Radio Script #435

Little Talks on Common Things

November 22, 1959

One of the most celebrated business establishments in Central Maine is the general store of Farwell Brothers at Thorndike. I have mentioned it several times on this program and have told about the unbelievable collection of old-time articles still for sale in that store. The Farwell store is known not only in the United States, but also abroad. It was celebrated in an issue of Stars and Stripes, with our armies overseas, in World War II, and two years after the war, in 1947, an illustrated article on this Maine emporium was published in a famous German magazine.

After the death of Charles Farwell, who many years ago was a Colby student and well known baseball player, his surviving brother gave me three letters which the firm had received from Germany as a result of that magazine article. Two of them are in German, which translated simply say how much the article was enjoyed, and how good it was to read about such a homey kind of store in the great nation that had won the war. The third letter. however, was written in English, in better English than I suspect most of us could do in German, and its wording is no more amusing to us than my German would be to the writer. But it does give a picture of conditions in Germany right after the war, conditions as told not by skilled publicists, but by a simple German woman writing from her tragic experience. Here is the letter:

“Koenigstein, Germany, 22 October 1947

“Dear Mr. Farwell:

“You must not laugh when you get a letter from a German lady. Before me lies an illustrated newspaper with your pictures and your shop and customers. They are beautiful and makes me fun. Here in Germany is since a long time no shop with so many things. How happy you must be. My parents had at Koblenz at Rhine a great bakery and biscuit factory, and at Frankfort my husband had a manufactory of soap, perfumes, hair water, cream and such articles. It was damaged by air raid on 22 March 1944. In 1943 our nice eleven room house was fully destroyed. Within the war’s last days and after it we lost large stocks by robbing. In the ruins, in only about 500 square meters, he is manufacturing liquid soap for hospitals. Although his work is very urgent, he cannot get raw materials. When he has materials sufficient, then there are no bottles or caps to shut the bottles. Then they need boxes, and there are none. That is always the same with all branches of manufacturing. This life is very boring. Because of lack of food, people, especially older people, cannot work as usual and are always tired and feeble. My son is twenty and he had the lucky hit to get his admission to the University of Frankfort. There were 9,000 applicants and only 200 got the admission. Now he has to rise each morning at 5:30 and go to Frankfort by train. He returns at 20 hours (8 P.M.). It is very much difficult for the students’ mothers, for we have so little food. Some months ago my married daughter lost her fourteen weeks old baby. It was too weak. We have no relatives or friends in the USA and have never had one of the little parcels that come from there. If it is possible, could you ask one or another customer to give a few cents for us so you could send us a good parcel. We cannot buy here coffee, rice, or enough fat, flour or mil k. How beautiful it must be to stand in so full a shop and have so much good customers. Can you believe for long years we have had no nutmeg? For a whole year we have had only a little darning cotton, no sewing cotton at all and no boot laces. But we always have the hope of getting better and better soon. Now I come to the end of my letter. Please excuse my mistakes in the English language. I send my best greetings to you and wish you a merry Christmas and a happy, healthy New Year.

“Very sincerely,

“Anna Grote”

I think you all know that a hundred years ago, before the coming of the modern high school, Maine had many more academies than it has today. In 1859 there were two such academies in Waterville — the Waterville Academy, a Baptist school which later became Coburn Classical Institute; and the Waterville Liberal Institute, conducted by the Universalists.

I was interested recently to find a catalogue of an academy which I suspect many of you never knew existed. It was the Lewiston Falls Academy and this particular catalogue was published a hundred and two years ago, in 1857. It was quite a school at that time, having 104 students and five teachers. The principal was Enos Luce, and three of his four assistants were new. The academy offered two courses, which today we would call a college preparatory course and a general course. Then they were called the Language Department and the English Department. The latter was in charge of the only woman teacher, Mary Loring. The school was coeducational, but the catalogue published separately the lists of boys and girls. It did not divide them into classes, but presented each sex in alphabetical order. Students were by no means confined to Lewiston and Auburn. They came from such diverse Maine towns as Jay, Fryeburg, Waldoboro, Scarborough, Westbrook and Freeport. as well as from the nearer communities of Danville, Mechanic Falls, Greene and Leeds. Tuition was $4.00 a term for the English course and $5.00 for the Language course.

The catalogue said: “Board can be obtained in good families for two dollars a week.” The Lewiston Falls Academy had a much longer school year than one would suspect, if one knows how short the old school years used to be. Instead of the customary three terms, it had four terms of eleven weeks each — a total year of 44 weeks out of the calendar’s 52. The purpose of the long school year was to cover the usual four years of an academy course in three years. In the Language course there were weekly examinations in Latin and Greek. The catalogue announced that valuable chemical and philosophical apparatus, lately purchased, would enable the teachers to illustrate, by actual experiment, nearly every important principle in those branches, while the numerous maps, charts. drawings, and the cabinet of natural history, would facilitate the giving of instruction of much profit to the students. Lectures would be given on Natural Philosophy and on the Art of Teaching in the Fall Term; on Astronomy in the Winter Term; on Chemistry in the Spring Term; and on Botany in the Summer Term.

