Radio Script #666

Little Talks on Common Things

November 14, 1965

On this program I have had a lot to say about college life and college expenses in the nineteenth century. I hope therefore you will bear with me while I say something about a certain college phenomenon today. I refer to student demonstrations and student riots, such as have occurred at the University of California and other colleges. Many students today assume it as an American right that they can dictate the content and the procedure of their own higher education. It is time that somebody set them right.

The student’s assumption that his or his Dad’s money is running the place and he should therefore be the one to decide what he gets for the money simply is not true.

Only a fraction of the cost of putting a student through college is borne by him and his family, large as that fraction has now become. Endowments, gifts from foundations and individuals, and other sources besides the student’s family account for much of the the cost for every student in a private college, while the taxpayers carry the major expense in the public universities. In addition many students benefit from scholarships donated through the years by generous benefactors.

The notion that the student is paying for his education is in any event the old shopworn argument that the customer is always right. Before students get around to deciding for themselves what will constitute their education, let them be reminded of a few pertinent facts. When a student becomes a candidate for a degree, he voluntarily submits himself to requirements which by law lie at the discretion of the faculty. Granting of the degree certifies that the student has met those requirements, not some that he has himself set up. Clearly the college has the firm duty to establish the terms of the contract under which its degrees will be conferred. It sets forth these terms in its catalog. There the applying student can read them for himself. If he does not like the contract that the college offers, nobody requires that he sign it. He is quite free to make a different contract with any other college. Society does not demand he go to college at all. He is quite free to enter some other activity. But once he has committed himself, once he has entered a particular college, he is not free to violate the contract he has made.

All of this seems to me simple American justice, plain fact of life. But, then, I am an old man, I fear too old for demonstrations and riots.

Now I want to tell you a story of old-time Maine that I think has never been in print, though it was long circulated by word of mouth up in the little village where is located a well known preparatory school, Higgins Classical Institute. Up there in Charleston they tell the story that in the 1830’s a certain Captain Thomas Bunker retired from the sea and settled with his sons on a farm in that town. But the father kept having such an itch for the sea that in 1839 the sons agreed to build the old man a ship if he would get out and let them have the farm. It apparently did not occur to the younger men that Charleston, many miles from the navigable waters of the Penobscot below the Bangor dam was hardly the place to build a ship. But build it they did. Then they faced the problem of how to get it to Bangor. The Charleston folk built a big cradle, fastened to it axles and wheels, the latter made from sections of huge maple logs. The whole community turned out for the job of moving the vessel. They assembled a hundred oxen and got the craft under way. The first day they made only three miles, because they had to stop and rebuild every bridge that their heavy load collapsed.

Before the procession reached Kenduskeag, that town was ready. Its authorities declared that their bridge was not going to be busted by any such tom-foolery from Charleston. When the ship on its big cradle reached the Kenduskeag bridge, a deputy sheriff was there to greet it. It was not long before, accidentally on purpose, something fell from the vessel that frightened the sheriff’s horse so that he ran away, carrying the officer with him. In the excitement the Charleston crowd urged oxen and ship across the bridge. and it was their good luck that the bridge held. The rest of the trip to Bangor was made without incident. As late as the 1880’s people who lived in the region could still point out deep ruts that had been made when Captain Bunker’s ship moved the 25 miles on land from Charleston to Bangor.

I recently ran across an old program that is curious for several reasons. I knew, of course, that the 200th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims was properly observed in 1820, that the 250th was recognized in 1870, and that a great celebration occurred on the 300th anniversary in 1920. What I did not know was that, through the early years of the 19th century not a year went by that did not see anniversary recognition of the landing at Plymouth. Such recognition was indeed paid in Norridgewock, Maine in 1849, and that is the printed program to which I refer.

In 1849 Norridgewock was a prominent town, the county seat of Somerset County and larger than Skowhegan. It was in Norridgewock Congregational Church that there was held on December 21, 1849 a service commemorating what the program designated as “the 229th anniversary of the Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock”. That event was a religious service with an address by a prominent Congregationalist, the Reverend George Shepard.

