Radio Script #581

Little Talks on Common Things

September 15, 1963

Here we are again with Little Talks on Common Things after the usual summer respite. This broadcast today begins the sixteenth season of Little Talks. From September to June for the past fifteen years this program has dealt with the history and folklore of Maine, especially of the Kennebec Valley. And now, for the sixteenth year. we offer still more information about old time things and old time ways of Maine people.

I believe this is now the oldest radio program in the United States that. from its beginning. has had only one sponsor. As I have often pointed out, our sponsor, the Keyes Fibre Company, has presented this program not as advertising, but as a public service.· The program does not urge you to buy any Keyes product; there is no interruption for any kind of ad; only at the beginning and at the end are you told that the program comes to you by courtesy of the Keyes Fibre Company.

Plans for this season’s broadcasts are based upon astonishingly interesting, and I believe historically important, manuscripts that I have had opportunity to examine. Beginning next Sunday there will be several broadcasts based upon very old papers discovered at the Waterville station of the Maine Central Railroad, when preparations were under way to abandon that station. That find consisted of letters, contracts. bills, stock certificates and bonds dealing with Waterville’s first railroad. the A & K, which came to Waterville in 1849 and was absorbed into the Maine Central system in 1863. There are many old payroll sheets in the collection, giving us the names of men who worked for that first railroad more than a hundred years ago.

The series of broadcasts based on the railroad papers will be followed by even more detailed information about our early railroads that I have gleaned from the diaries of George Flood, founder of the G.S. Flood fuel company. Mr. Flood began that diary in his senior year at Colby College, 1860, the year before the Civil War broke out and he continued it until a few weeks before his death in 1896. He was for many years in the employ of the railroads. That Flood diary is a mine of information not only about the rail lines, but also about all sorts of happenings in Waterville and the neighboring towns. But after I have told you what George Flood has to say about the railroads, I shall turn to another subject; then later in the year go back to other aspects of the Flood diaries.

Following the talks on the railroads, as seen through the early A & K manuscripts and the Flood diaries, there will be several broadcasts based on a collection of early Waterville manuscripts that came into my hands last spring. Many of them dated before 1800, those manuscripts are the property of Mrs. J. Rutherford Gettens of Washington, DC, a descendant of two of Waterville’s most prominent pioneers, Obadiah Williams and Abijah Smith. They reveal information of the greatest importance concerning Waterville’s early history, information that both augments and corrects statements in the city’s printed histories. Many of the papers are ancient deeds issued to Obadiah Williams, including a grant to him and several associates by the Plymouth Company of a tract of land that included what later became the entire towns of Mt. Vernon and Belgrade and another paper is Williams’ deed from John Pitt, one of the Plymouth proprietors, of Lot 104 of the old McKechnie survey — the lot that later would comprise the heart of Waterville’s business district.

I am sure many listeners will be interested in these three series that will carry the program well into the winter: the railroad papers, the portion of the Flood diaries that deals with the railroads, and the Gettens manuscripts about Obadiah Williams and Abijah Smith.

Before we begin those railroad broadcasts next week, I want today to refer to a few other matters. 1963 has been a great year for town celebrations in Maine.

In August I was a speaker at the 200th anniversary of the town of Sedgwick, only one week after I had spoken at Getchell’s Corner in connection with Vassalboro’s Old Home Week.

The newly formed Vassalboro Historical Society is doing a splendid job, and their exhibit at North Vassalboro during Old Home Week was outstanding.

Congratulations are especially due to the people of Fairfield for their remarkably successful celebration of the 175th anniversary of the incorporation of that town. Without employing any professional promoter, with all the work done by citizen volunteers, they not only paid all expenses, but had a surplus to divide among civic enterprises.

The Fairfield 175th anniversary parade was the best I have seen since the two-hour procession that marked Waterville’s elaborate floats. First prize was won by a representation of a camp-out with a fall spouting real water. Another displayed a replica of an early sawmill, with the small boys, looking much like three of the seven dwarfs, acting as mill operators.

