Radio Script #910

Little Talks on Common Things

December 5, 1971

A generation of children is now growing up who do not know the thrill of a ride on a railroad train. Most of them know the railroads only as stretches of iron rails over which occasionally passes a long string of freight cars pulled by one or more diesel engines.

As this program keeps reminding us of old time things, and especially as it has so often been concerned with Maine’s narrow gauge two-footers, we must now and then mention the broad gauge passenger trains that were once so common in Maine.

Let me tell you today about one of those broad gauge lines with which I had considerable experience in the early years of this century. It was in those days known as the Rumford branch of the Maine Central, and it was the way I traveled to and from Hebron Academy during my teaching years at that Academy. Our station was three miles from Hebron Village, and transportation from the academy to the station was by a stage line operated by Herbert Glover who held the franchise to carry the mail between the station and the Hebron post office.

Twenty years before my acquaintance with that railroad it had been the Portland and Rumford Falls Railway, incorporated in 1890, to take over already existing lines that connected Rumford with the main line of the Maine

Central between Portland and Lewiston. It had begun as far back as 1847, when the state legislature chartered the Buckfield Railway Company to lay tracks from Mechanic Falls on the Atlantic and St. Lawrence (later called the Grand Road to Trunk) to Buckfield, with plans eventually to extend to Canton. Two years later, in 1849, trains were running between Mechanic Falls an Buckfield. By the way, that year, 1849, saw the first railroad train arrive in Waterville,

On the Androscoggin and Kennebec, which also joined the Atlantic and St. Lawrence at Danville Junction. As a connection with the Atlantic and St. Lawrence, the Buckfield road had the wide, 5 foot, 6 inch gauge that John Poor had insisted on using for his important project that connected Portland with Montreal. In 1857 the little branch was sold to O. J. Smith of Portland, who changed the name to Portland and Oxford Central, and in 1870 the extension to Canton was finally opened. In 1874 a new company took over the line and again changed the name to the Rumford Falls and Buckfield Railroad, but not until 1890 did the road reach Rumford, and when that happened the name was again changed to Portland and Rumford Falls Railway. By that time, the owners intended to connect with the Maine Central as well as with the Grand Trunk, and of course nearly twenty years earlier most Maine roads had been changed to the standard gauge of four feet, eight and a half inches. So in 1893 the line was extended south from Mechanic Falls to connect with the Maine Central at a point west of Lewiston that was at once given the name of Rumford Junction.

Early in this century, in 1902, the Rumford road was extended north of that paper town to reach the Rangeley Lakes at Oquossoc. Previous to that time, the many sportsmen coming from Boston for hunting and fishing in the Rangeley region could not get as far as the lakes by Pullman sleeper. They could take a sleeper to Farmington, where they had to change to the Sandy River narrow gauge to reach Rangeley. They could, however, even on that narrow gauge, occupy the swiveled plush seats of a parlor car, for the Sandy River boasted the only parlor car ever operated on any American two-foot railroad.

My own introduction to the Rumford Branch came in the spring of 1913, when I was a senior at Colby. Principal Sarge’nt of Hebron Academy had invited me to visit the school with a view to joining his teaching staff. On a train over what was called the back road of the Maine Central between Waterville and Portland,the route of the old Androscoggin and Kennebec, I rode from Waterville through Lewiston to Rumford Junction, where I had an hour’s wait for the train out of Portland for Rumford. Passing through Poland and Mechanic Falls, we came to West Minot, where I left the train to take Glover’s mail stage for the three miles to Hebron.

In the summer of 1915, immediately after the close of the academy year, several of us teachers went on a fishing trip to Mooselookmeguntic Lake, going up in a Model T Ford owned by a local merchant. Because I had to be in Boston on a certain day, I did not return to Hebron in the Ford, but took the railroad train at Oquossoc, the only time I ever rode above Rumford on that branch line.

On that June morning 56 years ago, the train ride down from Oquossoc was delightful. We ran through dense spruce forest, past shining lakes and ponds, along sparkling brooks, through open fields filled with daisies and buttercups, then along the west bank of the ever-widening Androscoggin. When we stopped at the Dixfield station, I was reminded that it wasn’t Dixfield at all, but across the rivel in West Peru. The stop at Canton reminded me that this was the home of George Bisbee, father of General Spaulding Bisbee, Maine hero of two World Wars. Then came Buckfield, from the telegraph office in whose little station, John D. Lang, then Secretary of the Navy, had sent the coded cable ordering Admiral Dewey to attack the Spanish Fleet in Manila Bay in the spring of 1898. Such were my varied thoughts as the train went on to Portland .

