Radio Script #384

Little Talks on Common Things

September 7, 1958

Here we are again with a new season of “Little Talks on Common Things”. This is the eleventh consecutive season. Everyone of these broadcasts, already numbering 384, has been sponsored, not as advertising, but as a public service, by the Keyes Fibre Company. To have these more than a million words about old time things put on the air each Sunday evening from September to June we owe to the generosity and public spirit of the officers of Keyes Fibre.

I know that my listeners have sometimes been annoyed in the spring and fall because the baseball games carried by this station have run beyond 6:15 on Sunday evening. That often happens when a double-header is scheduled. I ask your patience about this, and assure you that any Sunday when the games carried by WTVL run beyond 6:15, our program of “Little Talks” will immediately follow the end of the game, however late that time may be.

What do we propose to talk about during the new season? I thought you might like to know some of the topics this program will bring to you between now and Christmas.

Tonight I shall tell you about Drummond Farnsworth’s connection with the Canada Road from Solon through Jackman to the Canadian line, and on some later broadcast I’ll tell how that Norridgewock man played a part in the Aroostook War. You will hear also about Maine’s exhibit at the Chicago World Fair in 1893 and the leadership in that exhibit taken by Hall Burleigh of Vassalboro.

There have just come to light the Civil War letters of a man who then lived in Jefferson, but whose four brothers became citizens of Fairfield. Those letters give interesting information about the camp at Augusta, where the Maine volunteer regiments gathered before going on to Washington.

I want to tell you, on some evening this fall, how the news of Col. William Heath’s death in battle reached Waterville in 1862, about Waterville High School in 1860, about the quarrel over railroad fares to the Colby Commencement in 1864.

A real find of the past summer was a letter written by Skowhegan’s historian and most famous woman, Louise Helen Coburn. One of the first women graduates of Colby, Miss Coburn wrote that letter when she was only a year out of college. I am sure you will find it interesting.

We’ll have a bit more to say about the sport of kings in days before the founding of the Waterville Fair. We’ll try to clarify the long-standing dispute about the final record made by Nelson, Waterville’s world champion trotter.

We’ll get in a few words about the famous Maine sportsman of half a century ago called “Flyrod”, and we’ll drag in a few tall stories about hunting and fishing in Maine.

And I am sure you will be interested to know that I have new information on Waterville’s renowned Coolidge murder case of 1847. I have learned that both Charles Stickney of my native town of Bridgton and Angier Mann, the eccentric Skowhegan doctor, played prominent parts in that case.

Let us begin tonight with a Winslow man’s recollections of that old narrow gauge railroad, the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington. The man is A. M. Robbins, who says that, whenever he thinks of that little railroad, he remembers best the engine, tender and car which lay abandoned for several years on the bank of the Sheepscot River, right where they had been wrecked in the railroad’s last days. There it lay, through the years when junk prices were low, only to be hauled away when we started shipping junk to Japan, to help that nation get ready to attack us at Pearl Harbor.

Before the engine was sold for scrap, two men attempted to appropriate all the brass on it. Leaving their automobile by the roadside, they walked down to the wreck and started to remove the brass. A farmer who lived nearby became suspicious and went down to see what was going on. Frank Winters of the old railroad company had asked this farmer to keep an eye on the wreck.

When the farmer began to question the two fellows who were removing the brass, one of them explained: “Frank sent us over to get the scrap, but we’re having a hard time and need some help. Can’t you help us?” “I’m pretty busy”,the farmer replied, “but I guess I can spare half a day to help you”. Then the spokesman for the pair said, “We don’t have any money to pay you, but there must be something in the wreck you could use.” The farmer looked around and asked: “Can I have the coal?” “Sure”, was the reply, “if you help us you can have the coal.” So the farmer got out his horse and wagon and hauled the brass and other salvage up to their car. Then he toted home the coal. Later that farmer had to do a lot of explaining to Frank Winters, because the farmer himself became the principal suspect.