Unusual and memorable was the art exhibit at the Lawrence Library — entirely the work of local artists. The paintings were mostly of local scenes — the old railroad bridge, the old covered bridges, and noted buildings. The exhibit revealed a wealth of artistic talent in the Fairfield community.

A feature of the program that I especially enjoyed was the service on Sunday morning at the Friends Meeting House in North Fairfield. The first twenty minutes saw a typical Quaker meeting, with any person speaking as the spirit prompted.

The minister, Mrs. Taylor, gave a brief sermon, and there were two items of historical interest: the reading of the deed of land known as the Quaker tract — a part of the big 36 square-mile Nye-Dimick survey; and a letter written by the pioneer settler, Elihu Bowerman, in 1848, which first came to my attention some fifteen years ago, that formed the basis for my story about the Bowermans in “Kennebec Yesterdays”.

High praise is due to Mrs. Gladys Duren and her contributing writers for the booklet of 46 pages entitled: “175th Anniversary and History of the Town of Fairfield”.

Several times on this program I have expressed regret that there are preserved so few historical records of that town, and indeed Mrs. Duren had very little to work with. There is not even preserved anywhere in the community a complete file of the long lived newspaper, the Fairfield Journal.

Despite the paucity of printed or even written information, Mrs. Duren has been able to assemble a chronological list of important local events from 1771 to 1963. It is not a narrative history nor does it pretend to be complete. But it is a worthy and important historical record.

An important accompaniment to Mrs. Duren’s history was the display of charts and maps set up in the Town Council Room at the Fairfield Municipal Building. The property of Ray Tobey, this collection contains highly important information about the Town of Fairfield. For instance, one chart shows the location of the town’s one-time ten schoolhouses. Mr. Tobey is perhaps the one Fairfield resident who has the largest fund of accurate and carefully classified information, especially in pictorial form, about the history of the town. Whenever I want to know where was located some long since forgotten bUilding or highway in Fairfield, I first ask Ray Tobey.

If you want to know what Fairfield Village looked like nearly 100 years ago, just examine the scenic map that forms the cover of Mrs. Duren’s book. It shows the old trotting park off West Street, near the present site of the new Lawrence High School. The park at the corner of High Street and Lawrence Avenue appears much as it does now, except that it had no fountain, but in its place a tall flagpole.

Just south of Railroad Street, on a spur track of the Maine Central, is shown a big factory with a tall chimney. On the whole stretch of High Street from Railroad Street south to the junction with Main Street there are shown only half a dozen buildings, all homesteads. The Lawrence High School on High Street had not yet been built, nor even the older school farther south off High Street.

When this map drawing was made~ the three bridges at Fairfield Village were of different structure. The one between the village and the big island was a comparatively new open bridge. Both of the other bridges — the one between the two islands, and the one between Bunker Island and the Benton shore — were still covered bridges of the original type that had first spanned the river, though of course those two remaining covered structures were not themselves the original bridges on the sites, because flood waters had destroyed several of those spans during the years. Only a few yards upstream from the open bridge was another open bridge to the big island. The woolen mill had not yet been built, but there were more than twenty houses already erected there. Across Main Street from the foot of Western Avenue there was a third access to the island, a footbridge.

Two structures on the cover map are easily identified: the Methodist Church on one corner of Western Avenue and Main Street, and the old schoolhouse on the opposite corner, now converted into shops and apartments. Only two houses are shown on Bunker Island, one on the right, the other on the left side of the road.

On the Kendalls Mills shore the big sawmills south of the bridge are clearly shown. Of course neither the Gerald Hotel nor the Opera House had then been erected.

There will always be cynics to ask, “What do we care about the history of our Maine towns? It is the present and the future that concern us. Let the dead past bury its dead.” But there is another opinion, and fortunately many people take it. Throughout the long existence of the human race on this planet, people have been concerned about whence they came as well as whither they were going, and in that concern they have become conscious of the debt we owe to the men and women who preceded us. Out of the past the present has come, and a knowledge of that past may indeed help us to shape the future of our Maine communities.

Year: 1963