Radio Script #298
Little Talks On Common Things
March 25, 1956
Amid all the things said pro and con about what goes on in our schools today — and I proclaim loudly that our schools are not nearly so bad as the critics contend — there are some practices so different from those of an earlier generation that they may deserve a bit of comment.
Frequently I meet boys and girls on their way home from the afternoon’s last classes at the Watervi I Ie junior and senior high schools. I am constantly amazed at how few of these young people are carrying books home for study. The girls are better than the boys, but not a lot better. The boy who takes home books from school seems to consider it almost a social disgrace, a losing of face among his pals.
This situation should not be blamed on the schools. It is clearly the fault of the home. Men and women of my age recal I very distinctly how our parents insisted that we do regular and consistent evening study. Some of us were al lowed to go out only on Friday and Saturday evenings.
I know there are plenty of folk who wi II contradict me, but I make the blunt statement that the outstanding difficulty faced by teachers and administrators in our high schools al lover America is that home study is not the social thing to do; in fact, under present American mores, it is socially the thing not to do.
How unrealistic, therefore, is the statement published in the Directory of the State Department of Education, which came from the press about a month ago. That statement says: “A unit is the credit given toward graduation for a subject pursued a minimum of 200 minutes per week for the entire year and requiring a comparable amount of time in preparation outside of class.”
Now of course the pupi Is have some time in school for this outside preparation, but the school day just isn’t long enough to provide 40 minutes each for four classes and another 40 minutes for each of four preparations. Furthermore it takes a better than average pupi I to do satisfactory work with only 40 minutes of preparation five days a week on any subject. The better pupils spend much more than that.
Now don’t get me wrong. I have nothing but prai1se for the pupi Is and their parents who respect the need for home study and observe it. But those pup i Is and parents are in the mi nori ty. And as the i r numbers conti nue to decrease, we approach nearer and nearer to the day when, for our high school boys and girls, not on Iy home study but any serious study wi II be not the th ing to do.
I n “Kennebec Yesterdays n have a chapter ca lied “I tch i ng Feet”, te II i ng how Mai ne boys left our towns for a II parts of the country and even to far-away lands in the years between 1850 and 1880. The migration, of course, has never stopped. Ma i ne boys sti II leave the state in I arge numbers.
The exodus from Ma; ne just before the Ci vi I War was not, however, a departure merely of unmarried young men. Whole fami lies went to the beckoning lands of the West. Since I wrote that chapter on “Itching Feet”, I have picked up a lot more information about the migrations from Maine. There is, for instance, the story of what happened to our Franklin County town of New Sharon, a town that we may almost claim as in the Kennebec Val ley, for it is on the Sandy River, which flows into the Kennebec.
As early as 1848 a New Sha~n man was doing a brisk business in Ohio o He was Charles E. Witham, who showed up in eastern Ohio towns selling lightning rods. But he was looking for something even more profitable. Between his trips, which placed rods on almost every barn in Ohio, Witham took a course in medicine at Cincinnati, got his diploma, and left Ohio for Iowa, where he became a pro- mi nent and revered .,country doctor.
When The vii lage of Anoka, Minnesota was organized in 1853, one of its first town officers was David McLaughlin of New Sharon, who in a few years became prominent in the erection and management of grain elevators. It was Elias Connor of New Sharon who bui It the first suspension bridge across the Mississippi at Minneapolis.
The Minnesota lumber industry owes a lot to the importation of hardy, experienced I umbermen from Maine. In 1850 Nathanie I Tibbetts went from New Sharon to the big forests along Minnesota’s Elk River. The next year Nathaniel was joined by his younger brothers Joshua, Benjamin and James. All became prosperous in lumber and real estate.
So many men and fami lies left New Sharon in the 1840’s that one wonders who and what STarted such a big and long-continuing migration. Were New Sharon folk unusua Ily restless? Oi d thei r feet itch worse than thei r nei ghbors? Was New Sharon, as a town, all played out? Or was it overpopulated? Did it have too many peop Ie to get a I i vi ng off its soil? We do not know the answe r. What we do knOll is That emi grants from New Sharon scattered to a II parts of the Ameri can West. More often than not, like the four Tibbetts brothers, they were up-andcoming, energetic, industrious people, quick to see a chance and quick to grab it. When opportunity knocked at the door of a New Sharon man, it didn’t have to knock tw i ce •
Next TO New Sharon, the town which saw its population most severely depleted in the twenty years before the Civil War was the tOlin of Corinna, between Newport and Dexter. In 1856, just a hundred years ago, the largest fortune in Minneapolis was held by Levi Stewart, who had come from Corinna, Maine.
He had seen the opportunities offered by the little towns of Minneapolis and St. Paul, had bought real estate at a bargain and sold it at handsome profits.
Benjamin Hi Iton and his wife Prisci Iia left Corinna in 1844, pioneered in I I linois, then in Wisconsin, where they were living when the Civi I War broke out. The end of the war found them in Iowa, where Hi Iton founded a paper called the “Boone County Advocate”. In 1870 the Hi Itons moved agai n, th is ti me to Li ncoin, Nebraska, where they opened a hotel. There the fami Iy finally settled down and soon persuaded other people from Corinna to join them. Among the Maine folk who went to Lincoln was the Reverend Fifield, who served as chaplain for the convention which drew up Nebraska’s first state constitution.
