Radio Script #95
Little Talks On Common Things
February 4, 1951
In the course of the years I have found many cynical people when you mention to them the public philanthropies of modern industry. They too often consider such good works as all bearing the spectacular marks of the elder Rockefeller’s distribution of dimes, forgetting the enormous benefit to humanity of the Rockefeller Foundation. These cynics are sure that when any industrial firm today gives away money, there is either a string attached to it or the company has some axe to grind.
One of the commonest distribution of grants by big business today i~ to colleges and universities for scientific research. Of course, say the cynics, these companies are interested in letting the scientists find ways for the company to make more money by selling more products to more people who can’t afford them. That opinion is grossly unjust. One of America’s biggest businesses, still largely under control of the family in which it originated is the E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, the company which, is sometimes said to be the State of Delaware.
For many years Du Pont has made unrestricted grants to universities for scientific research. For the coming academic year 1951-52, in spite of the nation’s absorption in defense production and Du Pont is one of the big defense producers — they will provide $400,000 to more than twenty universities.
As long ago as 1918 Du Pont began to make these grants to encourage graduate research in chemistry, and through the years has extended the grants to other fields of science. The grants are given outright to universities for unrestricted use in scientific research. The universities themselves select the projects and maintain complete freedom in the publication of results. Whatever is discovered belongs to the whole scientific world through the university; it is not the property of Du Pont. The Delaware company is only one of many large industrial firms in America which by suCh grants are keeping scientific researCh at top quality in our universities.
Such a policy Shows that industria11eaders are well aware of the nation’S need for independent, unrestricted researCh.
Mr. and Mrs. A. F. Drummond have made to Colby College a gift in whiCh I know many of my listeners will be interested. It is a map of Waterville in the year 1853, and it is now on exhibition in the main foyer of the Miller Library on Mayflower Hill.
Strangely enough the map was not printed in Maine, but in New York City by the engraving firm of Prescott and Edwards at 71 Wall Street. It contains somethingI have never before seen on these old maps — the subscribers’ names printed on the map itself, with eaCh subscriber’s occupation after his name. Many of those names will ring the bell of memory among the older people who hear them mentioned tonight. Among those map subscribers of a century ago were Samuel Appleton, postmaster; Timothy Boutelle, counselor at law; N. R. Boutelle, physician; W. M. Bates, ornamental printer; J. T. Champlin, professor at Waterville College; Nathaniel Gilman, opposite whose name is set no occupation, but simply the words “New York”. Mr. Gilman had left Waterville for the big city some time earlier, but his continued interest in our town was Shown not only by his large real estate holdings here but also by his willingness to subscribe for this map.
Other subscribers were D. J. Leighton, West India goods; Daniel Moor, saw mills and steam boat; E. Noyes, superintendent of the Androscoggin and Kennebec Railroad; W. A. Stevens, marble manufacturer; S. Wing and Brothers, daguerrean artists; and C. K. Mathews, book seller, brother of the Edward Mathews whom Dr. Coolidge had murdered six years before.
As for the map itself, it is very revealing. In the course of the past two years I thought I had come to learn a lot about old Waterville, but this map held many surprises — plenty of information of which I had not been aware. For instance, I had no idea that Winter Street did not always run all the way through from Elm to Pleasant streets. Both are very old streets, and I supposed of course that Winter was from the first a short connecting street between two long streets.
But the 1853 map tells us that such an assumption is wrong. Winter then was a dead-end street, running from Elm to a point almost opposite where my own house now stands at Number 17. Between the dead end and Pleasant street was a vacant lot. Of course I knew, as many of my listeners do, that West Winter Street, from Pleasant to Burleigh came much later, but how many of you ever suspected that originally the east end of Winter Street didn’t go all the way through to Pleasant?
Park street was then called Church Street, and Western Avenue, of course, was Mill Street. The site of the present Monument Park is shown simply as an unmarked green patch. Just about the time this map was made the old cemetery on that spot was abandoned, the bodies moved to the new Pine Grove Cemetery, and the place converted into a park, where some 15 years later .the Civil War monument was erected.
I have often wondered where the original Androscoggin and Kennebec Railroad joined tracks with the Portland and Kennebec. The A and K, you will recall, I have mentioned several times on these broadcasts, for it was the first railroad to reach Waterville, opening here in 1849. Not until six years later did the P and K reach Waterville. Why the promoters of that road built two expensive covered bridges, one at Augusta and the other at Waterville, instead of coming straight up the Sidney side of the river is not entirely clear. Legend has it that one of the prominent backers was a bridge builder who sold the new railroad a bill of goods, but the more probable explanation is that Vassalboro was then an important and thriving village, with at last three prosperous manufacturing plants, and with easy access to the growing inland villages to the east.
