Radio Script #81
Little Talks On Common Things
October 29, 1950
Common things sometimes lead to uncommon results. No better illustration can be found of that truth than an incident in the life of Martin Keyes, founder of the Keyes Fibre Company, and maker of the first papyrus pie plates in the world.
This past week has seen the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Martin Keyes, for he was born at Lempster, New HampShire on October 25, 1850. When he was a young man, working for the Indurated Fibre Company in northern New York, the mills made large quantities of maple veneer. Mr. Keyes observed that the workmen in the mills often ate their lunches off of pieces of this veneer, using them as plates.
Of course many men had observed the same thing before. It takes more than observation to get uncommon results out of common things. It takes inventive imagination, and that was just what Martin Keyes had. Why not make plates out of maple veneer, thought Mr. Keyes. So he steamed the veneer and formed it into a plate. Then he hit upon a better idea — forming pulp on a die — and making a papyrus plate.
Paper plates are pretty common things today, but they were unheard of when Martin Keyes first noticed that workmen ate their lunches off pieces of veneer.
The great paper products industry — a result important to the economy of thousands of American families — came from that common observation by a remarkably uncommon man.
A few weeks ago we mentioned p·ine Grove Cemetery, saying that the first recorded burial there was in 1851. The father of a man still living cleared the land for that cemetery. Mr. T. G. Burleigh of Roosevelt Avenue assures me that his father, Hall Burleigh, and Augustus Getchell cleared the cemetery land with oxen in 1850 and 1851.
If Longfellow, is generally considered Maine’s greatest poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson ran him a close second, and there are many persons who consider Robinson the greater poet of the two. James Humphry, Librarian of Colby College, has rendered a service to thousands of Robinson lovers by his recent publication of a carefully annotated list of the volumes in the poet’s personal library. A product of the Anthoensen Press of Portland, noted for the excellence of its printing, Mr. Humphry’s little book is the latest volume issued by the Colby College Press.
perhaps many of my listeners do not know that the Treasure Room of the Colby College Library is open to the public, and that Professor Carl Weber, Colby’s curator of rare books and manuscripts cordially welcomes visitors. Why don’t you go out to Mayflower Hill some afternoon and see the precious collections of Maine authors, such as Robinson, Sarah Orne Jewett and Jacob Abbott?
Except for mention of the 1855 freshet which carried away the Augusta dam, we have hitherto neglected the subject of floods on the Kennebec. So let us give that subject a little attention tonight.
It was nearly fifteen years ago that the Kennebec suffered its latest and perhaps its biggest flood. Every Waterville person over twenty years old must remember it well. All day of Thursday, March 19, 1936 hundreds of anxious citizens went frequently to the rear of the buildings on lower Front Street, or to the slope back of the college, to watch the rapidly rising waters. Everyone expected the railroad bridge to go out. Though weighted with flat cars loaded with stone, the piers themselves seemed to be giving way, as water gushed not only around them, but through them.
But the railroad bridge stood. It was the highway bridge that went out, and strangely enough it did not carry with it the adjoining span of the electric railway bridge. That abandoned bridge for the electric car tracks proved our salvation during the tedious wait for a new highway bridge, for one way traffic continued across the electric car bridge all through the summer.
That 1936 flood was certainly Maine’s worst. It did more damage than any previous flood, because there was more damage to do. It destroyed more than $20,000,000 worth of property, rendered 8,000 people homeless. Winslow’s gas lines and household water were cut off. Water stood five feet deep in the business district of Gardiner. The town of Bingham was completely surrounded by the flood. The fear of epidemic added to the people’s anxiety.
Psychologically the most agonizing part of that 1936 flood was that, When folks thought it was all over, the worst was yet to come. Wednesday, March 11 saw a heavy blanket of snow over the whole state. That evening it began to rain, and continued in such downpour all day Thursday that roads began to be flooded and there were many serious washouts. On Friday the waters of both the Androscoggin and the Kennebec rose more than a foot an hour. A dangerous ice jam formed at Vassalboro.
Saturday was fair, but the waters raged so devastatin~ly that the railroad bridge at Brunswick and the highway bridge at Richmond went out. By night the Whole Kennebec Valley between Augusta and Richmond was isolated.
Sunday was fair and much warmer. The water began to recede. The flood was over, and people set about the task of repairing the damage. No one thought much of it When intermittent showers fell on Monday. But when showers and fog continued on Tuesday and the weather reports forecast more heavy rain, folks became alarmed again. Their fears were justified. All day Wednesday the rain fell. On Thursday morning it was still raining and the high temperature was helping also to loosen the upriver ice. It was that ice that did the great damage. Few things — even the pieces of bridges — that got in its path could withstand it. A month after that wild night of March 19 huge ice cakes, capable of supporting a big house, could still be seen on the west side of the highway above Hinckley.
On Friday morning, after the Ticonic Bridge went out, the Kennebec at Waterville had risen to twice the height it had reached on the previous Friday.
It was not until Sunday that the waters began to go down.
Did the 1936 flood bring the highest water ever known in Waterville? We are not sure. Won’t some of our Hollingsworth friends Or other persons who have kept records of the h~gh’water tell us?
Did any other flood ever send the water so high as the flood of 1936?
