Probably no more bitter quarrels were ever fought out without bloodshed than were the controversies over the early railroads. There were battles over routes, terminals, width of gauge, financial control, and many other matters. The Wiscasset and Quebec, the little narrow gauge that finally ran only as far as Albion, was no exception. Before the route and terminus of that road were settled, the air was blue with name-calling and invective.<\/p>\n
Many years ago an Albion woman, using a government document, the Yearbook of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, as a scrapbook, pasted into it along poem, parodied on Longfellow’s Hiawatha. That poem, printed serially in some Maine newspaper not identified on the clippings, told the story of the controversy over the establishment of the little railroad from Wiscasset to Albion.<\/p>\n
The poem is <\/em>much too long to quote in detail. Suffice it to say that it recounts chiefly a long-fought struggle about extending the little road to Burnham Junction. The verses were apparently written by a Wiscasset man who ardently favored the Burnham terminus and who sings the praises of one Gitchie Atwood and soundly damns the villainy of one he calls Sachem Wilson. He also refers to prophet Crosby. Was that one of the Albion Crosbys? Perhaps some listener knows. Let’s have the few lines in the poem which refer to him:<\/p>\n “Prophet Crosby came among you<\/p>\n With a plan for your salvation,<\/p>\n To complete your road to Burnham,<\/p>\n Have two ends and two connections.<\/p>\n Honor be to prophet Crosby!<\/p>\n He’s your friend and always has been.<\/p>\n If he only had the money,<\/p>\n ‘Nary red of yours he’d call for,<\/p>\n But would straightway build your railroad<\/p>\n Out of love for you, my people.”<\/p>\n Of Sachem Wilson the versifier says:<\/p>\n “Sachem Wilson came among you<\/p>\n With a scheme for your damnation,<\/p>\n And I think it runs in this wise:<\/p>\n If you’ll cough up all the interests,<\/p>\n That you now have in your railroad,<\/p>\n He will build a broad ~age for you;<\/p>\n Build it up the spout or elsewhere.<\/p>\n Give him ninety days, he tells you,<\/p>\n To collect his game and wampum;<\/p>\n Don’t make any further effort<\/p>\n To get your road built into Burnham.<\/p>\n Then in ninety days he’ll own you, .<\/p>\n Stocks and bonds and all equipment.<\/p>\n Verily — he is a Dailey.<\/p>\n Listen not to Sachem Wilson. II<\/p>\n The poem’s third and final installment (or canto, as the author calls it)<\/p>\n is headed “Burnham or Bust”. It ends with this impassioned appeal:<\/p>\n “We are tired of all this talking,<\/p>\n Tired of the broad gauge stories,<\/p>\n Tired of the Sachem’s wisdom.<\/p>\n So build your railroad up to Burnham.<\/p>\n Give us of your wealth, 0 China!<\/p>\n The amount that you apportioned,<\/p>\n Give to us, 0 old Palermo,<\/p>\n All that you’ve been asked to spare.<\/p>\n Whitefield, we expect to see you<\/p>\n Walk up and lay right down your share.<\/p>\n Jefferson, Who’s interested?<\/p>\n Surely you will help us out;<\/p>\n For Albion ha~ done her duty,<\/p>\n Done it nobly and with zeal,<\/p>\n She’s a ready, willing worker,<\/p>\n With your Prophet at her wheel.<\/p>\n Bathe now in his plan to aid you,<\/p>\n Wash the war paint from your faces,<\/p>\n Smoke the calumet together,<\/p>\n Vote to build your road to Burnham.”<\/p>\n Alas, the heated imprecations of Sagittarius — that is the way the author signed the poem — fell on deaf ears. The road was never built through to Burnham.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n One of the new books this fall is an amusing and informative account of the woman who was the first to have her face appear in newspaper advertisements allover the united States and eventually on a bottle label allover the world. Yes, you have guessed it; the woman was Lydia E. Pinkham.<\/p>\n An Army chaplain, Captain William B. Adams, says when he went ashore on one of the first South Sea Islands to be liberated from the Japanese, he immediately took a lot of photographs. When he developed those films, he came upon one negative showing a woman standing outside a thatched jungle hut, surrounded by her children and all her worldly possessions. Those possessions were meager indeed, but among them proudly stood a familiar object — a bottle of Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound.<\/p>\n Although everybody in this region has heard .of Lydia Pinkham, I suspect few realize how closely the operations of her company were related to the State of Maine. When Daniel, the most adventurous and energetic of Mrs. Pinkham’s three sons, was trying to get sales of the compound well started in the drug stores of New York, in 1878, he wrote to his brother Will back in Lynn:<\/p>\n “We’ve got to make up $10,000 worth of pills and shove them into advertising down in Maine. If I were home I’d show you how to do it. Those Maine folks will buy if you spread the advertising on them thick. I evidently will took Dan’s advice, for later Dan wrote: “I’m glad 1;:0 see that you are going in so heavy down in Maine. Keep running that state to full capacity so that everybody that sees a paper in the whole state will surely see our ad.”<\/p>\n In 1882 the two surviving Pinkham brothers and their sister Aroline, who a year before had been organized as a partnership, decided to form a corporation, the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Company. That company was incorporated not in Massachusetts, but in Maine, because, it is said, Maine at that time had more favorable tax laws for an enterprise which still consisted largely of equipment and supplies, but very little cash. As a consequence of this incorporation of the company in Maine, it was Maine courts that saw the bitter legal battles between quarreling Pinkham interests for more than thirty years.