Mr. Robbins tells me that the W, Wand F was bumping cars long before any of the modern bumping yards were built. Mr. Robbins has drawn a diagram, showing how this kind of switching, called bumping, was done, but it is a little hard to describe clearly without showing you the diagram. Suffice to say, this was a way of cutting a car out of the middle of a train and putting it on a siding without stopping the train.

Mr. Robbins recalls that one winter night in a driving blizzard a railroad snow plow, going toward Coopers Mills 30 miles per hour, hit a hardpacked drift, uncoupled, left the train and came to rest on a siding headed in the opposite direction, toward Windsor. The train backed into the siding, hooked on, and backed up to Weeks Mills, turned the plow around and went back to Wiscasset.

Mr. Robbins is also reminded that when~ as a boy, he lived on Bolton Hill in Augusta, people there knew it was going to rain whenever they could hear the whistle of the little narrow gauge engines of the W, Wand F. For some time Mr. Robbins worked at the Central Maine Power Company station at Maxy’s siding about half way between the Windsor and Coopers Mills stations of the old narrow gauge.

In “Kennebec Yesterdays” I have told how Jim Jackman built the so-called Canada Road from Bingham to the Canadian line in 1838. I have since been interested to learn that Miss Meroe Morse’s ancestor, Drummond Farnsworth of Norridgewock, was interested in that road which, you will recall, was built to get the silver through.

In 1834 one of the U. S. Congressmen from Maine was Goshen Parks. Preserved in Miss Morse’s collection of Farnsworth items is a letter which Representative Parks wrote to Drummond Farnsworth from Washington on February 1, 1834. The Congressman told the Norridgewock man that he was having trouble in getting a survey made, because authorities in Washington informed him that no officers could be detailed to make such a survey without the specific approval of the President and nobody could seem to get that approval from President Andrew Jackson.

One of Congressman Parks’ schemes to assure the road was his proposal for a fort on the highlands near Jackman. He told Farnsworth: “I prepared a memorial showing the importance of a military post on our frontier. I asked not only for a fortress large enough to protect Maine from predatory invasion, but large enough to shelter an army that might prevent any troops moving up the St. Lawrence from Quebec. I contended that the highlands between the sources of the Kennebec and the Chaudiere were of greater military importance than any other point between the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the farthest west; that it would afford protection to Ohio, New York and Vermont as well as to Maine; that the time had gone by when there would ever be more campaigns on the Niagara; that if we got further contests with Great Britain, the battles would be fought in Maine or in the adjoining Canadian provinces.”

Why couldn’t Parks persuade the President to let the survey be made? He explained to Farnsworth that Pres. Jackson felt the dispute over the northeastern boundary was in too delicate a stage to stir up the British unnecessarily by preparing for a new military post on the border. Parks assured Farnsworth that everyone felt the boundary question would soon be settled (he was wrong by some five years), and that just as soon as that issue had quieted down, he would renew his attempts for the survey. His letter ended thus: “I said very little to the War Dept. about the road. I merely observed that about 40 miles would be required to be built. If you get the fortress, you need not fear about the road. It will follow as a matter of necessity. If I am able to get a fortress, it will be one of the first magnitude, a very different thing from the little one at Houlton.”

Through the courtesy of my friends, Mr. and Mrs. Vincent York, proprietors of Greenwood Inn at Phillips, I have had a chance to examine a file of that interesting eight-page weekly newspaper, “The Maine Woods” for the year 1903. That paper was published chiefly in the interests of hunting and fishing in the Rangeley region and was filled with the ads of the manufacturers of rifles, shotguns and ammunition, fishing rods, reels, leaders, spinners and flies, tents and other camping equipment, and numerous ads of the sporting camps, hotels and boarding houses throughout the region.

In the spring of 1903 the editor was much concerned about a damaging rumor. He wrote: “It has been stated in some of the Boston papers that there is smallpox at Rangeley. If the rumor were not absolutely false, the report would seriously injure the business of this region. There is not and has not been a single case of smallpox within many miles of Rangeley village or any of the Rangeley lakes.”

Year: 1958