Radio Script #624

Little Talks on Common Things

October 18, 1964

Let us first today have a few more items from the brief diary of Charles K. Mathews, the Waterville bookseller of a century and a quarter ago. Flour was high priced in 1854. On February 11 Mathews paid $9.50 for a barrel of it. A year later in March 1855, it was even higher, costing Mathews $12.50 a barrel. If flour was high. the same could not be said for medical service. Mathews says that on April 25, 1855 he paid Dr. Bates of Kendalls Mills “$11 for six visits made to my house during Florence’s sickness.”

Though the old time doctors were poorly paid. they had plenty to do. Mathews tells us that in May, 1854 two Frenchmen at the Head of the Falls had been treated by Dr. Babb for cholera. and in August a woman in the same locality was stricken with cholera about noon and died the same night.

In March, 1857 tragedy struck Charles Mathews’ own family. The diary says: “Our dear son George was taken sick with scarlet fever. We did not think he was dangerously ill until four days later, when his glands began to swell and we became alarmed. He continued to grow worse until croup set in, causing his death.”

Business men a hundred years ago often made small loans or signed someone’s note. On March 8, 1854 Mathews recorded: “I paid Solyman Heath $4, it being the cost on Tuck’s note. I have learned that Tuck has gone to California.” A month later Mathews wrote: “I have enclosed in a letter to California directed to Philander Soule a note given by Samuel Benson for $164, now running to Kimball and Mathews, dated March 24. 1839; and another note given on Nov. 14, 1838 by Samuel Benson, running to John Mathews. These may be hard to collect.”

In January, 1857 Charles Mathews’ father John and his mother came, as Charles put it, “to my home to board”.

Among things that were cheap in the middle of the 19th century was rent. On July 15, 1862, when the Civil War had been waged for more than a year, Mathews wrote: “Millett commenced renting my store at $5 a month.” March 8, 1864 – “T. Atherton commenced renting house at $50 a year.” April 29 – “Friedman has rented my store at $60 a year.”

Just as cheap as rent were wages. In November, 1860 Martha Shaw was working as a hired girl in Charles Mathews’ family for $1.50 a week. Four years earlier Mathews had taken Collins Eaton as a hired man at $75 a year and his meals. It was in 1872 that Mathews recorded his cheapest deal for help: “Harry Getchell commenced work for me at $25 a year.”

Business had other hazards besides bad debts and signed notes. “Nov. 2, 1869 – Some 15 to 25 do 11 ars taken from my safe.” A week later Mathews lost another $30, but he happily recorded that the culprit was apprehended. If the winter of 1854 was cold, the summer of 1870 was abnormally hot. Here is Mathews’ entry for July 25: “Thermometer at 100 — the warmest day within the remembrance of the oldest citizens.”

Prominent people were already taking summer vacations a hundred years ago. In 1869 Charles Mathews set down this comment: “My wife and myself started for Moosehead Lake on August 19 and returned August 25.”

When I wrote “Kennebec Yesterdays” I included in that book the remarkable story of the Forbes family — how a woman was left alone in wilderness near Moosehead Lake with several young children, while her husband plunged toward the Kennebec settlements — how that woman miraculously survived after nearly a month without food. I got the story from an old book published in Portland in 1790 a book loaned me by the late Jarvis Thayer of Waterville. The book said that after the rescue Forbes took the surviving members of his family to New Gloucester to be near his friends Mathews and Stinchfield. At that time it did not occur to me to connect that Mathews with any Waterville man, but I now find such to have been the case.

The account also substantiates my previous conviction that Jabez Mathews was not one of the deserters from Arnold’s army, but that he accompanied that army to Quebec and was one of the many American captives when the expedition collapsed. According to the old Portland book Forbes had rescued two of those captives, Col. Mathews and a man named Stinchfield. After the tragic experience of his family in the wilderness, Forbes learned that Mathews and Stinchfield were living in the neighboring towns of Gray and New Gloucester. So Forbes settled in New Gloucester where he lived for the rest of his life. The Mathews whom Forbes had saved from war captivity and who later befriended Forbes at Gray was, of course, the same Col. Jabez Mathews who later came to Waterville with his sons John and Simeon in 1794.

A letter published in last Tuesday’s Sentinel reveals that there are a few people still living who remember the popular druggist, George Dorr, who dispensed drugs and medicines in the recently demolished Phoenix Block near the corner of Main and Temple Streets. Dorr was a Waterville druggist there from 1885 to 1903. His was, of course, the old drug store started by William Dyer in 1850. The prescription records of the old store and some of its account books are still in the hands of Fred Larry, who succeeded to the business after it passed through the hands of several followers of George Dorr.

