Comment about the narrow guage railroads has stirred up a lot of interest.\u00a0Within ten minutes of the close of the program two weeks ago, Basil Higgins of\u00a0the Maine Central Railroad, who long ago worked on the Sandy River line, called\u00a0to tell me that he believed the Sandy River was once three different roads, and\u00a0this week he called again to confirm the fact and name the roads.<\/p>\n
Mrs. Harriett Holmes of High Street, waterville was the first of several\u00a0persons to tell me about the old two-foot line from Old Orchard to Ocean Park\u00a0and Ferry Beach. Robert Gay of Silver Street thinks that road was broad\u00a0gauge,\u00a0but David Howard of Nash Street supports Mrs. Holmes.\u00a0Perry Morse of Carter’s Flower Shop says there was once an old two-footer\u00a0at Searsport, connecting with the wharves. He thinks it might at one time have\u00a0been two or three miles long.<\/p>\n
Harry Jones, who now lives in <\/em>what was once the East Vassalboro Station of\u00a0the Wiscasset, waterville and Farmington, tells me that the little road suspended\u00a0operation into Winslow in <\/em>1908 or 1909, about the time when the electric road\u00a0was built through from Augusta.<\/p>\n In spite of his present place of residence, Mr. Jones says he is <\/em>more familiar\u00a0with the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes line. He is <\/em>one of half a dozen\u00a0listeners, including Galen Eustis of Mayflower Hill Drive (a native of Strong),\u00a0who support Basil Higgins’ statement that the Sandy River was once three separate\u00a0roads. The original one, called the Sandy River, ran from Farmington to\u00a0Strong. Then there was the Franklin and Megantic from Strong to Kingfield, with\u00a0a later branch all the way to the foot of Mt. Bigelow. The third was called the\u00a0Phillips and Rangeley, with a link to the original road between Phillips and\u00a0Strong. Later a line was built from Dead River Station to Coflin, and Mr. Jones\u00a0says that branch was called the Eustis Railroad.<\/p>\n Mr. Jones adds an important historical touch when he assures me that the\u00a0road bed and culverts on the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington Line were\u00a0originally graded for standard guage, and that the decision to build the narrower\u00a0track was a reversal of early plans.\u00a0Speaking of road beds, they last a long time after the line has been abandoned\u00a0and the rails taken up. Hunters in the Mt. Bigelow region tell me that the\u00a0old road bed of the narrow guage spur out of Bigelow Station still makes a convenient\u00a0and recognizable trail.<\/p>\n How many of you are aware that the old road bed of the Maine Central, along\u00a0the west bank of the Kennebec back of the old Colby campus, is easily recognized\u00a0to this day; yet I think no one now living remembers when trains ran on that road\u00a0bed instead of crossing College Avenue at the south end of the campus.\u00a0F. D. Wood of Clinton sends the information that the railroad from Burnham\u00a0Junction to Belfast was originally planned as narrow guage. Miss Littlefield of\u00a0the Waterville High School faculty tells me that the little Monson road always\u00a0had the local nickname of the peanut bender.<\/p>\n Several Franklin County residents say that the traveler from New Sharon to\u00a0Farmington can still see Where some of the work was done in preparation for the\u00a0intended, but never completed, line from Waterville to Farmington. The grading of embankments for bridge-heads and culverts, and other signs of such preliminary\u00a0work, are still visible.<\/p>\n Who is my authority for the\u00b7 statement that there were once ten of these\u00a0narrow guage roads in Maine? He is Linwood W. Moody, author of a little book\u00a0called “The Edaville Railroad”, the story of Ellis Atwood\u00b7 s reconstruction of\u00a0the narrow guage roads of Maine on his cranberry. bog on Cape Cod. I quote from\u00a0page 3 of Mr. Moody’s book: “The ten two-footers in Maine boasted 212 miles of\u00a0line. They were built and run like big railroads, and were iImnensely vital to\u00a0the loves and lives of the neighborhood. Their smoky smells were just as alluring\u00a0and they could holler just as loud.”