Radio Script #458

Little Talks on Common Things

May 8, 1960

Since the drastic curtailment of railroad passenger service in Maine, we have heard of a lot of lament about the passing of the railroads. Yet we are told that such mourning is only useless nostalgia. We who thus complain are behind the times. The practical usefulness of railroads to carry passengers is a thing of the past. So the modernists say to us: “Stop your lamenting and wake up to the changing times”.

Has it ever occurred to you that the railroad has been more than an instrument of passing progress, a way to move goods and persons over long distances at previously unheard of speed? It is heartening to hear a great scholar, Jacques Barzun, Dean of Graduate Faculties at Columbia University, come to the defense of the railroads in a deeper, philosophical sense. Dr. Barzun says, “What makes me sad is that I see in the decline of the railroads the decline of an art as well as a business, for the railroad is a spectacle of complexity mastered, of intellectual order at its best.

“I do not suppose”, continues Barzun, “that when the public hears of another line abolished they think of that railroad as a model of human thought. They grumble at the loss of a convenience. But the truth remains that the railroad was the first embodiment of modern organization the coordination of space, time, matter and men, which we now consider the most natural thing in the world.”

Barzun goes on to point out that we take it completely for granted that life will run on schedule, we expect a name and number for every object, a regularity and uniformity on which we can rely. It was the railroad, says Barzun, that applied to our lives the universe of rotating spheres, the most exact clock in all creation.

For man even to approach the precision of the heavenly bodies was a remarkable achievement, and it was through the railroad that he first did it. “Look at a railroad timetable”, suggests Barzun. “It not only sums up the power to combine and predict from a distance the daily movements of those little worlds called trains, but it also typifies the compulsion exerted by numbers and clocks and colored lights over the will of the natural rebel, man.”

Barzun calls our attention, by way of contrast, to travel before the coming of railroads. “As a customer paying his way, flaunting his title or his wealth, the traveler took as long as he liked to dine at the inn. As the holder of the reins controlling the motive power, the coachman played the despot about stopping and leaving. Our present self discipline in public, our sense of social equality, are the manners of the age of trains. The natural rhythms of man’s life, selfish and individualistic, came under control.”

Barzun could bolster his argument with some pertinent facts. When the railroads first came on the human scene, the pace of living was not ready for them. In 1830, when the British opened a rail line from Liverpool to Manchester, a member of Parliament was killed by an engine shunting through the crowd. When that engine moved, no one knew how to gauge its speed and distance, how soon to get out of the way. Ten years later, in 1840, when Auguste Brunel, a pioneer in locomotive design, wanted to know what had happened to one of his engines, overdue at the terminal, he would mount another and drive it along the expected track of the missing train.

When someone asked him what he would do if, rounding a corner, he came face to face with the missing engine, Brunel replied: “I would put on full steam and drive off the opposite engine by the superior velocity of my own.” You see, in 1840, not even a designer of engines knew the power with which he dealt.

Man is an animal that resents discipline. When the railroad brought frequent accidents, every attempt to introduce safety devices was met with opposition. They were resisted as “newfangled”, costly contrivances. Engineers on the trains were just as resistant as were the railroad directors. When their boilers were first supplied with safety valves, the engineers would screw them down tight, preferring to blow up rather than lose steam. In the old code of brainless courage, taking precautions was regarded as unmanly.

Standardization and system were likewise resisted. We have all heard of the battle of the gauges, and of the chaos that existed when American railroads were of various widths. We have heard also about the persistent resistance to standard time. But not as well known is the opposition to tickets. In 1840 a friend of the Newcastle and Carlisle R.R. in England proposed the use of printed and numbered tickets, but the railroad officials spoofed at the idea. The only proper way for a freeborn Englishman to board a train was with a sheet of particulars, a sort of bill of lading, written out especially for him with his name on it. So strong was the belief in individual liberty that it took a series of horrible accidents to stop people from riding on the tops of coaches, especially on excursion days. In France, to prevent impulsive exits, the passengers were locked in before departure.

The whole history of railroading teaches us that, long before its adopting,every safety device had been invented and was ready. The delay was always in the mind.

The victory, the great triumph over obstinate human nature, was to force people to think, and to act on the results of their thoughts. So it is that Dr. Barzun concludes: “In the railroad lies the difference between the social organization of an ant hill and that which man has evolved. Destroy an ant hill and the creatures are so single-minded that they will remake it exactly as it was before. But between the first rail lines laid in Britain and America 120 years ago and the modern transcontinental systems, there is a philosophical as well as a technological difference. Within a century man has begun to understand that, by giving up some trivial, selfish satisfactions, he can gain realms of unsuspected freedom. If my ego suffers from not seeing my name on the ticket, if I have to personalize my every act, I can always send myself a telegram.”

