Radio Script #619

Little Talks on Common Things

September 13, 1964

Here we are again after the winter we enjoyed or failed to enjoy during July and August. Mark Twain once said: “Maine has two seasons, winter and the Fourth of July.” That pretty well describes Maine’s 1964 summer. But, despite all our complaints, we Maine people enjoyed our weather much more than folks relished the torrid heat in other parts of the nation. I assure you 1964 was not the coldest summer Maine ever had. No one now living, of course, remembers the Year of No Summer, 1816, when there was frost every month of the year and two snowstorms in July.

Again we are grateful to the Keyes Fibre Company for their continued sponsorship of this program. Faithfully they have stood by it since the first broadcast in 1948, though there is no evidence that it has ever brought them a dollar of business. Unlike most radio sponsorships, this one is not advertising, but is rather produced by WTVL, under Keyes sponsorship, as a public service. It is the sort of thing that shows the regard of a great company for the community in which it operates.

A lot of water has run down the Kennebec since this program first went on the air in the fall of 1948. and what a host of old-time things we have talked about!

Some of them have had historical importance for cities and towns in Maine, as well as for the whole state. The first highways, the development of Kennebec River traffic, the coming of the railroads, the first roads and streets, the early industries, the old covered bridges and their tolls have had true historical place on this program. But along with important things, we have mentioned hundreds of trivial items, quite insignificant of themselves, but in the aggregate giving us a comprehensive picture of how people lived and spoke and thought in the days of long ago.

Just to show the range of those little things that have been heard on Little Talks, let us select a single item from many possibilities, one for each letter of the alphabet. It’s a pity I haven’t at some time mentioned Xerxes, or X-rays, or Xerox, or something else beginning with X, because I can’t find a single X in my list. But all other 25 letters are bountifully represented.

So we have talked about almanacs, high-wheeled bicycles, cattle pounds, drug prescriptions, and epitaphs on tombstones; about floods and grasshoppers, horse collars and ice harvest, junk yards and kitchens, livery stables, mason jars, nails, and old folks concerts. We have said something about peddlers, quack doctors, reservoirs, snow rollers, three-dollar bills, upsetting an axe, vaccinations, watchmen, yarn balls and zinc mines.

Another way to show the extent of our coverage in social history, especially of the Kennebec Valley, is to sample the places and persons we have mentioned. Take names beginning with the letter S alone. We have talked about Saco and Searsport; Sebasticook and Sheepscot; Sidney, Skowhegan and Solon; Stoneham, Sugar loaf, Swan Island and Swanville. We have told about luther Severance and Samuel Francis Smith, about Sophie May and William Sullivan; about half a dozen Stackpoles and a dozen Smiths besides Samuel Francis, not to mention a number of Simpsons, Shores, Shoreys and Stones.

I am often asked if the sources for this program are not running dry. Far from it; they keep flowing in as from a spring-fed brook. Actually my unused material is more abundant than it was five years ago. During this summer, while the program was off the air, more than 100 new items came to my attention. let me name a few of these new items that will appear on this year’s program of little Talks.

There is the diary of a Winslow woman written in 1845, revealing something of the life of a longboat riverman and his family. A curious item is a book about a deceased child, written in 1851 by the child’s mother and published at family expense.

What makes this of local interest is that the child’s father was the clergyman founder of one of Waterville’s earliest churches.

Last year’s account of George Flood’s diaries will have a brief sequel this year, as we turn to a much shorter diary kept by his brother, Charles Flood, father of our late distinguished woman citizen, Miss Exerene Flood.

Did you know that, in the middle of the 19th century, Colby College had financial interest in a lot of Waterville real estate, that in fact it once owned the Elmwood Hotel? Some new information has thus come to light about how, even a hundred years ago, the college helped in the growth of the town, as the town helped in the growth of the college.

Then there are some letters by and about a young Oakland man who went to the gold fields of California in 1849 and there lost his life.

Some of you will remember our broadcasts more than 10 years ago about Waterville’s first murder. I later published the story in Kennebec Yesterdays. It is time we gave a full account of the family of which that murdered Ed Mathews was a member, because it was among the most prominent of Waterville’s early families and has distinguished descendants today.

