Radio Script #420

Little Talks on Common Thingss

May 10, 1959

We have been led to believe that letters written by young people 80 or 90 years ago were as stiff and formal as were letters of the 18th century, but we often find that such was not the case, especially when one young person wrote to another. Here is a letter written by a freshman girl at Colby, only three years after the first woman was admitted to that college. This is what freshman Milly, during the Christmas vacation in 1874, wrote to Nellie, another girl in the same class. Let me first read you the letter just as it was written. Then I’ll explain some things about it.

“Dear Nellie: Excuse me for writing, but I am reduced to a great strait and no one can help me but you. Somebody or something has absconded with my Nutritive System. Of course I feel badly as one naturally would, but if you will be kind enough to send me the Analysis, I think I can easily recover the loss. Bert says we (you and I) will have honorable mention for our productions. It seems that none of the boys wrote anything except the Abstract that the professor gave us, and one or two necessary definitions. Tilden wrote nothing at all, hardly.

“Did you know that the Examining Committee had our papers to peruse? The professors never see them. Isn’t that terrible? I was sewing on boot buttons when I heard it, and it came near being my last mortal work.

“Has your term bill come in, and how do you feel in your mind? I hope as frisky as I do.

“Now if you will please send me the analysis of the first lecture, I shall be very much obliged. Yours truly, Milly.”

Now for the explanations. The writer of that letter was the third woman to receive a degree from Colby College and the only woman to graduate in the Class of 1878. She was Emily Peace Meader who, until her death in 1914, lived in the big, mansion-like Meader home in Waterville, where the First National supermarket now stands. The girl to whom she wrote was Ellen Koopman, who did not graduate because of serious illness, which led to her death in Georgia a few years later. In 1874 both girls were Colby freshmen. During the Christmas holidays Miss Meader wrote this letter in Waterville and mailed it to Miss Koopman’s home in Freeport.

When Miss Meader referred to her Nutritive System, she did not mean her insides. She meant her analysis of a lecture on the nutritive system which she had made for her course in Physiology. At that time every freshman had to take a term course in physiology, for which no textbook was used. It consisted wholly of lectures by the professor, given once or twice a week. Usually the professor passed out a brief, printed abstract of the lecture, on the basis of which, combined with their own notes taken at the time, the students were required to write and submit an analysis.

Miss Meader had lost her prepared analysis on that particular lecture, the Nutritive System, and she appealed to Miss Koopman for help.

She tells Nellie that she has picked up certain information from Bert. He was Albert Getchell, another member of the Class of 1878, who would gain fame in the field of medicine. With a bent for such subjects as physiology and anatomy, he knew what he was talking about when he told Milly that the work of herself and Nellie was good enough to rate honorable mention. Getchell, a Waterville boy, received his M.D. degree from the Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia did post graduate work at Harvard, then became a distinguished physician of Worcester, specializing in ear, nose and throat. He was consulting laryngologist for several mid-Massachusetts hospitals, and was the author of a curiously interesting book, “The Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare”.

The Tilden who passed in nothing but the mere abstracts was Howard B. Tilden of the same class, who had come to Colby from a farm in the Franklin County town of Chesterville. He went from Colby to Newton Theological Institution, then to a series of pastorates in several of the New England states.

The Examining Committee to which Miss Meader refers was a committee of the Trustees, not of the college faculty, to whom were submitted the collections of the analyses made by the students on the lectures in physiology. Miss Meader was only one student who stood in awe of those august personages, the Colby Trustees. She could only say to her friend Nellie, “Isn’t that terrible?”

Miss Meader’s reference to the term bill is to the increase in tuition that had just gone into effect. When you consider that Colby tuition is now $950 and next year will be $1,100 a year, it is interesting to note what Miss Meader was exercised about in 1874. In that year tuition had been increased from $48 to $60 a year. The tuition charge on Miss Meader’s bill for one of the three annual terms was therefore just $20. There is evidence of how the cost of living has gone up in the past 85 years. In that time tuition at Colby has increased by 1,850 per cent, or by geometrical progression has doubled more than four times. What I mean by this last remark is that, if you double that 1874 tuition of $60, you get $120. Double that and you get $240. Double again and it is $480. Then the fourth doubling gives you $960, only $10 more than this year’s tuition, and $140 less than it will be next year. Indeed a student could attend college with very little money 85 years ago.

