Radio Script #1123

Little Talks On Common Things
April 24, 1977

[podcast]http://web.colby.edu/scimport/files/2011/05/LT1123.mp3[/podcast]

Before the coming of the railroads, the federal government established post roads, over which the mails were’ to be carried between important points some distance apart. In 1812 such a post road was established between Boston and “Eastport, Maine. That did not mean that a new road was built all the way, but that the mail route was fixed for the entire 400 mile route over already existing roads, all of them rather rough, none thoroughly graveled, and-some having to ford small streams where there were no bridges.

The starting point was the Old State House in Boston, whence the route went via Charlestown Meetinghouse to Lynn. Then, passing through Salem, Beverly, and Ipswich, it came to Newburyport Court House; thence through Sudbury and Hampton to Portsmouth. The route into Maine was one that we still know well as U.S. Route 1, through York, Wells; Kennebunk, Biddeford and Saco, to Portland. From Portland the route extended through North Yarmouth to Freeport and Brunswick, then followed the present direction of Route 1 to Bath.

From Bath to Woolwich, the Kennebec River was crossed by ferry, then on the present line of Route 1 to Newcastle, Waldo, Warren and Thomaston. There was then no separate town of Rockland; so. the next stop was Camden, then on to Lincolnville and Belfast. From Bel,fast the route went to Prospect Landing and to Buckstown (now Bucksport).

Ins tead of going on to Bangor. the line then turned east of Blue Hill and Ellsworth and on to Sullivan Meetinghouse. Then came another ferry across an arm of the bay, with ensuing stops at Gouldsboro, Steuben, Columbia, Machias and DennYsville. At the destination, Eastport, were two stops, the Ferry and the Post Office.

Concerning this line, Greenleaf’ $ Survey of Maine in 1816 said:

“The mail route from Boston to Eastport will soon be shortened about 2·7 miles when a good road is made from Augusta bridge to Bangor, 60 miles, and Bangor to Ellsworth bridge, 20 miles. The distance from Boston· to Eastport will then be 370 instead of 397 miles.”

Besides on the federal post roads, mail was transported within Maine by numerous stage lines over country roads. In 1832 there were 12 stage lines by different routes out of Portland, seven of which were daily, the rest three times a week. Places of arrival and departure within Portland were the Elm Tavern at the corner of Federal and Temple streets, and the American House on Congress Street.

By that time there was a second great post road in Maine, laid out from Portland to Gorham, N. H. and the Canada line, where the Quebec government extended it to St. Hyacinthe and Montreal. On that route one change of horses occurred at Brown’s Tavern in Gray: The line used Morgan horses, and changed them about every five miles.

By 1845 mail routes in Maine ‘covered more than 1,700 miles.

As late as 1880, all of Aroostook County had no railroad service. But in 1834, the scare caused by the Northeast boundary dispute had caused the federal government to assist Maine in building the Military Road ‘from Bangor to Houlton, and this became the early mail route into Aroostook, with the highway gradually extending on to Mars Hill, Presque Isle, Caribou and Fort Fairfield.

In 1885 a poem appeared in the Bangor Whig that described the old stage line into Aroostook. Entitled “The Aroostook Mail”, it begins:

“Oh, terribly slow is the Aroostook Mail –
Slow as the pace of a palsied snail,
Slow as the days to a debtor, in jail,
Slow as a skipper bereft of sail,
Frozen up in the Arctic Ocean.
ItS low as a miser I s niggard ly paw,
Dealing out dimes to a beggar squaw,
Slow as a poor man’s suit at law.
Slow as a’typical April thaw,
S low as the s lowes t motion.”

After a dozen more uncomplimentary verses, the poem ended:

“Wait till the world has forgotten its care,
Till the bald headed eagle has got back his hair,
Wait till the regions of dark. despair
Re-echo with mirth and laughter.
Wait till the weak are helped by the strong,
Wait tell the right has conquered the wrong,
The Aroostook Mail will then crawl along
To town a day or two later.”

One of Maine’s early roads that became a subject of romance and legend was the Air Line Road from Bangor to Calais, built in 18’30, at a time when it traversed genuine wil.derness, much of it unlurnbered, primeval forest. Just before the Civil War, a Bangor paper published an article about that famous highway, from which the following is’ an extract.