An old cash book — a mere account of in and out transactions for cash — is one of the Dorr items retained by Fred Larry. In that book Dorr faithfully did what the writer of many a personal diary does: he recorded the weather. When he started the account on January 19, 1885, the thermometer stood at 20 below zero, and it did not rise above the zero level until nearly a week later.

Cash receipts were not big in the Dorr store 80 years ago. On January 19 he took in $45.50; on January 22 only $12.50. His receipts for the entire week were $165.67.

It is surprising to note that, for ten years from 1885 to 1895, Dorr’s biggest day of the week was Monday, not Saturday as we would suppose. Did people then customarily get sick over the weekend and demand Monday medicine?

The cash book, of course, reveals that some of each day’s receipts represented payment for goods previously purchased on credit, not bought on that particular day. Some of the citizens who regularly made payments at the Dorr store were William T. Haines, Warren C. Philbrook, Frank Hubbard, C.H. Nelson (owner of the famous race horse), and George Flood. Other prominent persons whose names appear in the Dorr records were W.H.K. Abbott, superintendent of the Lockwood Mills; F.A. Smith of Hathaway shirts; Fred J. Arnold, Increase Robinson and Nathaniel Meader.

The names of Waterville physicians occur frequently in the Dorr records: Frederick C. Thayer, J.F. Hill, Luther Bunker, P.S. Merrill, Dr. Hardy and Dr. Howard. Colby professors did business with Dorr: Prof. Eld~Y, the chemist; Prof. Rogers, the physicist and Albion Woodbury Small, the president. Dorr had a lot of charges against the college corporation. Although we do not know the items, because the journal in which Dorr must have entered them is lost, we do know they must have been numerous, because the cash book shows substantial receipts from the college: $34.52 in November, 1885; and the larger sum of $210.63 in July, 1886.

Now let us take a look at some of Druggist Dorr’s expenses. During 1885 and 1886 he regularly paid 50 cents to have his floor washed. He loyally advertised in the college publications, paying $5 for an ad in the Colby Echo and $3 for one in the Oracle. That he paid out cash for spruce gum shows that he was buying it, not from a wholesaler, but from folks who gathered it in the woods and brought it in to Dorr’s store.

On one occasion Dorr paid a dollar for a platform to a back window. Does that mean that customers sometimes drove their buggies into Merchant’s Court behind the store and did business through a window, as is now done at the drive-ins of banks? Dorr rented a post office box at 25 cents a quarter, or one dollar a year. He evidently stored a large quantity of kerosene oil, for in February, 1885 he paid $6.63 for a supply of that liquid. Every year Dorr paid a man or boy a dollar to distribute almanacs which, at that time, was a customary medium of advertising for druggists.

I have never known how Waterville’s street sprinkling was paid for. I was quite sure it was not done at taxpayers’ expense, and my conviction was confirmed by George Dorr’s cash book. From late spring until well into the fall Dorr paid 75 cents a month for street sprinkling. This was evidently his share in the expense borne together by all the Main Street merchants.

In 1887 occurs the book’s first reference to electric lights, for which originally there was no metering. Dorr paid regularly $4.80 a month, but the record does not say for how many lamps. In 1888 came another advancement to Waterville when Dorr paid $10 for an ad in the horse cars. His first mention of a telephone was in May, 1901.

When Dorr took over the business in 1885, Christmas had long been celebrated with gifts and festivities. Did Dorr’s business profit by the Christmas season? Only slightly. Unlike the modern drug store, Dorr sold almost nothing except drugs and medicines. He did sell cigars and a few toilet articles had come on the market. But during the week before Christmas, year after year, Dorr’s cash sales increased very little. Compared with the $165 he took in during his first week in the store, his receipts for the following Christmas week were only $186.

During the 18 years that Dorr recorded the weather in his old book, his hottest day was 100, though he had many above 95. His coldest was 34 below zero on January 2, 1899. Was it more usual to have colder weather in Waterville 70 to 80 years ago than it is now in the last half of the 20th century? Dorr’s record makes it certainly seem so. The month of January in 1887 had eleven days below zero; February, 1901 had nine such days. As for snow, Dorr recorded that it fell for four successive days in December, 1901, 20 inches on December 4, five inches on the fifth, 14 inches on the 6th, and 10 inches on the seventh — a total fall of 49 inches — more than four feet.

Well, anyhow, if it was colder in those days, people were dressed for it, and if they did chance to contract a cold, George Dorr had remedies for it.

Year: 1964