Radio Script #697

Little Talks on Common Things

September 25, 1966

I want to tell you today about 26 Maine cats that made newspaper publicity thirty years ago. The old roadway of Route 1, before the building of the Sullivan Bridge, used to pass through the town of Franklin between Ellsworth and Cherryfield. It is a village well known to several Waterville families. Arthur Stetson was for a time the high school principal there. The late Arthur Tracey frequently visited his relatives in Franklin.

In that town in the 1930’s there was one of the most fantastic homesteads in all New England. Folks called it “old man Austin’s dream castle”. Two and a half stories high, the upper part shingled, the lower part made of fieldstone, the building was topped with a huge stone tower. At one end of the house extended an enormous barn.

In 1937 the place was dilapidated almost to a shambles. Its moss-grown tower, the red marble pillars, the stained glass windows, were all dirty; the iron grillwork was coated with rust; and the blank windows proclaimed emptiness within. Yet the house was not deserted. Inside lived two elderly women and their 26 cats. They were the unmarried daughters of the builder. In 1937 Miss Alitia was 67 years old, Miss Neva was 60. Their father, Theodore Austin, was a retired and wealthy New York jeweler when he came to Franklin in the 1880’s. He came to investigate rumors of rich deposits of gold, silver and copper supposed to run in a thick vein through some 5,000 acres of field and woods in Franklin. He sank many shafts and dug many pits. Because at first the ore seemed promising, Austin bought the whole great tract of land and set about to build his dream castle. He put up a forty-room house, the like of which that part of Maine had never seen. In size and grandeur it surpassed the famous Black mansion at Ellsworth. He spent more than $200,000 on the building.

Curiously enough. the house was never completely finished. All the rooms were lathed, but only a few were ever plastered. In one room were stacked more than a hundred barrels and crates, all stenciled with the name Austin. Not one had ever been opened. For more than fifty years a dozen carloads of furniture, oil paintings, statuary, glassware, china and expensively bound books were never removed from their wrappings.

The mines finally came to nothing. The ore was too low grade to yield financial returns. Then Theodore Austin died. Instead of selling the place and returning to New York, his two daughters decided to stay in the mansion. They had plenty of money, with stocks and bonds and jewels safely in the vault at the Ellsworth bank, but they gave up all the elements of luxurious living, confining themselves to one room and a kitchen, letting the rest of the house slowly go to ruin. They were not complete recluses. They sometimes had workmen come in. They made regular trips to the bank and to the food market. But they were wary about visitors, and it was a rare occasion when a reporter got inside the place. Yet some of them did, and the sisters freely talked with the few they allowed to enter. They made no attempt to hide things, talked volubly about the old days when their father was alive and proudly showed off their cats.

No intruder could ever surprise those sisters. They kept constant vigil. Only one of them slept at a time, the other was always awake and alert. One reporter who was allowed inside insisted that the sisters were not queer at all when one talked to them. Their actions only seemed to make them appear queer. He said: “I found them bright, cheerful, intelligent women, well read and up to date on world affairs, and exceptionally entertaining conversationalists. As we talked, a big wagon came down the road loaded with wood. Miss Neva remarked, ‘That’s our stove wood; we burn lots of it. Just look down cellar.’ I did, and there was wood piled neatly from floor to roof in long, ranging tiers. I remarked that it was indeed a lot of wood. Why did they need more? ‘Oh’, said Miss Neva, ‘we always keep at least thirty cords on hand in case of emergency’.”

But it was their cats that the sisters liked best to talk about. “Oh, yes”, said Miss Neva, “we have a few cats around the place. Not so many as we used to have. Cats come and go in cycles, like a Democratic landslide. We had 54 at one time, but most of them are gone now.”

One of the cats was named Louie-Auburn. Miss Alitia explained that the cat was born the day of the Lewiston-Auburn fire, so naturally they called him Louie-Auburn. Another was named Frankie for President Roosevelt. With some humor they called another “Old Man Depression”. In 1937, as near as they could tell, there were still 26 cats on the place.

Now both sisters have long been dead and the old mansion is no more. What happened to all the barrels and crates I cannot tell you. I’m sorry that I do not know even what happened to the cats.

During all the years of this program I have mentioned only incidentally one of the oldest settlements on the Kennebec, what is now the city of Gardiner. It is time I told you more about that place.