The Norridgewock observance was held on December 21 because that was the exact anniversary date. The landing on Plymouth Rock had taken place on December 21, 1620. But in such an observance lies the second curious fact that occurred to me. In 1849 December 21st fell on a Sunday, and what would one now suppose was observed then? Why, of course, one would have expected a recognition of Christmas Sunday. On that day, in this middle of the 20th century, every Christian church in the world proclaims the advent, the Savior’s birth.

But we should not be surprised that in 1849 recognition of Christmas gave way to observance of the Pilgrim anniversary. As I have more than once pointed out on this program, it was well into the 1850’s before Christmas was observed at all in Central Maine. The old Puritan objection to all festal occasions had caused them to reject all observance of Christmas Day, and that attitude had a long hang-over -far into the 19th century. Probably no one in Norridgewock paid any attention to Christmas in 1849. Everyone was quite willing to let Christmas Sunday be devoted to the Pilgrims.

Speaking of the Pilgrims, I have often been asked about the trading post they established on the Kennebec. I have referred to it a few times on this program, but I have never given a full account of it.

The voyage of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, and supplies brought with them, were financed by a loan from a group of merchants in London, on consideration that for seven years the lenders would receive one-half of all profits made by the Pilgrims in fishing and in trade with the natives. Far from being able to send any profits to London during the whole year of 1621, the Pilgrims had to increase their loans. But in the next year shallops built by the colony’s carpenter sailed down the Maine coast with the intent of developing Indian trade. Furs, especially beaver, were in strong demand in England, where beaver hats for men had come very much into fashion. The trade developed slowly until the autumn of 1625, when a Pilgrim shallop loaded with corn sailed past Seguin Island, up the river and across Merrymeeting Bay, past Swan Island opposite the present village of Richmond, and stopped only when they reached the rips at the head of tide, the present Augusta. There, just below the first rapids, they were received by friendly Indians and exchanged their corn for beaver furs.

Remembering that it was the Plymouth Indians who taught the Pilgrims how to fertilize their corn hills with fish and that those Indians were already settled agriculturists, we may well ask what the Indians wanted of any Pilgrim corn. The answer is that the Indians of the Kennebec Valley were quite different from those of Cape Cod. When the white man settled in New England the Abnakis of Maine had not progressed beyond the nomad stage of hunters and fishers. It was the French priests like Father Rasle who taught the Abnakis to raise crops, not the other way around.

So, when the Pilgrims set up their trading post at Augusta, their corn was a good commodity to trade for fur.

In 1628 the Council for New England, the London body that controlled the terms of settlement, granted to the Pilgrims a patent for a large portion of the coast around the mouth of the Kennebec and up the river on both sides. Soon the Plymouth Colony had almost a monopoly on the Kennebec fur trade. They expanded their trading interests into other parts of New England, gained control of the trade around Buzzards and Narragansett Bays, until in the seven years from 1631 to 1638 they netted more than t 10,000.

How long did the Pilgrim trading post on the Kennebec last? The truth is that it was short-lived. It fell to the French in 1633, and thereafter commerce with the Indians played a small part in the Pilgrim economy. Nevertheless the colony owed its financial independence to those few prosperous years of trade with the natives. In 1633,the very year when they had to give up the post at Augusta, the Pilgrims ended their debt to the London merchants, and since 1625 almost every payment made on that debt had been in the form of furs acquired from the Indian hunters.

About our Kennebec Indians and their prominence in the colonial fur trade a very recent book, Alden Vaughan’s “New England Frontier”, had this to say: “The northernmost tribe of New England. Indians was the Abnakis, inhabiting western Maine, especially the valleys of the Saco, the Androscoggin and the Kennebec. In many respects they were unlike the other tribes, for their northern location forced the Abnakis to be hunters rather than farmers. Their access to furs. on the other hand, made them more commercially oriented, and their proximity to Canada made them pawns in the long struggle between the Catholic French and Protestant English.”

Well, little as it is, that’s about all I know concerning early fur trade on the Kennebec.

Year: 1965