What do you know about corn, and I don’t mean radio programs? For one thing, it is generally agreed that the finest sweet corn in the world is grown in Maine. In the world’s markets Maine canned corn is even better known than Maine canned blueberries. Even before the war cans of Maine corn were sometimes seen in such unlikely places as Abyssinia and Madagascar, My Colby classmate, Robert Fernald, is U. S. Consul in Tananarive, Madagascar, and he assures me that Maine corn is not an unusual item among the American goods Which reach that far-away island.<\/p>\n
Now a curious thing about corn is that it has no wild counterpart. Corn is one of the few plants that grows only when cultivated by man. Yet corn, like every other cultivated plant, must at some time have had a wild ancestor, but its discovery has persistently eluded the botanists. Within the past week news has come of What may be a missing link in this quest.<\/p>\n
Two Harvard explorers recently found, in a New Mexico cave, the most primitive corn yet discovered. In a layer of refuse, which geologists say is 4,000 years old, they found cobs, husks and grains of very primitive corn. The ears are tiny, about two inches long, and the kernels appear as irregular, single spots, not in orderly rows.<\/p>\n
Did such corn once exist in a wild state? What difference does it make? Who cares? The answers to those questions reveal your own philosophy of life. If you can see no value in anything that does not have immediate, practical ends, of course you don’t care about the origin of corn. But if you believe that any discovery Which expands human knowledge is in the long run of value to present and future generations, then you do care. The fact is that the final discovery of wild corn, if and When it comes, may answer many questions concerning the prehistoric men who used it, and the more .we know about the long, slow process by which man arose from primitive beginnings to modern civilization, the better we can understand what kind of creature man really is and how his future progress can be best assured.<\/p>\n
Now for the covered bridges. I fear we can’t finish the subject tonight, because we confront quite a search. Listeners have written and telephoned in even larger numbers than they did about the narrow gauge railroads, and, as you might well suspect, the more they send in the more checking we have to do.<\/p>\n
Our best clue as to the number of covered bridges still standing in Maine comes from a listener who has helped us before, Emery Hegarty. He calls our attention to an article in the Lewiston Journal on October 16, 1948 by Harry A. Packard. The article is devoted to the famous artist’s bridge in the town of Newry, said to be the most frequently painted covered bridge in our state. In the article Mr. Packard says there are 37 covered bridges yet standing in Maine, seven of them in Oxford County alone. Unfortunately Mr. Packard does not name the 37 bridges; his article is devoted wholly to one bridge.<\/p>\n
You listeners have responded so helpfully that I wish we could name every one of you who have turned in some information this week. But the list is too long even to give hastily on this program. If I fail to mention your name it is not because I did not notice your communication.<\/p>\n
More than thirty listeners call attention to the covered bridge at Stillwater Village, and Fred Dore of l5i College Avenue has taken the t~e to send me four large hand-written pages by Adelbert M. Lakeman on history and legend connected with the Stillwater bridge. Mr. Lakeman says it is one of only three so-called double barreled bridges still standing in New England. Both of the others are in Vermont.<\/p>\n
There used to be many of those double barreled bridges \u2022 Less than 15 years ago one crossed the Androscoggin at Turner. Most of the covered bridges had width for only one team, and hence were one-way bridges. Some of them were wide enough for teams to pass, but few of them had two actually separate tunnels — a long line of crossed timbers dividing the two sections. That is the way the Stillwater bridge was built more than a century ago, in 1835. During a freshet the very next year it fell into the stream and had to be rebuilt. But since that year, 1836, the bridge has stood — its whole 230 foot length — with only occasional repairs. Originally a toll bridge, it was purchased by the town for $2,000 in 1870, and for nearly 80 years has been free to all travel.<\/p>\n
Why did they ever go to the trouble and expense of the twin tunneled architecture? Why not just a wide bridge? Traffic was not dense enough on most of those bridges for the narrow passages of one-way structures to cause much delay; so the mere desire for two-way traffic could not have been the reason. Mr. Lakeman gives a more plausible explanation. Covered bridges were bad places for collisions, and frisky horses were not so likely to shy at one another with a dividing barrier between them.<\/p>\n
Why did they build covered bridges anyway? That was apparently an easy question, because more than forty listeners have sent in the right answer. It was not to add weight to the structures in times of high water. It wasn’t, as a magazine article once seriously said, to keep the bridge free from drifting snow. In winter they sometimes actually shoveled snow onto the bridge to give sleds traction. The real reason, of course, was to protect the timbers from rotting, and explains why those bridges have so long resisted rain, ice and snow.<\/p>\n
What other covered bridges still stand in Maine? One crosses the Piscataquis River between Dover-Foxcroft and Guilford. It can be seen from the main highway between those towns, though it is on a less traveled road connecting the main highway with the so-called black road — also a tarred surface — from Dexter to Sangerville. Another crosses the Little Black River just before it enters the st. John in Allagash Plantation. This is not far from the more famous Allagash River, the canoeist’s paradise.<\/p>\n
The Artists’ Bridge, to which we have already referred, crosses the Sunday River at Ketchum, a tiny village in the town of Newry. Anyone who ever took the memorable drive from Rumford to Berlin, New Hampshire by way of Upton and Eustis will recall the wonderful scenery both up and down river in the vicinity of that picturesque bridge.<\/p>\n