At any rate the railroad bridge at Waterville was finally built in 1854, exactly one hundred years after the building of Fort Halifax, and early in 1855 the first train from Augusta crossed it into Waterville. The old station of the P and K was near the Head of the Falls at the foot of Temple street, while the older station, that of the A and K, was not far from the site of Waterville’s present railroad station.
Now anyone who goes down on the riverbank back of the old college buildings can plainly see the road-bed, where once ran the tracks of the extension of the Portland and Kennebec to Bangor — a road known as the Penobscot and Kennebec. It had always been clear to me that the tracks of the A and K must have joined those of the P and K somewhere in Waterville, for before 1860 there are records to show trains going through from Lewiston to Bangor.
Mr. Drummond’s 1853 map gives us the answer. It shows just one railroad crossing over College Avenue, exactly where the present upper crossing now is. Just beyond, in what are now the Maine Central yards, the A and K tracks, having crossed College Avenue, joined the P and K tracks that came up the river bank from the bridge. Years afterward the riverbank tracks and the Temple Street station were abandoned, the lower College Avenue crossing was built, and Waterville got a union station.
Where Coburn Institute now stands was an older building marked on this map as “The Academy”. Farther down Elm Street at the corner of School Street, where the D’Orsay house now stands was another school building marked “The Institute”. All this calls for an explanation.
What is now Coburn Classical Institute was founded in 1829 as waterville Academy. It flourished for a time, but declined in the 1830’s so that in 1840 it suspended operations, without teachers or pupils. A rival school had already sprung up, called the Waterville Liberal Institute, and is said to have attracted many students away from the Academy. The rivalry was doubtless enhanced because the Liberal Institute was sponsored by the Universalists as the Academy had been by the Baptists. Friends of the older school were determined, however, that it should not die. In 1841 they obtained an Act of the Legislature, incorporating Waterville Academy under a board of trustees, of whom the best remembered were Samuel Plaisted, Edwin Noyes, Harrison Smith and Stephen Thayer.
It was not the act of incorporation, however, which gave the old Academy the vigor to make it a great and lasting school. It was rather the coming of a new principal, James H. Hanson, whose name and fame were to be identified with the school long after Abner Coburn had built the new building and seen the name changed in his honor.
There was not room in Waterville for two college preparatory schools. One of them had to go. That it was the old Institute that died and the Academy (the new Coburn) that lived is no reflection on the Universalists and no special credit to the Baptists. Unfortunately the old Institute had no genius like Dr. Hanson to assure its success and perpetuity. While the old school at the corner of Elm and School Streets lasted, however, the Universalists had the satisfaction of saying that while the Baptist society in waterville had the college for its mother, the Universalist society had the Liberal InstitUte for its child.
The old map gave me another surprise; in 1853 the entrance to the Universalist Church and the church tower faced across Silver Street to the east, not south toward the triangle between Silver and Elm Streets.
I got a thrill when I saw plainly marked on the map a building I have mentioned several times on this program — the old brick schoolhouse on College Avenue, directly across from the end of Getchell Street, where the north end of the American Legion building now stands.
Here’s another surprise. In 1853 the part of water Street that extends from Bridge Street to Main Street did not exist. That was a closed lot. Teams coming up later Street went around the lots where Lockwood Park is now, just the way the new rotary traffic now takes automobiles. In those days it was a more gradUaJ.:1 curve, not a sharp turn from.Bridge Street into Lockwood Street as now.
A glance at that old map of 1853 reveals at once how, in Waterville’s very early days when the town was a part of Winslow, the one road came up the river bank over the plains and on into. Front Street before lower Main Street was ever constructed. By 1853 when this map was drawn, Main Street did show all the way from Lockwood Street to the Main Street railroad crossing, but it is easy to see how the direct route once ran from Water to Front Streets.
Surely many of you know that until fairly recent years there were buildings on Lockwood Park. The largest faced the end of Main Street and was visible all the way down that business thoroughfare. Part of it was once a hotel, and it always contained stores.
Where the James Hotel now stands were the shops of the A and K Railroad. I shall have an interesting story to tell about those shops on a later program. What was known for years as the Noyes house, the present home of the YMCA and earlier quarters of the BOyS Club, on Temple Street is marked on the 1853 map “T. Boutelle”. It was indeed the old home of the famous Squire Timothy Boutelle, and became the inheritance of Squire Boutelle’s daughter, Mrs. Edwin Noyes, whose husband, starting as a law student in the Boutelle office, had become in 1853, as the list of map subscribers shows, superintendent of the Androscoggin and Kennebec Railroad.
On that old map the house where Harvey Eaton now lives is plainly marked “C. Mathews”. This was, of course, Charles, the brother of the murdered Edward Mathews. Since Edward had lived with his brother, Mr. Eaton is quite right in saying that he lives at the same residence once made famous by Waterville’S first victim of murder.
Year: 1951