Radio Script #1337

Little Talks on Common Things
January 23, 1983

There are many stories about persons called giants because of their extreme height. I am sure a number of our listeners have visited a museum on Cape Breton Island, where relics about one of that region’s famous giants are preserved.

Male giants, at least in legend, seem to be common, but women giantesses are rare. Maine had one of those in the person of Miss Sylvia Hardy of Wilton, a very tall woman who is now almost forgotten even in her home
town. Through the Maine History News, official organ of the Maine League of Historical Societies, her fame is now revived. Sylvia Hardy was born in Wilton in 1823. Both of her parents were of ordinary height. At her birth the girl weighed only four pounds. Sylvia was a twin whose sister died in infancy, and people said that Sylvia took on the growth of both. By the time she was eighteen, she was seven feet tall and weighed 330 pounds. When she was forty she had reached her greatest height, 7 feet, 11 inches, and weighed 400 pounds. Despite her great weight she did not appear to be fat. She was very tall and her weight was evenly
distributed. Through the efforts of Miss Blanche Appleboy an exhibit about Sylvia has recently been placed in the Wilton Public Library.

In 1870 Miss Hardy came to the attention of the great showman, P. T. Barnum. It was Mrs. Tom Thumb, wife of Barnum’s renowned dwarf, who discovered her. Mrs. Thumb had a relative in Wilton, whom she occasionally
visited. On one visit she had several talks with Miss Hardy. The tall woman became a close friend of the Tom Thumb couple, and kept in touch with them for many years. During the 1870’s Sylvia herself was, like the two
dwarfs, part of the Barnum exhibit that traveled in various parts of the world.

At that time the Barnum circus was horse-drawn, and the roads between towns were rough. Miss Hardy made travelling easier for the dwarfs by holding them in her hands. Yes, in her hands, not her arms. Miss Hardy, in addition to her height, had exceptionally large hands. It was said of her that she never took a baby in her arms, but always held it in her hands. Placing the head between two of her fingers, its feet extending toward her wrist, her third and little fingers forming an admirable cradle, the length of her hand accommodated the whole length of the child.

In her sixties Miss Hardy became severely afflicted with arthritis and she died on August 25, 1888 at the age of 65. Her funeral, held in her home on Wilton’s Depot street, caused a problem. To get the 8 foot casket out
of the house, a whole side of the entry had to be cut away, and it took 16 pallbearers to carry that casket. In a Wilton cemetery is a simple stone reading “Sylvia Hardy, died August 25, 1888, aged 65 years”. Not a word about her extreme height or her association with Barnum.

Now we turn to another subject, that of forest fires in Maine. In recent years it seems to be the state of California that is hardest hit by those disastrous conflagrations; but a lot of Maine people remember well our great fires of 1947. Blazes sprang up allover the State, destroying many of the palatial summer homes on Mt. Desert Island, and wreaking havoc in numerous Maine villages such as Newfield and Brownfield. Damage approached a hundred million dollars.

While the 1947 fires are of most recent memory, they were by no means the first to spread flaming catastrophe through Maine. For many of them the prosperous lumber industry was responsible. For more than a century wanton and careless ways of cutting timber were much too common. In early days when pine was the most marketable wood, and the paper industry had not turned to spruce, enormous quantities of good spruce were cut to use simply as skids to get the big pines out of the woods, and they were left to rot on the ground. The resulting debris of slash was a constant fire hazard.

In 1824 what became known as the Maramick fire swept into Maine out of New Brunswick and destroyed 832,000 acres of Maine forest. In those early days fires were sometimes intentional. In his book THE MAINE WOODS, Thoreau records that, in the mid-nineteenth century, he saw debris piled as high as six feet deliberately set fire to clear the land, only to have the blaze get out of control. He wrote “The interminable forest seems doomed to be gradually destroyed by fire, and no man will be warmed by it.”

Fires were also caused by lightning, and in the present century has come a new hazard, automobile travelers and campers. That long, dry summer of 1947 was also nothing new for Maine. Her people had been long accustomed to dry spells. In 1908, between May and October, this State had less rain than normally falls in anyone of those months. Bad fires swept through the woods. The office of Maine Forest Commissioner was established in 1891, and its first report showed what was happening as Maine turned its attention to the tourist trade. “Come to Maine”, the ads said. “Come to fish or hunt for deer, bear and moose”. The immediate result was not good for Maine forests. Visitors failed to put out campfires, were careless with matches and cigarettes. Trees were cut for fuel and brush was left to dry in heaps. Though the report showed that, in that comparatively good year, 200,000 acres had been swept by fire, people were not concerned because that was a small part of the State’s 16 million acres of forest.

For this brief mention of Maine forest fires I am chiefly indebted to the writing of Miss Elizabeth Ring of Portland, with whom I long had the pleasure of serving on a committee of the Maine League of Historical Societies.

Now let us take a look at a great Englishman of American colonial times. Apropos the current controversy about teaching of both evolution and Biblical creationism in our public schools, it is interesting to note what Edmund Burke, the staunch defender of American liberty, had to say in Parliament in 1758, exactly a hundred years before Darwin published his ORIGIN OF SPECIES. Burke said “Since no one can ever know for certain whether his own view of creation is the correct one, it is impossible for him to know whether someone else’s view is the wrong one.”

That was the man who denounced his own British government for its oppressive American colonial policy. It was he who gave publicity to the phrase “taxation without representation”. He declared that the colonial policy was not only unfair, but also impossible to enforce. “Three thousand miles of ocean”, he said, “roll between England and America. Before Americans can even learn that a law has been passed, it has become obsolete.”

Finally, let us have a few words about how the size of shipping vessels is measured. Everyone, landlubber as well as seaman, has heard of tonnage, and has been told that a certain ship is of so many tons. Even though I have maritime ancestry through the early 18th century shipowner and shipmaster John Marriner of Cape Elizabeth, I long had the same idea held by most people that tonnage meant the weight of a ship’s cargo. But, in its origin, tonnage had nothing to do with weight, but referred to the TUN, a cask used chiefly for wine. How many tuns of wine could a ship’s hold contain?

From that origin, tonnage came to mean how many cubic feet were available for cargo in the ship’s hold. Tonnage thus refers to space, not to weight. Tonnage figures are arrived at by multiplying the length by the breadth by the depth of the hold, then dividing the total by 100. Thus a hold that was 80 feet long, 24 feet wide and 8 feet deep would translate into a vessel of 153 tons.

And with that clearing up of the common misinformation about tonnage, we say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1983