we are concerned with Leslie Brown’s items about Belgrade Lakes Village, for I feel they ought at least to be given publicity on this radio program.
Brown remembers the excitement in 1922, when a strange craft appeared on Long Lake. Hearing a roar in the sky, people rushed out of their houses to see an aircraft about to land. Fitted with pontoons, it descended net into a field, but on the surface of the lake itself. It was the first hydroplane ever to be seen in the village. People converged on the dock at the Belgrade Lakes Hotel to get a good view. The pilot let it be known that he would give rides ever the region at five dollars a head, and a few, who could dig up the money, took the thrilling ride.
Few persons living today know that the village of Belgrade Lakes once had a railroad. To be sure, it was only a few yards long, but it did have rails two feet apart, like Maine’s ten big narrow gauge lines. It ran between Long Lake and the Stream that empties Great Lake into Long. A gasoline motor turned a windlass that pulled along a cradle car on which could be carried boats needing to get around the falls at the outlet of the stream. The operator, Frank Lowe, charged one dollar for the service.
During its history, the village has had three names: Chandler’s Mills, Belgrade Mills. and Belgrade Lakes. Early in the 19th century John Chandler built a spool mill near the bridge over the stream, and that gave the place its original name, Chandler’s Mills. It was also Chandler who built the stone building that still stands on the west side of the highway through the village, and made it his general store. During the second decade of this century the Brown family came into possession of the property, made many improvements, and converted it into a two-family home. It is now owned and occupied by former international YMCA secretary, Kenneth Smith, and his wife.
When Chandler erected the building, he hired two Irish stone masons to quarry granite blocks out of the Vienna hills across Long Lake, and he hauled those blocks across the lake on the ice. He paid his workmen fifty cents a day and all the rum they could drink. At the top of a large granite post, inscribed “1838,” Chandler placed a silver dollar. The original store had a huge double door. When both halves were opened, barrels of flour and sugar, and huge hogsheads of molasses and rum could be rolled in. In front of the store stood massive hitching posts.
In 1882 the village got its first electric street light – not from a line run in from the outside, but by locally generated power. It came from what was called a Rhythmic Wheel, set up at the bridge and turned by the stream, thus generating small wattage of electric power. That throbbing wheel could be heard allover the village. The result was a weak, yellow light from a feeble bulb. While it gave little illumination, it was a novelty and the beginning of what became full electrical service when the Central Maine Power Co. took over.
As Belgrade Lakes village became a center for visiting hunters and fishermen, it was almost inevitable that it would one day get a taxidermist. In 1917 such an artisan arrived in the person of Clinton Stillman, a Harvard graduate. In a small building just north of the Union Church, Stillman went to work. Soon his shop exhibited many specimens of mounted wild life – chipmunks and rabbits, deer heads, salmon and trout, and numerous birds. Those flying creatures were so true to life that they seemed about to take off from their perches. Unfortunately the shop had a short life, for Stillman died in 1922.
As a village situated right between two of the larger lakes of the Belgrade chain, the place naturally became a center of boat building. Sole’s shop near the bridge employed master craftsmen. Sole’s successor then continued to turn out safe and beautifully shaped boats. At one time three such shops were in operation. Their end came with the introduction of lighter aluminum and fibre-glass boats.
Did you know that movies were once made in Belgrade Lakes Village? In 1920 Holman Day, who had started a movie studio in Augusta, brought a company to the Lakes, where his cameras focused on actors and actresses as they came up and down the steps of the Belgrade Lakes Hotel, or conversed on the lawn. Of course, in the conversation no one knew what they said, for those were the days of silent movies. The hotel proprietor, Charles Hill, was an observant and critical spectator.
The second largest inn at the village had an interesting history. Built around 1900 on the shore of Long Lake, it was called the Central House, a two-story structure with guest rooms and a spacious dining hall. On the lake side was a wide porch with its array of rocking chairs. A feature was a room off the dining room called the “Liar’s Paradise,” where village cronies gathered to tell tall stories. In 1923 renovations were made and the name changed to the Lake Shore Hotel.
Another local hostelry that gained renown was the “Locust House.” For more than half a century it was operated at the north end of the village near the stream by Edwin Magill. This broadcaster knew the place well. When he was host to the conference of New England Deans at Colby in 1938, the association banquet was held at the Locusts.
I had association with another famous place connected with Belgrade- one that Brown also describes. That was Camp Abena, next to the Luther Gulick camps at Sebago, the oldest girls camp in the United States. It was established early in this century by Miss Hortense Hersom and her three sisters. Miss Hersom was a teacher in a private school in the nation’s capital, and it was from that city and its diplomatic corps that she attracted many girls to one of Maine’s finest camps. Miss Hortense was the camp director, her sister Mrs. Lambert was the dietitian, and the third sister Miss Rilla was camp nurse. By the time that Mrs. Marriner and I spent the first of four delightful summers at Camp Abena, the fourth of the Hersom sisters had died.
The camp had an enviable location, on a spacious peninsula jutting out into Great Lake, and across one arm of the lake was the entrance to the Belgrade Stream emptying into Long Lake. It was admirably protected from intruders and at the same time was sufficiently near sources of supply. The camp program provided instruction in swimming, canoeing, sailing, archery, tennis, and other sports, as well as guidance in manners and etiquette, and a strong intent to inculcate moral principles. The girls at Camp Abena were divided into three groups: junior, middle and senior, the whole range covering ages from five to seventeen. My own daughter was in the junior camp when she was only five. The camp had a number of girls who became famous in later years. In the 1920s perhaps its most famous camper was the girl who became the movie actress, Constance Bennett. Mrs. Marriner and I occupied the cabin where, on one of the beams, Constance had carved her name. Another girl from a nationally known family was Elva Statler, daughter of the famous hotel family.
For many years Mrs. Marriner and I kept up a correspondence with Abena counsellors of the 1930s. In the 1920s Belgrade Lakes became associated with one of the nation’s unsolved mysteries, the disappearance of Judge Joseph Crater in New York City. Crater owned a cottage near Thwing’s Woodland Camps on Great Pond. He had been there for several days, when he was called back to the city. There he completely disappeared, and to this day no trace of him has ever been found. He may have suffered the fate believed much later to have befallen Jimmy Hoffa, the labor leader, but probably we shall never know.
Later, in the 1940s, I had a peripheral connection with Crater. I was in charge of the academic part of the program set up by the Army Air Force at Colby College, and one of our problems was to get enough teachers of physics to supply the need to teach that subject to every cadet. As one of those teachers I employed a trained physicist who had married Judge Crater’s widow after the Judge was declared legally dead.
Year: 1978