<\/p>\n Is Mr. Moody right? Were there once ten of those narrow guage roads in\u00a0Maine? Well, we know there were the Bridgton and Saco River, the S.andy River\u00a0and Rangeley Lakes (originally three separate roads), the Wiscasset, Waterville\u00a0and Farmington, the Kennebec Central, the Monson. That makes seven if we count\u00a0the separate roads that made up the Sandy River. Now we know there was an eighth\u00a0at Old Orchard. What was its name, by the way? And if Perry Morse is right,\u00a0there was a ninth at Searsport. Where was the tenth, or is Mr. Moody wrong in\u00a0his arithmetic?<\/p>\n When I attended the funeral last week of Somerset County’s leading woman\u00a0citizen, Helen Louise Coburn, I was struck by the thought, what a long period of\u00a0time only two generations can cover. The time from the birth of Miss Coburn’s\u00a0father to her own death last week encompassed the .entire history of Colby College\u00a0to date. For Miss Coburn’s father was born in 1817, the year before classes were\u00a0first held at the Waterville College. There had been only eleven graduations\u00a0when he entered the college in 1835, and it was 72 years ago when Miss Coburn\u00a0herself received a Colby diploma. She was four years old when her:\u00b7 father served\u00b7\u00a0in the thirty-first Congress during the first administration of Abraham Lincoln.<\/p>\n Only twice previously in my life have I been reminded of the long expanse\u00a0of time a few generations can sometimes cover. In my early teaching days at\u00a0Hebron Academy I became a close friend of an aged lady, Miss Carrie Tripp. She\u00a0remembered well her grandfather, Elder John Tripp, who had come to Hebron from\u00a0Massachusetts in 1799, and who lived to be a very old man. Elder John Tripp had\u00a0once shaken hands with George Washington. It may seem a very trivial thing to\u00a0you, but it has always made an impression upon me that I knew well a person who\u00a0had frequently talked with one who had shaken the hand of WaShington.<\/p>\n My second incident of this sort occurred here in Central Maine. For many\u00a0years I had known that fine old gentleman, Horatio Adams, who remembered as a boywatching his father make on the kitchen stove America’s first chewing gum. Surely\u00a0all the old timers have not forgotten Adams I Gum. After several years of cherished\u00a0acquaintance with Mr. Adams, I came to know his charming wife. One day she\u00a0told me this incident. When She was a little girl of ten She was visiting in\u00a0the home of her g:tTaridmother on Long Island, and the grandmother told her how,\u00a0when She herself was a child of six, Aaron Burr, hiding from public wrath after\u00a0the duel with Hamil ton, took refuge in her parents’ home, the very house where\u00a0grandmother was now telling the story to granddaughter. So here again\u00b7 I was\u00a0talking with one who had talked with 9- person who had seen the men of prominence\u00a0in the founding of our nation.<\/p>\n Yesterday was the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, born 140 years ago, in a one room\u00a0cabin on the Sinking Spring Farm, four miles from what is now the village\u00a0of Hodgeville, Kentucky. It was a scorching July day in 1939 when I visited that\u00a0spot, now a great national memorial. High on a hill, which one mounts by a hundred\u00a0granite steps, stands a beautiful marble edifice within which is enclosed\u00a0the one-room cabin of the pioneer.<\/p>\n To this cabin, on the day following Lincoln’s birth, came nine-year old\u00a0Dennis Hanks with his aunt Betsy Sparrow. Telling of the incident years later\u00a0to Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, Dennis Hanks said: “Nancy let me hold\u00a0him, and she said, ‘Be keerful of him, Dennis, fur you air the fust boy he’s ever\u00a0seen!’ I swang him back and forth and he begun to yell bloody murder. So I says\u00a0to Aunt Betsy, ‘You take him. He’ll never amount to much.’ It\u00a0Even to nine-year old Dennis Hanks a baby was a common thing. There were\u00a0lots of them in the cabin homes of the Kentucky frontier. But prophecy is\u00a0always dangerous, and Dennis was far from the truth when he predicted that\u00a0little Abe wouldn’ t amount to much.<\/p>\n We live at a time When environment counts for a lot, or at least is believed\u00a0to count for a lot. With the writer of the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” we\u00a0like to believe that<\/p>\n “Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid<\/p>\n Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;<\/p>\n Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed,<\/p>\n Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n How does the poet explain it? “Their lot forbade”, he says. The environment kept these geniuses from having a chance.