Miss Meader’s christened name was Emily Peace Meader. Before she graduated from college in 1878, her close friends like Ellen Koopman and Louise Coburn were calling her by her middle name, Peace. In fact, in January, 1880 she wrote to Miss Koopman a letter which she signed “With love, Peace”. She wrote:

“Dear Nell: I just read a lovely poem by Louise and I shall soon send it to you. Bess came home last Tuesday, to stay only a week. She is studying in water color, so wants to get back soon. Harry and I read an hour every morning in the Iliad and accomplish about a hundred lines a day. Don’t we do well?

“Friday night I went to a Masonic Ball at West Waterville. Twenty of us went from here and we had a gay time. Bess wants me, so goodbye for now. You wouldn’t know her. She is taller by far than I and quite fleshy.”

Well, those two letters show you that girls of college age, writing to each other nearly a century ago, could be just as human and just as chatty as letter writers are today.

A few weeks ago I told you about the dispute over the route to be taken by the Penobscot and Kennebec Railroad from Waterville to Bangor. It finally took what was called the northern route through Pittsfield and Newport, but there were many champions of a southern route through Unity, Troy and Dixmont.

One of those was a man who signed himself “J. Roger”, who lived in Unity. Roger was a terrible speller, and the letter he wrote about the battle over the railroad route has such atrocious spelling that often his intended word can only be guessed at, but in general the man’s meaning is clear. Wherever the railroad might go, Roger warned the farmers not to get involved. “I am not for amalgamating the farming and railroad interests”, he wrote. “Such a union would be fraught with evil. Agriculture is the foundation of life; industry, commerce and railroads are but handmaidens. Railroads cannot be built and ships cannot sail without the assistance of pork and beans. It belongs to the commercial part of the community to build our railroad. Let them do it. The farmer had better spend his money to raise potatoes to feed the Irishmen who will lay the ties and rails.”

Roger continued: “We must admit that the Newport route stands pre-eminent in point of grade. It will take a strong argument to induce the company to alter that location to our southern route. Still I am convinced that our route can be made the better and more economical one by disinterested care for the money spent.

“When I urge the farmers to keep shy of railroad amalgamation. I speak from experience. When I was young I had the idea of mixing two interests. So I, a farmer, married a fisherman’s daughter. I soon found my wife was more fond of catching codfish and pacing the quarterdeck than of feeding the proudest rooster that ever strutted on a dung hill. As a consequence, our offspring were half horse and half alligator. If I trusted my boys to drive a team, they were sure to imagine they were on board a fishing smack, under a sheet of canvas, and off they’d drive, bound for Davie Jones’ locker. So I lived my life amidst fish and gurry. So I tell you farmers not to marry a railroad corporation. They will think your team can be harnessed by steam, your hens can lay by steam, your horses pull by steam, your potatoes grow by steam. In the end they will bury you under steam. Just stick to farming, and when they get scalded letting off too much steam, you will have plenty of potatoes to make poultices to heal their wounds. Let every man attend to his own calling and all will be safe.”

At the end of Roger’s letter is appended the statement: “To be read at the railroad meeting at Unity Village in April, 1853.”

We usually do not think of war time as a period in which to start a new business. But that is just what the Lang family did at North Vassalboro in 1863. Here is the account of that event, given in the Waterville Mail on January 8, 1863.

“Happily the employees of the North Vassalboro Manufacturing Company mutually resolved to make the opening of their fine new factory an occasion for a New Year celebration. The throng that passed through the long halls on New Year’s Day declared the enterprise a huge success, never equaled in the whole big town of Vassalboro. Two hundred feet of tables, laden with all the luxuries that bear relationship to hot coffee and cold turkey, and surrounded by a thousand feet of hungry, merry men and women, is but one item in the program. The operatives presented a silver plate to Thomas Lang, agent of the Company. Mr. Webber, the master machinist, made the presentation speech, which was brief, simple, and just right. Mr. Lang replied in the same style. Dancing to the music of a fine band, and any amount of chatting and just plain looking on, filled the time till two o’clock in the morning. But mere amusements were not the most prominent feature. That was the bringing together of capital and labor in human relationship. Both parties met, mingled and were strengthened.”

In the Waterville Mail for May 24, 1863 I find two items, one just above the other. The top one reads: “Our Kendall Mills neighbors will dedicate their new cemetery with appropriate ceremonies tomorrow afternoon.”

Just beneath that item is this one: “The West Waterville Cornet Band, D. B. Gibbs, leader, is prepared to furnish music for all occasions where a brass band is requested.”

Now what I want to know is, did that Oakland band help Fairfield dedicate its new cemetery?

Year: 1959