<\/p>\n Like most fond mothers, Mrs. Pinkham never suspected trouble among her offspring, and when Aroline married gentle, Quaker-born Will Gove, Lydia was delighted with his cooperation in the business. But the old lady reckoned without the influence of the third generation. For into that generation was born a spirited fighter, Lydia Pinkham Gove. A graduate of Smith College in 1907, she was one of those determined bachelor girls of the early suffragette days. Until her death a few years ago she fought with every possible legal device to dominate the company against her cousins, the Pinkhams. And of course she had to fight those battles in the Maine courts.<\/p>\n After many attempts in court to gain control of the company, Miss Gove finally agreed to a plan worked out by the lawyers of both sides, a plan which someone has described as “a consummate example of studiously designed corporate deadlock”, The company’s 112 shares of stock were divided into 56 shares of Pinkham stock and 56 ,shares of Gove stock. Each group had authority to elect three directors. The president, first vice-president and secretary must always be Pinkham stockholders elected by Pinkham directors, while the treasurer, assistant treasurer and second Vice President must always be chosen by the Gove directors. Certain powers were given jointly to the president and the treasurer, but only the treasurer or assistant treasurer could sign checks.<\/p>\n That compromise was only asking for more trouble. Miss Gove, in her capacity as treasurer, refused to sig~ checks for obligations incurred by Charles Pinkham in his capacity as president. When the case finally reached the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine, Judge Sidney Thaxter, in a carefully worded decision, said: “This arrangement, though it may have had virtue from a sentimental point of view, assumed a spirit of cooperation between the two groups which has not in fact existed. It was designed to function in an atmosphere of harmony which is sadly lacking.<\/p>\n The litigation finally ended in 1937 because Miss Gove overplayed her hand. In 1934 a master appointed by the Maine court to determine the facts concerning Miss Gove’s petition for receivership of the company wrote in his report: “Lydia Gove stated to Arthur Pinkham that she was going to run the business, and that the Pinkhams must stop interfering with her”. But on the witness stand in 1937 Miss Gove testified that absolute equality between the two families had always been intended. To her consternation the defense produced a letter written by her to a representative of the Pinkham employees only a few months before. That letter said: “My mother’s mother, Lydia E. pinkham, arranged that the Gove interests should control the management of the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Company.”<\/p>\n Obviously what she said in that letter and what she had. just said: on the witness stand could not both be true. The Gove suit was dismissed and somehow the Pinkham and Gove directors have managed to function peacefully ever since.<\/p>\n Do any of you remember this old popular song?<\/p>\n “Oh, we’ll sing of Lydia Pinkham<\/p>\n And her love for the human race.<\/p>\n How she sells her Vegetable Compound<\/p>\n And the papers they publish her face.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n When my family took residence in Waterville 26 years ago one of the first things we noticed was the city’s casual and nonchalant attention to the safety of its school children. We had just come from Portland where during the minutes when children were crossing busy streets to and from school nearly the whole day-time police force was devoted to that job. I remember especially the genial six foot four officer who escorted children across Congress Street in front of the Lafayette Hotel. At every trip he had some youngster by the hand and often some tiny tot in his arms.<\/p>\n That system of police protection of school children accomplished a lot more than the children’s safety. On minds in the most impressionable years it established the policeman not as someone to fear and dodge, but as a friend to whom a child can turn for help and guidance. For 26 years we have waited, sometimes a bit impatiently, for Waterville to wake up. We haven’t enough police officers. Special officers for school hours would be too costly. Officers cannot be spared from the business section.<\/p>\n All of these excuses leave us cold. If the school children of Augusta can have police protection — and they do have it — the citizens of Waterville can give that protection to their children too. We are pleased to learn that the Board of Education is making another attempt — at least its fourth within our memory — to get action. Perhaps the new police commissioner will see the light. Waterville has decided by majority vote to do something about its sewage before a disastrous epidemic strikes from the open sewers that its two streams have become. Those sewers are scarcely more dangerous than the poorly protected crossings that threaten the tiny tots in all sections of the city. The voluntary patrols set up in the schools are fine, but they are not enough.<\/p>\n What’s that you say? You don’t see anything to get excited about. Everything seems to go along pretty well as it is. Maybe so. But you’ll feel very differently about it if someday tragedy comes to your child.<\/p>\n Year: 1949<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Read the script for “Little Talks” program #37, broadcast on October 9, 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\/7053"}],"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=7053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7053\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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