<\/p>\n According to that theory, if a child has a drunken father and a slovenly mother, don I t expect the child to grow up to amount to anything. And we know, alas, that there is much truth in the theory. If a child comes from a home of poverty, in these days of plenty and social security, don’t expect anything to come of him.<\/p>\n Now the career of Abraham Lincoln is a constant rebuke to that theory. Environment would have made him anything except a great statesman and our most loved President. He might easily have spent his life flat-boating on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. He might perhaps ,have been just a wrestling, storytelling, rail-splitting day laborer of the Sangamon Valley. But he didn’t spend his life that way. He became a reader of books, an eager listener to the talk of men of affairs, he became fired with ambition to rise above the level of the Carey Grove gang, whose leader he had twice out-wrestled. Not in the environment around him, but in the spirit within himself lies the explanation of Abraham Lincoln’s rise to fame. “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?”, scoffed the scribes and the Pharisees. Men talked the same way in 1860. Could a President of the united States come out of the uncultured prairies? Impossible! You can’t get blood from a turnip.<\/p>\n But Abraham Lincoln was elected President. The boy who never attended school so much as a whole year in his life-time, the boy whom the church influenced scarcely at all, the boy who oo.uldn It find out the name of his own maternal grandfather, the boy who, growing to be a young man, found retail trade a road to bankruptcy and his post office the brim of his own hat — that was the boy who led a nation through a great fratricidal war, the boy who was to say in 1865, “With malice toward none, ‘with charity for all”. One of the most misunderstood and most wrongfully condemned of persons is the stepmother. Fiction likes to picture her as the cruel, ruthless persecutor of her husband’s children. But that kind of fiction is often most untrue to fact.<\/p>\n Such was the case with Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps the crucial turning point in his life was the day when Thomas Lincoln brought his new wife, Sarah Bush Johnson, into the boy’s third cabin home on the Indiana prairie. A year had passed since that mournful day when he and Dennis Hanks had shaped wooden pegs with which his father fastened together the rough planks that made the crude coffin in which they carried Nancy Hanks Lincoln to her grave.<\/p>\n For a whole year Sister. Sarah, now only twelve years old, had cooked the meals and done what housekeeping she could. Then came the stepmother — a woman of sympathetic understanding, strong mind and good sense. Long afterward she told Herndon: “Such a mess I never saw before. That cabin was filthy. I washed and dressed up those children so they looked more human, and I kept after Tom until he made bedsteads, a proper table, better stools and two’ hickory chairs.”<\/p>\n It was this stepmother who encouraged Lincoln’s reading, who protected him from his father’s taunts about his physical laziness, who saw that he came to the notice of men like James Gentry, the squire of Gentryville. Al though Lincoln never saw his father again, after he became a Springfield lawyer, he kept in close touch with his stepmother. He protected her small inheritance from the schemes of her own son; he frequently sent her money; he often spoke of her with deep appreciation. She lived to see h\u00b1m President and suffered the agonizing news of his assassination. And at the last she said, “Abe was a good boy and a good man. He seemed closer to me than my own children.”<\/p>\n Yes, when we are inclined to speak ill of stepmothers, let us remember Sarah Bush Lincoln, the woman who did more than any other person to change a motherless, Shiftless boy, seemingly destined for an eventless life on the frontier, into a great man, a great statesman, the savior of his nation.<\/p>\n Year: 1949<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Read the script for “Little Talks” program #14, broadcast on February 13, 1949<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[741,35314],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6988"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6988\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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