West Minot station was a busy place at the opening and the closing of each term of Hebron Academy. When school was in session, or during vacation, a buckboard pulled by two horses was ample conveyance for mail, express and passengers. But when the school’s 200 students arrived and departed all at once, conveyance space was sorely taxed. Then Bert Glover would take out every rig at his command, using all of his eight or ten horses and others hired from neighbors. As for the carts and carriages then put to use, they defy proper description. Some of them must have first gone on the road before the Civil War. Many of them had stuffing leaking out of upholstered seats; many had seen no paint for years. Sometimes parts were held together by rope. But I cannot recall that any of them broke down. Somehow they all got through to the train.

Sometimes, when school was in session, Bert Glover guessed wrong about his passenger patronage. Meeting the train with his lone buckboard, he would find enough passengers for two loads. In the early days there was nothing to do except for some of them to wait tediously while Bert carried one load to Hebron and returned for another. By 1915, however, Hebron had telephone service, and if Bert was lucky enough to have one of his son at home, he would phone for the boy to harness another rig and come down for the surplus load. Those were the days of chivalry, and everyone understood the rule of women and children first;,so it was the boys who always had to wait.

In 1920, I rode a long and anxious journey on that Rumford Branch. My wife had gone to Massachusetts to await the arrival of our first child. On the night of February 27, 1920, we had snow followed by rain. In the early morning of the 28th it turned bitter cold, freezing the mixed snow-rain into a solid crust. On that morning I received a telegram saying my wife had gone to the hospital. I had just time to catch the stage to West Minot and board the train for Portland, where I would change to the Boston and Maine. As we left West Minot, it had already begun to snow and a blizzard soon developed. We were an hour late leaving Portland, but our troubles had only begun. Time and again we were held up while crews thawed out switches, and cleared rapidly drifting track. At Portsmouth we were told, “This will be the last train through to Boston tonight, if it does get through.” Instead of reaching Boston at the scheduled time of 2:40 p.m., we arrived just before midnight 16 hours after I had left Hebron.

All the time I had had no word from the hospital, though my parents had promised to send a telegram to the train. I later learned they had done so, but it was never delivered. When I reached my parents’ home in Watertown about 1:00 a.m., I learned that I was father of a healthy son and that his mother was doing well.

Now 1920 was a leap year, and on that tedious train trip I had been hit by the thought that my child might be born on the 29th of February and thus have an official birthday only once in four years . Bur fortunately the boy beat the clock and appeared before midnight of the 28th.

One cannot ride the old Rumford Branch today. Even the rails have been taken up, and freight trains in and out of Rumford go via Livermore Falls. As for that once sparkling Androscoggin, today it is the most polluted of Maine rivers. In summer the odor it emits below Rumford is nauseating. You will hardly believe what the Lewiston Journal had to say about that stretch of water 78 years ago in 1893. The paper said “The Androscoggin water is very soft and pure, suitable for all manufacturing and domestic purposes. It contains a little matter, but that does not mar its healthfulness as drinking water.”

Before we close this broadcast, we have just time enough for a few odd items from the Lewiston Journal of a hundred years ago. Here are some of the things happening in Lewiston in the decade immediately following the Civil War.

“Three young men from Lewiston came home last week after three years in the army. They have been fighting Indians from the station at Fort Laramie.”

“Babies, winter locked for the past four months, are getting into the sun. There was quite a parade of baby carriages last Sunday on Lisbon Street.”

“A young man wearing an immense neckerchief frightened a horse on the bridge yesterday. The wind blew the scarf off the man’s neck and made the horse bolt. The horse was captured, but the scarf went into the river.”

“Ice may not be hot, but some of those Kennebec ice speculators are going to get their fingers burned in their wild scramble to build bigger and bigger ice houses.”

“A condemned lot of liquor was turned into the sewer in Market Square this afternoon. The thirsty looked on in dismay vainly scheming to catch some of the stuff before it reached the river. But they couldn’t do it. Down went 1200 gallons of good liquor.”

And with that story of booze down the drain, we must say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1971