I am sure many of you know that it all began with Dr. Sylvester Gardiner, clerk and most prominent incorporator of what was called the New Plymouth Company, whose legal title was The Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase. After three men bought the whole vast tract, 15 miles on each side of the Kennebec from the Old Plymouth Colony in 1661, the repeated Indian wars had made settlement nearly impossible for nearly a hundred years. When in 1749 Sylvester Gardiner and his associates bought the big tract from the heirs of the purchasers of 1661, settlement was not yet safe. The French and Indian War was on and the French had many Indian allies who were only too eager to raid white settlements. Only after Gov. Shirley agreed to the building of Fort Western and Fort Halifax, in addition to Fort Richmond at Pownal borough, was there secure protection for settlers above Merrymeeting Bay.

It is probable that Sylvester Gardiner had his choice of the lands that were distributed among the many shareholders in the Kennebec Purchase, and he chose a tract that included the outlet of the Cobbossee Stream into the Kennebec. There he erected two sawmills, a grist mill, a fulling mill, wharves, stores, and several dwellings. He also cleared an extensive farm. Dr. Gardiner was an indefatigable promoter of settlement. In 1760 he brought up from Falmouth a number of skilled millwrights and carpenters, who built not only his mills and stores, but also the inn and meeting hall that was known as the Great House. Settlers up the river as far as Norridgewock came in canoes to bring their grain for grinding at Gardiner’s mill.

The American Revolution brought an abrupt end to Dr. Gardiner’s personal development of the place. He was an ardent Tory, who considered Sam Adams and John Hancock as traitors. He fled to England and his Kennebec property was confiscated by the victorious Revolutionists. Eventually, after many legal complications, it was restored to the family. The principal heir was the son of the doctor’s daughter Hannah, wife of Benjamin Hallowell. The doctor’s will bequeathed his Gardiner properties to that grandson, Robert Hallowell, provided the young man’s name should be legally changed to Robert Hallowell Gardiner.

Young Gardiner took over the property in 1803. Between 1750 and 1800 settlers on the land had included not only those who held deeds from the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase, but many squatters who held no deeds at all, but who had actually cleared land and improved it into productive farms. Robert H. Gardiner found a total of 86 squatter families on his lands, and decided to treat them well. He offered to buy back the land, paying for any improvements made, or to give them a chance to pay him for a warranted title, granting a reduction because of improvements, and taking a mortgage to guarantee payment. He called a meeting at Litchfield on August 11, 1803, to lay his offer before the squatters. A number of the latter wanted no dealings with any proprietor. On the principle that “finders is keepers” and that “possession is nine points of law”, they wanted to fight it out.

Although Gardiner came to terms with the squatters in Litchfield and in other parts of the tract, it was not so on the eastern part of his lands that now lie in the town of Windsor. That part was then called Malta, and the uprising of Gardiner’s settlers was known as the Malta War. With whatever crude arms they could collect, a band of squatters marched on Augusta. But at last it all ended peacefully and the Malta squatters too signed agreements with Robert Gardiner.

To the mills started by his grandfather, Robert Gardiner added a paper mill in 1806. The lumber mills increased in number and in size. Factories were set up to make furniture, broom handles, sashes and blinds. Timber was indeed the basis of the town’s economy during the first quarter of the 19th century. Then came the era of of Kennebec ship building, of which Gardiner had its share. When shipbuilding faded, it was replaced by the booming ice industry. Millions of tons of Kennebec ice went in the holds of ships to the West Indies and South America, to Calcutta and Singapore.

It is said that the first load of ice left Gardiner in 1820 in a brig owned by William Bradstreet. It was an uncle of R.H. Gardiner, Frederick Tudor, who built up the first large scale business in ice. Both banks of the river from Richmond to Augusta were lined with tremendous ice houses. In the winter, when the industry was at its peak, 25,000 men and 2,000 horses were employed in harvesting ice.

The first prominent settlement above Merrymeeting Bay was not at Gardiner, but a bit down the river at Pownalborough, what is now Dresden. On the east side of the river on the former site of Fort Richmond was the still standing Pownalborough Court House, and on Swan Island in the middle of the river were several houses and a store. On the east side, near the Court House, was the Episcopal Church, the first meeting house built above Merrymeeting Bay.

By 1875 Gardiner had far eclipsed Pownal borough in size and prominence. Gardiner gave to the nation two prominent literary figures, Laura E. Richards and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Mrs. Richards was the daughter of Julia Ward Howe, author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and like her mother wrote many books and magazine stories. Robinson, one of America’s greatest poets, lived most of his boyhood and young manhood in Gardiner.

Waterville has several interesting conections with Gardiner. One of those connections concerns Colby College. In 1815 there was deeded to the Trustees of the Maine Theological Institution a plot of land in Waterville that became the old Colby campus on College Avenue. That deed was signed by Robert Hallowell Gardiner.

Year: 1966