Radio Script #82
Little Talks On Common Things
November 5, 1950
Last week we promised you more information about old-time floods on the Kennebec. Here it is. Winslow’s famous freshet oak stood at a distance which is described by T. o. Paine as 363 steps below Ticonic Bridge. The tree no longer stands. In August, 1942 H. B. Pratt, Jr. and L. A. Fitch noted that the tree had recently been cut down. The annular rings in the stump were so clear, however, that Mr. Pratt could count 183 of them, showing that the tree was standing from the earliest days of Winslow’s incorporation as a town. Logs carried by freshets marked that tree at various heights. On one side of the tree was a deep gash, shaped like a new moon. This was identified as work of the great ice freshet of 1869. During a whole century no scar was higher, except an older one, fully a foot above. That was the log-made scar of the champion of all Kennebec freshets, the flood of 1832, which we described in detail last week.
When Mr. Paine was making his investigation of Kennebec freshets, Charles Getchell went with him to the freshet oak, which was then still standing. He pointed to the highest scar and said: “The’ 32 freshet was up there. The ground is about as it was then. Mr. William Redington said to my father, William Getchell, who stood near by, ‘The freshet was there’, and where Father showed him, Mr. Redington painted a red mark. I was then ten years old, and I could just reach Mr. Redington’s mark.” Mr. Getchell also told Paine that in 1832 the oak was round, straight and smooth, and that its great and highest scar was certainly made by the great freshet of 1832.
How many of my listeners remember the old covered bridge across the Sebasticook near Fort Halifax? In 1887 that bridge withstood a big freshet. The high water mark was above the floor of the bridge, so that no logs could pass under, and a huge jam piled up in the river between the dam and the bridge. Mr. John Runnels told Paine that the water stood at its height for three hours, and the bridge would certainly have gone out under the battering of logs if the drop had not come very rapidly and the logs went through with a rush.
In 1887 the railroad bridge across the Sebasticook was down stream from the highway bridge, just as it is now. The railroad bridge formed a sort .of boom, which obstructed the logs, except in a narrow channel close to the pier. A crew of men worked frantically to keep the logs in that channel and save the bridge.
A large hemlock log, fourteen inches in diameter, lodged on the bottom chord at the south end of the bridge. It took mighty high water to lodge a big log in that place.
Plenty of my listeners remember Bassett’s store in Winslow. It was only nine years ago, in 1941, that it was moved a few rods south to the position where it now stands, below the gasoline station near the corner of Lithgow Street and the Augusta Road. Josiah Bassett told Mr. Paine, “The freshet of 1887 landed big logs up in the field back of my store. Water came up to within 20 feet of the northeast corner of the building.” But Mr. Bassett said he had been told that the 1832 flood touched the floor of the store.
On lower ground, east of the Bassett store, once stood a cooper shop, in which at the time of the 1832 flood was located the Winslow post office. This is what Josiah Bassett wrote for Mr. Paine in 1891: “A high water mark of the 1832 freshet was cut on the old time post office partition in my father’s cooper shop about 18 inches above the floor. There were two steps into the shop, one stone step and the threshold on the sill. The shop was torn down by my brother Benjamin many years ago, and its precious mark is now lost.”
Another old mark was on the Eaton store, at the head of what was known as Eaton’s Landing. This was a two-story building with four-sided roof. Mr. Bassett when a small boy, had heard Solomon Eaton say that in the 1832 flood a canoe entered his store and its bow shot over the counter.
Winslow Simpson told Mr. Paine his recollections of the freshet of 1869.
Just as in 1832, said Mr. Paine, a long, heavy, northeast wind blew the water out of Moosehead Lake. That accounted for the tremendous swell of water which Mr. Paine saw cover the intervales belonging to his father, Frederic Paine and their neighbor, Nelson Dingley_ “The wind would pack and pile the river, and get up a great, surging body full of all kinds of trash. Old pig pens, old mills on the river, all clustered together, were crowded in among the logs. Once I saw a load of lumber on a cart with a dog sitting on top of it, all going madly down the river.”
One amazing feature of the ’32 freshet concerned a flock of sheep. They grazed on the lower end of the flat just above the Pond Hole, near where the H & W Mill now stands. They slept under a flat boat turned bottom up. That flock of sheep, without leaving the flat, lived through the flood.
Fortunately Mr. Paine put into the record an explanation of the phrase “Pond Hole”. He wrote: “It is important to know that the word ‘hole’ often meant a very bad place. This meaning comes from the use of the term in Ezekiel, Chapter 8: ‘He brought me to the door of the court; and when I looked, I beheld a hole. Then he said to me, Son of Man, go in and see the wicked abominations that they do here. I found my walk up through the Pond Hole a difficult one. The hole was a gully or ravine, cluttered, clogged and tangled, full of trees, rocks, bushes, and all sorts of trash — a very hole of a place.”