How far back do accurate records of the Kennebec floods take us? Fortunately we have the painstaking research of a competent investigator to help us answer that question. In 1891 Timothy Otis Paine, at the request of the Hollingsworth and Whitney Company, made an exhaustive study of whatever could be learned about floods on the Kennebec.
Mr. Paine had been born in 1824 in a house on the hill above the Sebasticook in Winslow. He lived there until 1856 when he went to Massachusetts. In November and December of 1891 he was employed by Engineer H. F. Mills, on behalf of H & W, to visit his old home in Maine, to go among the aged farmers on the Kennebec from Winslow to Fairfield and, with his own knowledge of Kennebec freshets, to fix as many high water marks as possible.
Paine’s notes, still carefully preserved by H & W, clearly show that Winslow was a good place to study the high waters. Paine wrote: “When Moosehead Lake sends out a great freshet, Winslow at the Fort catches it; it comes into the stores and dwellings on the lowland. For this reason there have always been many high water marks at the village. Waterville, on higher ground, has poorer flood records than the mother town of Winslow.”
Mr. Paine found that the greatest freshet of which there was record since Winslow became a town in 1771 was the freshet of 1832. Mr. Paine wrote: “The freshet of 1832 has always been the base to which all freshets are referred by the older people. Ever since my boyhood I have always heard people say, “The freshet this year comes wi thin so many feet or inches of the freshet of 1832.”
As Mr. Paine patiently accumulated information on all the recorded floods, he became convinced that 1832 saw the record high water during the 120 years between 1771 and 1891. Mr. Paine had himself seen that freshet when he was nearly eight years old. He stood at the sitting-room window of his home and watched the waters reach their height. He saw them come up over the lowlands around what is now Lithgow Street, then creep up to the foot of the hill. At the same time another boy of 14, Winslow Simpson, was watching the flood at the flat where the H & W mills now stand. Still living in 1891, Winslow Simpson fixed the high water mark of 1832 by a sawdust line left by the waters in the graveyard on the flat opposite Colby College. Mr. Paine accepted that mark as authentic, because he writes: “The sawdust and drift line of a freshet is made by nature herself. It is a contour line admitted into the courts of the world, and may be seen and traced for many years.”
When Mr. Paine began his investigations in 1891, he recalled that no one had ever ascertained any generally accepted reason why the 1832 freshet was so great. There had been rumors that the cause was known but had been kept secret.
Rumor persisted for some time that the dam at the foot of Moosehead Lake had burst, and that the builders kept silent for fear of having to pay damages.
Mr. Paine speedily spiked that rumor, because he proved that no dam existed at the foot of Moosehead in 1832. Mr. Walter Getchell, a very old man in 1891, told Mr. Paine that in the 1″832 flood a northeast wind blew every. day for fifteen days, and not one of those days was without some rain. It was Mr. Getchell’s opinion that the continued heavy wind blew the water out of Moosehead Lake and made the ’32 freshet especially high. That explanation did not satisfy Mr. paine, and it was only after he had interviewed many old timers and made many measurements that he hit upon the real reason for the 1832 height.
Unlike the freshet a century later in 1936, the 1832 high waters were not accompanied by ice. May 22nd was too late in the season for ice flows. But Mr. Paine proved conclusively that the high waters were caused by an obstruction.
When flood waters encounter any natural obstruction, Mr. Paine.pointed out, they pile up the logs, lumber, trees and floating debris into all the essentials of a dam, which lifts the top water behind it into a rapidly filling pond. Such an obstruction is Bunker Island at Fairfield. The 1832 logs on the Kennebec were several feet through, strong enough to jam everything into a hopeless snarl between the abutment and pier of a bridge. When the water rises high enough to force this natural dam to give way, a vast mass of driftwood pushes down the river before a great wall of water which would continue a roaring torrent until it reached the broader expanse of the bay below Ticonic Falls. Mr. Paine describes what happened in 1832 in the following picturesque language:
“The high water marks of the 1832 flood at Winslow reveal the vastness of the clog and clutter let loose at Fairfield on the midnight of May 21, when everything there gave way and poured down like a great wood and water pudding, shouldering both shores and riverbed, leaving logs on the hill fields, packing solid the pond-hole near what is now the H & W mill, and getting ripped to pieces in the college rip.”
What happened therefore to make 1832 the greatest of Kennebec floods for more than a century was this. At sundown on May 21 the Kennebec was alive with moving masses of logs, washed out bridges, buildings, uprooted trees, and all sorts of floating wreckage. Bunker Island and the piers and abutments of the Fairfield bridges halted this mass so that some of it formed a huge raft in the naturally made pond. Soon after midnight this whole raft let loose down the river.
“Therefore”, says Mr. Paine, “the ’32 flood, from Fairfield down to Ticonic Dam, was a series of log and rubbish ponds, the dams of logs now fixed, now moving, keeping the water not only higher than any freely moving flood had ever raised it, but higher than any Kennebec freshet had ever raised it before.”
Next week we shall tell you about Winslow’s famous freshet oak, about the high water marks on the old covered bridge across the Sebasticook, and how high the water used to come around Bassett’s store. Perhaps we can also find time next week for mention of a few other big floods, especially those between 1891 nd 1936. At any rate we shall have more high water next Sunday evening.
Year: 1950