We shall have another murder story for you this year, a crime committed in the sparsely settled town of Shirley, near Moosehead Lake, more than 60 years ago. You will be interested to learn what a miscarriage of justice that trial turned out to be and how a famous Kennebec man finally won freedom for the convicted man after 22 years in state prison.

Well, those are only a few of the items this program will include during the next 39 weeks. We hope you will enjoy these broadcasts. So here we go with the first item of local history to be presented on our 1964-65 series. I am just conceited enough to have that first item concern the street on which I live. Waterville’s Winter Street. which now runs from Elm through Pleasant to Burleigh. I have long known that Winter Street originally ran only from Elm to Pleasant and that all west of Pleasant, between Gilman Street and Western Avenue, was open field and Hayden Brook gully. But I always like to get repeated confirmation of these historic points, and I was therefore pleased to see this summer the old deeds that concerned what we call the Morrill house, on Winter near the corner of Elm, where recently died the last of three maiden ladies who long lived together in that house: Clara, Lucia and Frances Morrill.

Early in the 19th century Timothy Boutelle owned what was left of the old Lot 104 of the McKechnie survey, extending 40 rods along the Kennebec and a mile back to the First Rangeway. Boutelle’s holdings included the lot on which the First Baptist Church now stands, land of Coburn Classical Institute, the site of St. Francis Church and parsonage, and nearly to the present School Street. Boutelle did not own land of what is now Monument Park. That had already been taken for the town cemetery before Boutelle made his purchase.

About 1848 a big tract of this land, south of the Coburn property and west of Elm Street had been bought by James Pearson. Pearson laid out a street from Elm to Pleasant, got it accepted by the town, had the property surveyed into house lots and proceeded to sell them. It appears that a part of the property that had come into Pearson’s possession had once been a portion of the original academy lot. Anyhow this is what a certain deed by James Pearson conveyed to Theodore Saunders in 1849: “Lots 9, 10 and 11 of the old Academy lot between Elm and Pleasant Streets, lying on the north side of the two rod street, laid out from Elm to Pleasant by said Pearson for the use of lots on each side of the two rod street, according to a plan by Silas Redington, made in October 1848, said lots being the three next west of the land owned by James M. West, and extending north to the lot on which the academy building stands.”

Then in 1851 Saunders sold to William Dyer a portion of those three lots that Saunders had purchased from Pearson. On that deed Winter Street is still referred to as the two rod street, beginning at the west side of the James West property and 90 feet in depth. On that piece of land was built the house later purchased by Llewellyn Morrill, where in recent years lived his daughters, whom we knew as the Morrill sisters.

Now what those two old deeds clearly reveal is that previous to 1848 there was no house on Winter Street, because there was no such street, and that one of the earliest houses on the street must have been the Morrill house. The James West house, referred to in both deeds, was much older, built perhaps as early as 1830. When the West family left it, the house became the property of Coburn, then became the property of St. Francis de Sales parish, and until recently was used for various parish functions. It is now being renovated into offices by Attorney Lester Jolovitz.

Several times this program has mentioned Amos Gerald, the man who built in Fairfield the ornate Gerald Hotel, and the castle like residence in which Martin Keyes later lived, and is now the Lawry funeral home. I have told about Amos Gerald’s promotion of the Waterville and Fairfield electric railroad, about his creation of Bunker Island Park on the Kennebec island at Fairfield, and about his famous Casco Castle at South Freeport. What I have not previously said is that Gerald was responsible for the first electric light plant built in Maine.

In 1886, in association with four other Fairfield men, he built that plant, and it is said to have put electric lights into the first so lighted dwelling in New England, the big mansion of the Connor family in Fairfield. Gerald promoted the building of the Portland and Brunswick Street Railway, the Augusta, Hallowell and Gardiner, the Bangor, Orono and Old Town, the Calais Street Railway, the Lewiston, Brunswick and Bath with its famous Merrymeeting Park, the Waterville and Oakland, and the Skowhegan and Norridgewock.

Another item of historical interest concerning Amos Gerald is that his daughter Helen became the wife of one of Maine’s best known writers, Holman Day.

Year: 1964