“Four fear-crazed horses drag a swaying coach at breakneck speed on a rough trail through rockstrewn hills and forbidding forest, while the driver cracks the long lash of his whip over the heads of the plunging horses. One passenger, braver than the others” leans his neck out a window and holds out one arm with pistol in hand, to help the driver scatter the pack of wolves racing beside the coach, slashing at the horses’ throats.

“Worse than the wolves are the highwaymen. Stages are held up and robbed just as they are west of the Mississippi. What the robbers are after is the mail pouches, where letters often contain bank notes. They seldom ‘molest passengers. Knowing that passengers, as well as driver, are usually armed, a highwayman seldom attacks a full coach. Recently an ingenius driver stuff~d empty mail bags with men’s clothes and propped those dummies on the seats. He saw a highwayman waiting at the turn of the road, but when the fellow saw that the coach was full, he let it pass unmolested.

“Several losses of mail at the little village of Amherst on the Air Line caus.ed an investigation by postal authorities. They discovered that the stage stopped in Amherst beside a high board fence. Hiding behind the fence the thief would wait until an inspection by the driver had found the mail pouch to be safe. He would then reach over the fence, grab the pouch, and be off into the woods. The rascal wa·s caught and sentenced to the state prison for 15 years.”

Winters were tough on the Air Line Road. During the great blizzard of 1888, the horses could not pull the stage through an immense drift. So the driver unhitched the team, put the women passengers on horseback, then he and the male passengers, on foot, broke the w.ay for two miles to a wilderness home. The next day that resident and his lumber crew found. the stage coach completely buried in snow, and it took two days to break a path sufficient to get it on to the next town ..

In the 1860’s it was common for professors at Colby College to use the long winter v’acation to make trips to various parts of Maine to solicit money to keep the college going. In1865, Colby’s famous professor of natural history, Charles Hamlin, who later became an associate of the noted Louis Agassiz at Harvard was making that kind of money-raising trip over the Air Line Road. One day’s record of the diary he keji: during that trip shows what the Air Line was like at that time.

“Took morning -train for Bangor, and after dinner at the Franklin House, was driven to Mariaville, 21 miles, through Brewer, Eddy ton and Clifton. The cliff at Clifton seems quite as high as Sugar Loaf at Deerfield, Mass., and’ like it, is a sheer precipice. Deer are plentiful in the forest here, and one sees many on this stage line. Lately wolves have been seen frequently. They sometimes howl so loud and so near by that they can be heard distinctly inside a house, even with the windows closed.”

It was not until after the Revolution in 1787 that any kind of passenger stage service reached Portland. Before that, Joseph Barnard had been the mail carLier, bringing the mail from towns between Kittery and Portland on horseback. In 1787 Barnard put backless seats on a two-horse wagon and started carrying pas.sengers. He would leave Motley’s -Tavern in Portland every Saturday morning and reach Portsmouth on Monday, leave there on Tuesday and be back at Portland by Thursday evening. The way Barnard handled the mail is especially interesting. Arriving at his own home in Portland, he would open the.mail bag, take out the mail directed to Portland, put back the mail directed elsewhere; close the bag, and hand it over to the Portland postmas.ter, who in turn got it into private hands for delivery before there were any regular drivers going farther east.

Barnard and his immediate successors encountered wr~tched roads and very few wet bridges. Often passengers got off when the stages forded the many streams between Portland and Portsmouth. But crude as roa~ construction then was, there was already a marked highway between Kittery and Saco, a toad laid out before the middle of the-18th century and called the King’s Highway.

After 1800 a part of the route between Portland and Portsmouth was turnpiked. That meant that private enterprise, one man or a group, improved a section of road, and placed on it a barrier called a turnpike, halting traffic so that the improvers could collect toll over the improved section.

Maine’s first post office was established at Kimball’s Tavern in Wells in 1775. The next year saw the second post office at Georgetown, and then the’ third at Falmouth, now Portland.

Half way between Portland and Portsmouth was Kennebunk, where east and west bound coaches always met and where horses w.ere changed. By 1825 the traffic was so great that the Kennebunk stable sheltered 80 horses. While two horses sufficed to draw a coach in good summer weather, .mud time in the spring required four horses, as did often the snows of winter, when the coaches were ·put on runners. At Jefferd’s Tavern ~n Kennebunk there was usually a crowd to greet the meeting of the east and west coaches, which approached at a gallop to the sound of the drivers’ cracking whips, and drew up with a flourish at the tavern door.

And with that tribute to old-time public transportation, we must say goodby until next week.