Another covered bridge connects Maine and New Hampshire across the Ossiskee River at Porter, but I have been unable to learn whether a second bridge still spans the Ossiskee, or whether any of the old covered bridges, once so numerous on the Saco, still stand. I believe the so-called Upper Bridge at Andover still remains. It is a ninety foot structure across the Ellis River, built in 1870, and long a landmark in northern OXford County.<\/p>\n
I was naturally pleased to see in the Lewiston Journal article a picture of the one covered bridge with which I was personally most familiar. It spanned the Saco River at the foot of Walker’s Hill between Bridgton and Fryeburg, but it is now only a memory. It was replaced nearly a quarter century ago by a concrete structure. It was one of the longest covered bridges in western Maine, and it nobly withstood some mighty freshets.<\/p>\n
Now this makes only six named bridges that still stand. To be sure Mr. Lakeman refers to the “ten or a dozen covered bridges left in Maine”, but Mr. Packard must have had good authority for saying there are 37. At any rate, there are surely more than six. Where are they?<\/p>\n
An interesting question we should like to see answered is, where in all the world is the longest covered bridge still standing and in use? I am told there is a covered bridge 1,400 feet long on the Gaspe Peninsula in Canada. Does anybody know a longer one?<\/p>\n
Did you know that in Winslow there were 0nce three covered bridges in sight of each other? What a pity that we had no aerial photographs in the old days, or no. vantage point from which all three could be focused into one picture. Both at the Waterville Public Library and at the Waterville Historical Society are blow-ups of an old picture of which a copy has just reached me from my friend Edgar Brown, former postmaster and for many years secretary of the Waterville Winslow Chamber of Commerce. That picture, taken in 1856, carries the caption:<\/p>\n
“View of Waterville from Sand Hill, Winslow”. It shows two of the covered bridges — the highway bridge, a double-barreled structure where the present steel and concrete bridge cr0sses the Kennebec, and above it the covered railroad bridge. An interesting feature of the old photo is an elevated sign spanning the highway at the foot of Sand Hill. The sign reads: “Rail Road Crossing. Look Out for the Engine When the Bell Rings”.<\/p>\n
The third bridge, not shown in this picture, was the last of the three to survive. Crossing the Sebasticook in Winslow, it came down in 1902. Adelbert Wright of the Maine Central yards tells me he knows the covered bridge at Augusta was standing on July 4, 1896, because on that day he and his brother crossed it to attend Barnum’s circus in the capital city. Mr. Wright has an interesting story about the covered bridge at New Sharon, which went out in the 1897 flood. His sister, who lived about a mile above Rome Corner on the New Sharon road, recalls that her whole family rushed to the door to see what was making such an awful racket one fall evening in 1896. It proved to be one of the first automobiles ever seen in that part of the country. Memory .says not whether it was one of the early factory products, or a home-made vehicle such as the Walker brothers put on the roads of my home town about the same time.<\/p>\n
Next day Mr. Wright’s sister and her family learned what happened after the auto went by their house. It had begun to rain, and the rain froze as it fell. The car made such slow progress that it was nearly mid-night when the passengers reached the New Sharon bridge. They crossedit but found the village hill so icy that the car couldn’t make it. So they backed down under the shelter of the covered bridge and there spent the night out of reach of rain and sleet.<\/p>\n
That’s enough about covered bridges for tonight, but we’ll return to the subject again when we learn where more of them are located. Let us turn now to another subject. Most Waterville people know that Colby College has a Paul Revere bell. One of the last of the big bells that came from the foundry of the man who took the famous ride hangs in the belfry of old South College on the College Avenue campus. The building is the oldest Colby structure, erected in 1822, and the bell adorned it only a few years later. Some day, surely, that historic bell will be heard on Mayflower Hill.<\/p>\n
Mrs. Gertrude Taylor of North Vassalboro says the last church bell made by Paul Revere is now in the belfry of the Congregational Church at Benton Falls. I believe Herbert Jones in his book “Maine Memories” gives an interesting account of the adventures and difficulties encountered in getting that bell to Benton.<\/p>\n
Just one more topic tonight. We are told that nowadays one marriage in every\u00a0four, after a very few years, ends in divorce. Nevertheless, look about you. You will find plenty of families where husband and wife have not only stood each other, but have stood by each other for many years.<\/p>\n
It was my pleasure last week to see on the New York stage Howard Lindsey and Dorothy Stickney in their new production “Life with Mother”, sequel to the more celebrated “Life with Father”. It has the same complicated actions of the six red-headed Days that gave the 6,000 audiences which saw its predecessor so many hearty laughs. Father Day is just as domineering and Mother is just as adept at having her own way with him. But even more than “Life with Father” , this sequel “Life with Mother” impresses an essential, central theme. Here .are two married people who, in spite of differences and in spite of tempers, have maintained a mutual affection which surmounts all difficulties and persists through life.<\/p>\n
Year: 1949<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #22, broadcast on April 10, 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":[741,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7015"}],"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=7015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}