Wherever Maine people went in the developing West, they took with them not only the flat, twangy Maine speech, but also Maine customs and Maine mores. After 1851, when Neal D~ won his great victory for prohibition, ardent Maine dries carried the campaign against liquor into hundreds of settlements from Ohio to Oregon. Among those crusaders was a Maine Carrie Nation. She was Harriet Bishop, a tal I, thin spinster who had been born in Vermont, but had later become a schoo I teache r in Ma i ne • In 1848 she had gone to St. Pau I, where she opened a school with seven pupi Is, two white boys and five Indians. Harriet was a rousing prohibitionist. She seized and smashed many a bottle; crusaded in a score of Minnesota towns for a prohibition law. Encouraged by Neal Dow’s success in Maine, Harriet and her fel low prohibitionists got a simi lar law through the territorial legislature of Minnesota in 1853, and Harriet saw to it that the vi ctory was ce lebrated by the ri ngi ng of every Protestant church be II in st. Paul. Harriet was tearing mad when a chief justice declared her law unconstitutional, and she vented her wrath on the saloon keepers. Leading a vigi I ante group, she attacked st. Paul’s Empire Saloon, operated by Daniel Dudley, himself a Yankee, but not from Maine, breaking doors and windows and pouring his stock of liquor into the street. Dudley promptly reopened, but within two weeks, his P I ace was destroyed by fire, as the authori ti es sa i d, “of undetermined origin”.
One interesting story of Maine’s itching feet tells how the famous Jesse James gang of robbers met their match in Henry Sumner French of Sandy Point, Maine. French had gone to Minnesota in 1868, had settled in the growing hamlet of Northfield, and had become the vi I lage postmaster.
On September 7, 1876, eight horsemen, including Jesse and his brother Frank James, and the three brothers named Younger, rode into the main street of Northfield and moved toward the bank. The first to suspect what they intended was Jos i ah A lien, another Yankee, who operated the town’s hardware store.
He ran into his store, shouti ng to the men who happened to be there, “Get your guns, boys.” To the assembled unarmed men Allen passed out his store’s stock of new rifles and shotguns and the necessary ammunition. A New Hampshire youth, Henry Wheeler, took up the alarm, dashed into the hotel across the street from the bank, picked up a handy Army carbine, and went into action.
Meanwhi Ie, what of Maine’s Henry French from Sandy Point? Hearing the alarm, he looked around the post office for a weapon. Finding nothing more formidable than a broom, and disdaining that woman’s weapon, Henry rushed out into the al ley behind the post office, picked up an armful of sizable rocks, and began bouncing them off the astonished desperadoes in the street. In the whole lurid history of the James-Younger gang, this is the only recorded instance when anybody attacked those notorious two-gun men with a barrage of stones.
Although two of the bandits got inside the bank and ki I led the cashier, they never got the safe opened and fai led to get a cent of money. They were forced to leave in frustration because their protecting accomplices in the street were hav i ng too much troub Ie. With the fi rearms from A lien’s store, the aroused Yankees of Northfield had become decidedly busy. In a few minutes six of the bandits were in flight, two of them badly wounded. The remaining two I ay dead in North fie I d t S rna in st reet In the quiet, peaceful town of Northfield there reposes today a relic of that street battle of 1876. In a plush-lined case in a Northfield museum is an object that once belonged to one of the bandits – his right ear.
I am often asked whether I know the origin of certain Indian names that have come down to us as the desi gnaTi on of Mai ne ri vers and nounta ins, and hence of Maine towns. Unfortunately no one has done a thorough piece of research on the Indian place-names in the Kennebec Val ley, but Fannie Hardy EcksTrom did a splendid, scholarly work with her “Indian Place-Names of the Penobscot Valley and The Ma i ne Coast”. Thanks to Mrs. Eckstrom we know how the I ndi ans named places for physical features of the land and streams. One suspects aT a glance, for instance, that Passadumkeag and MaTTawamkeag have something in common, and so they have. Both refer to a grave I bar ina stream. Passadumkeag means above the gravel bar; Mattawamkeag means below, or at the mouth of, the gravel bar.
Most, but not all, The Indian names which end, in English spelling, wiTh “keag” refer to points of land formed by the action of two confluent streams. Perhaps there was once such a name for the juncTion of the Sebastioook and the Kennebec, but, if so, it was long si nce lost, or perhaps overwhe I med by the better known UTi con i c” whi ch, at fi rst, referred To The fa lis. Mrs. Eckstrom admi TS that the origin of Tioonic is uncertain, but she thinks the best explanation is “a greaT crossing”, for above the falls, near the spot where the old college bui I….;· dings now stand, was once a favorite crossing place.
Sebago, the name of one of our moST beautiful lakes, is a corruption of the Abnak i word “Mas i begatff big, sti II waTer. Damariscotta means “fish going up”. Mati n i cus means cut-off or far-away is I and. Monhegan means simp Iy HThe I s I andit , the one great, prominent island off the coast, but near enough to approach. Olanon means red paint; Mattanawcook signifies “at the end of the island’!; Wytopit lock i s “the 0 I de r p I ace n •
Wi scasset is a comb i nat i on of ‘~ech i” — wants to run, and “kas i ka” -” scrapes as it goes”; and therefore means a concealing outlet. OgunquiT signi- fies a neck of land adjacent to a marsh.
InteresTingly enough, Cape Newaggen does not refer to a cape, as does Cape Eli zabeth. I t comes to us from a sing Ie I ndi an word, “kapah i gan”, mean i ng a closed up openi ng in a waterway, and thus a p lace where the Indi an trave ler had to carry his canoe over land. Cape Newaggen in Indian times, therefore, was a p lace where a water trave fer crossed the I and.
So with these references to names we gOT from the Red ~n, we bi d you good night for old times’ sake.
Year: 1956