A number of persons who have heard me from time to time speak of the famous journey of Col. John Montressor in 1760 have asked me where I got my information. They refer to Montressor’s first journey into Maine. when he left Quebec on snowshoes in January, 1760, intending to come down over the Height of Land to the chain of lakes, then follow the Kennebec River to Fort Halifax. Up in the wilds above Rangeley, Montressor somehow got off the course, hit the headwaters of the Androscoggin instead of the Kennebec. and eventually came to his first Maine settlement at Topsham. It was not until a year later, in 1761. that Montressor made another expedition up the Chaudiere, across to Penobscot waters, over the well known Indian carry to Moosehead Lake, out of that lake into the Kennebec River.

Now the account of that second journey — Montressor’s own journal of the trip was published in the very first issue of the Collections of the Maine Historical Society, the same issue that contains the contemporary accounts of Arnold’s expedition to Quebec. For my knowledge of that trip that brought that British engineer down the Androscoggin rather than the Kennebec, I am indebted to the editor of the Collections of the New York Historical Society. who in 1881 published the text of a letter which Montressor wrote to Lord Jeffrey Amherst from Boston on February 26, 1760. After his arrival at Topsham, Montressor had gone on to Boston, and from the comfort and safety of that large colonial town he wrote to the commanding general of British forces in the American colonies. This is what he wrote: “Honored Sir: I have the honor of acquainting you of my arrival yesterday at this place in 31 days from Quebec. 26 of which were in the woods, the other five on my journey from Topsham to Boston. My escort was one officer, two sergeants, and ten rangers.” (Note that Montressor does not mention Indian guides. The lack of them is probably why he lost his way, for in the following year Indians guided him speedily and accurately to Moosehead Lake and the Kennebec.) He continues the letter: “All but two of my party got out with me safe to the settlement of Topsham near Fort Brunswick on the Androscoggin River. One was froze past recovery about 200 miles in the woods; the other was just capable of moving to within 30 miles of Topsham, and to him I sent relief.

“We were 13 days without bread and without meat, owing to the little knowledge we had of the distance we had to go and the difficulties to encounter.

“I left the party at Topsham to recover, they being very feeble and scarce any flesh on their bones, having been obliged to subsist, as well as myself, by eating our Indian shoes, bullet pouches, and all spare leather, with berries, buds, bark and boiled mountain tea.

“I left Quebec on January 26, crossed the river St. Laurence in canoes, through and over the ice to Point Les Peres; from thence marched into the woods and cut through the village and concessions of St. Charles; from thence struck south by west upon the river Chaudiere, a few miles above the village of Nouvelle Basse; from thence to the forks of the Chaudiere, continuing on the southern branch till we reached the notch of the Allegany Mountains, then arrived at Great Chaudiere Pond.”

(That is what we now call Lake Megantic.) “Still keeping the same course, I passed the Height of Land down to Little Chaudiere Pond, passed the carrying place and struck on a stream which proved to lead into the Androscoggin River, which I followed till I arrived at the settlement of the Township of Topsham.”

You all know my oft-repeated statement that one of the best ways to get a picture of the olden days is to read the ads in newspapers of long ago. Here are a few advertisements that appeared in the Lewiston Falls Advertiser in the year 1843: “Wanted: 3,000 bushels of oats, 2,000 of corn, 500 of rye, and 500 of white beans.

“India Rubber Court Plaster for sale by Hubbard and Lane.

“Wm. Brown’s Boneset Candy Medicated. Within a few months we have sold 23,000 pounds of this celebrated cough remedy. It is no quack medicine, but is made of boneset root, roots of squill and of licorice, and snake root. Don’t buy substitutes. Buy the real stuff. Brown’s Boneset Candy Medicine.

“Charles Higgins, recently from Turner, would respectfully inform the public that he has taken a shop at’Lewiston Falls, where he intends to carryon tin plate and sheet iron manufacturing.

“Molasses. loaf, crushed and brown sugars, Oolong and Souchong teas, Santo Domingo Coffee, saleratus, rice. spices of all kinds, cocoa shells and raisins at Holland and Lane’s.

“Come in and see our hard and hollow ware, our shovels tongs and fire dogs, our sad irons and umbrellas, our buffalo robes and muskrat caps. and our superior assortment of shawls.”

The Advertiser had. in that year 1843, one very alluring out-of-state advertisement. It said: “Grand Charter Lottery. First Prize $13,000; second $11,000; two prizes of $6,000 and two of $5,000. Other prizes from $4,000 to one dollar. Altogether 28,653 prizes. Whole tickets one dollar. Package of 26 whole tickets $10.00; of 26 half tickets $5.00; of 26 quarter tickets $2.50. Morris and Co., 8 Bank Street. Cleveland, Ohio.”

Year: 1960