It was Winslow Simpson who assured Mr. Paine that the river rose 26 feet in less than 12 hours in the great freshet of 1832. Mr. Simpson’ s father, who lived to be 104 years old, used to keep a record of all freshets by marks on a cedar tree at the foot of Simpson’s Landing. A larg~ limb shot out horizontally from the main trunk. No freshet recorded by the elder Simpson quite reached that limb, except the tremendous flood of 1832. The mark which Simpson placed to show how far up the tree the water then came was well above the limb. On May 23, 1832, the day after the flood was at its height, measurements taken from that mark showed a rise of 26 feet in the flood waters. Long before the elder Simpson’s death, the cedar was cut down and its valuable record of flood marks was lost.
Mr. Paine felt that stories about the 1832 freshet had been somewhat exaggerated.
He collected evidence to show that, while it was probably the highest, the 1832 flood did not rise much higher than many other freshets between 1761 and 1891. Mr. Paine wrote: “In Nathaniel Dingley’s front yard, and between the Winslow post office and the railroad bridge, I can stand and, on my own body, mark off with considerable accuracy, all the freshets since 1761. No freshet can I call great unless it wets my feet, as I stand inside Mr. Dingley’s gate. Some freshets in the ’30’s and 140lS would then come to my knees, the great flood of ’32 coming only a little higher, not more than half way to my hips. When I was a boy, I used to be disgusted with a freshet that was even a few inches lower than the last.”
Evidence that the freshet of 1936 was higher than even the big flood of 1832 comes to me in the form of a photograph, looking west down Lithgow Street past the Bassett house. The whole area is completely flooded. No street can be seen at all. The water covers almost up to the sill of the northeast window of the first floor. Now Mr. Paine’s little book quotes Josiah Bassett as saying that no flood had ever cov.ered the floor of that old house — then called the Eaton house — but that the 1832 flood came to the under side of the floor beams. The 1936 waters came higher than that.
We shall welcome anything more our listeners can tell us about Kennebec freshets, especially any facts or measurements that relate the flood of 1832 to the better remembered flood of 1936.
When I talked about the Coolidge murder case, little did I think that any property which once belonged to the murderer was still in existence. But I now have in my custody what are declared to be the saddle bags used by Dr. Valorus P. Coolidge when he was practicing in Waterville. These saddle bags came, some fifty years ago, into the possession of a Mr. Merrill of Fairfield, and were by him passed on to another person, whose name I am not at liberty to mention.
Mr. Merrill’s nephew, Judge William Burgess of Fairfield, says he knows nothing about the history of these saddle bags, but he is joining me in the search for proof that they actually belonged to the murderer, Coolidge. We shall let you know what we discover.
When the consuming public got jittery after the Korean War started and proceeded to raid the stores for certain commodities, the story goes that a certain aged lady, who has long lived alone, ordered from her grocer 25 pounds of coffee and a hundred pounds of sugar. “Why, Aunt Mary”, said the grocer, “what can you possibly want with so much coffee and sugar?” “Young man”, said Aunt Mary, “don’t you know there’s a war on? I’m going to build up my inventories before a lot of greedy people start hoarding.”
Not long ago Ben Fairless, the distinguished head of U. S. Steel, told a gathering in Philadelphia that even in the heavy industries and the building trades there are unfortunately too many Aunt Marys. That, said Mr. Fairless, is the only way one can explain why today our nation is using 100 million tons of steel to produce a smaller quantity of goods than it manufactured out of only 88 million tons seven years ago.
But Mr. Fairless made it equally plain that hidden inventories do not alone explain our shortage of steel, nor do war demands of the government complete the explanation. He points to the undeniable fact that strikes have cost the American people 29 million tons of steel production since VJ-Day in 1945. Now right here in Waterville we are getting first-hand knowledge of What a construction strike can mean.
Mr. Fairless made no accusations. He refused to place the blame on anyone.
He said, “I believe that any man who, in this critical hour,. impugns the motives or the patriotism of any group of Americans, is playing the Kremlin’s dirty game.”
Mr. Fairless went on to say: “Some men tell us that those strikes occurred because management was stubborn and unyielding. Others say that labor was willful and headstrong. As an interested party, I am not qualified to judge which is right. But of one thing I am sure. If the patriotic men of steel — the men who make it and the men who manage it — are fully determined to put America’s security above all else, any problem they ever face can be settled peaceably, with patience, forbearance arid reason.”
These are hopeful words in a critical time.
Year: 1950