In 1857 modern science as we know it was just being born years later would Darwin publish his famous Origin of Species.

Not until two In the early part of the 19th century what could be called science in the colleges and academies went under two names: natural philosophy and natural history. The first included chemistry, physics and astronomy; the second covered such areas as geology, zoology and botany. Chemistry was first to break off as a separate discipline, but until well after the Civil War what we today know as physics was called natural philosophy. When the Lewiston Falls Academy catalogue spoke of philosophical apparatus, it meant the instruments to perform experiments in physics. Every school in those days took pride in its cabinet. The Lewiston catalogue, in referring to the Cabinet, meant the collection of rocks, shells, fossils, mounted birds and small animals, to illustrate objects in natural history.

It is especially interesting to note that, as early as 1857, the Lewiston Falls Academy was offering instruction in French, German and Spanish. One of the French readings was Vie de Washington, a life of George Washington in French.

Here is the way the catalogue described the location of the school: “Lewiston Falls is 32 miles from Portland, on the line of the A & K RR, and is easy of access from different parts of the State. The institution is in a quiet and healthy part of the town, on rising ground, commanding a beautiful view of the Falls of the Androscoggin.”

In 1857 the Lewiston Falls Academy had twelve trustees, headed by Rev. Elijah Jones of Minot. Three members of the board later achieved fame. John Frye was the father of Maine’s great U. S. Senator, William P. Frye. Alonzo Garcelon was Governor of Maine in the notorious count-out controversy in 1879, when one party set up a siege in the State House to prevent the other party from taking office. A third trustee, Edward T. Little, was the man for whom Edward Little High School in Auburn was later named.

We have said so much on this program about Fort Halifax in Winslow that it is time we paid some attention to Fort Western at Augusta. Both forts were built in the same year, 1754, as a result of the demand of the New Plymouth Company, headed by Dr. Sylvester Gardiner, who was anxious to open the upper Kennebec to settlement and needed protection from the Indians, since the French and Indian War then raged violently.

Fort Western was built under the direction of Gershom Flagg of Boston, himself one of the proprietors of the new company. A house builder and glazier by trade, Flagg superintended the hewing and dovetailing of timbers down the river at Topsham, whence they were floated up on flood tide. Built on a stone foundation, the fort contained twenty rooms and had seven staircases. The main building still stands on the east bank of the Kennebec at Augusta. A hundred feet long, 32 wide and 16 high, it has solid twelve inch walls.

Like Fort Halifax, Fort Western was never attacked, but a garrison of soldiers was retained there, just as at Winslow, until after 1760. In 1762 the Fort Western garrison had been reduced to one lieutenant, one armorer, two sergeants and thirteen privates.

In the early days of the settlement, all public meetings were held at the fort, just as they were held in Fort Halifax up the river in Winslow. In 1763 Augusta’s first wedding was held in the fort, when James Howard, Augusta’s first permanent settler and land owner, performed the ceremony for his own daughter’s marriage to a young man of the settlement. Howard, as a justice of the peace, was the only man in Augusta qualified to perform the ceremony.

In 1779 Fort Western entertained a tired, bedraggled visitor. The expedition sent out from Boston to dislodge the British at Castine had ended in disaster, and the surviving Americans had to make their way back across country as best they could. So one day a few of them straggled into Fort Western, seeking their tedious way back to Boston. One of those ragged, footsore, defeated patriots was none other than Paul Revere.

I am so often asked when certain of our Waterville churches were established that I want to end this broadcast tonight with information about the religious denominations in our town. As I am sure you know, when Waterville became a separate town from Winslow in 1802, it already had what was known as the West Meeting House — the building erected at the expense of the taxpayers on the common — the building that was later removed to face Front Street and became the Armory.

In that first Waterville meeting house worshippers of any denomination were permitted to hold services, for unlike the older town of Winslow, when it included both sides of the river, Waterville never employed a full-time preacher at public expense.

The first denomination to be organized in Waterville was the Baptists in 1818, and they were the first to have their own building in 1826. The Universalists came in 1826 and built their church in 1832. In 1828 came the Congregationalists, with their church building going up in 1830. Although the Methodists were organized here in 1843, they did not get a building until 1868, two years later than the Unitarians, who built their Main Street church in 1866 after their organization in 1863. The Episcopal, organized in 1876, put up their chapel in 1878. Meanwhile the Roman Catholics had established their first Waterville parish, St. Francis, in 1857, and had built the St. Francis Church in 1871. Later came the Free Baptists, now the Getchell Street Church of the United Baptist denomination, the Adventists, the Christian Scientists, the Assembly of God, and the formation of the Second Baptist Church out of the hundred-year old Baptist mission on Water Street.

Year: 1959