Can you remember way back to those days when we used to look upon Franklin\u00a0Roosevelt as the champion government spender? Poor Mr. Roosevelt! If he\u00a0were only around today, wouldn’t he think he had been a miserly skinflint compared\u00a0to his successor?’! As AI Smith used to say, take a look at the record.<\/p>\n
In all of the 156 years that the U. S. Government had been In operation\u00a0between 1789 and the death of President Roosevelt on April 30,1945, the fed ….\u00a0era I government took from the peop Ie and the corporations total taxes of 248\u00a0billion dollars. In the six years from May 1,1945 to June 30,1951 the pre,..\u00a0sent adm I n I strat ion took I n taxes $260 bill Ion – … twelve b 1111 on more than the\u00a0preceding 32 administrations had taken in a century and a half. Yet, despite\u00a0the staggering amount taken In taxes, the present administration closed its\u00a01951 books in the red by $7,470,000,000 — a deficit twelYe times as great as\u00a0that of 1950.\u00a0But the worst Is yet to come. The deficit for the current year ending\u00a0June 30, 1952 is estimated at $8,200,000,000. For 1953 it will Jump to\u00a0$14,400,000,000.<\/p>\n
On June 30, 1951 the tota I federa I debt was $252 billion; next June it\u00a0will be $260 bill ion, and In June, 1953 it will be $275 bi Ilion ..\u00a0Everybody knows we are a rich country. But how rich? Rich enough 10\u00a0spend and spend and spend and tax and tax and tax and still owe 275 billions\u00a0of debt? Somewhere there Is a limit, and when It comes, beware the crash!<\/p>\n
Numerous I isteners have told me during the past week that they expect me\u00a0to talk about big snow s10rms of the past and compare them with the little\u00a0flurry we had last Monday. don’t want to disappoint those listeners entirely,\u00a0but I’m not going to make any comparisons between particular blizzards past\u00a0and present. I want to make just these brief comments about big storms In\u00a0genera I.\u00a0irst, our individual memories are tricky. Most of us remember a big\u00a0storm because of some unusual personal experience connected with it, and because\u00a0we have no such personal experience connected with another storm, we\u00a0forget al I about it. I simply do not remember any big storm in 1935, but the\u00a0Watervll Ie Sentinel of that year carries the undeniable record of a huge\u00a0crippling blizzard. But I certainly remember the storm of February 28,1920,\u00a0which began with rain freezing solid, then topped it with 18 inches of snow.\u00a0Why do I remember that storm? Because my son was born that day, and I spent\u00a015 anxious hours on a train from Portland to Boston, and didn’t see my son In\u00a0the Waltham hospital untl I more than 24 hours after he had come into the world.<\/p>\n
My second comment is that we are today more helpless In a big storm than\u00a0our grandparents were. In our recent storm we were fortunate not to lose electric\u00a0current. But only last winter, within five mi les of America’s greatest\u00a0city, peop Ie litera II y had to go to bed to keep warm. Not an 0 i I burner cou Id\u00a0function, there were no I ights, no telephones, no milk deliveries, no transportation.\u00a0Fifty years ago a big storm was no such problem. The storm didn’t put\u00a0out the kerosene lamps or shut off the telephone, because in most homes there\u00a0wasn’t any_ The house didn’t get cold, because there was a wholerwlnter’s .supply of wood out in the shed. Nobody went hungry, because mother had a whole\u00a0barrel of flour in the pantry and vegetables and fruits of her own canning In\u00a0abundance. As for mi Ik, if the family lived in the vi I I age and didn’t have a\u00a0cow, someone put on snowshoes and went to a neighbor in the village who did\u00a0have one. Yes — we pay a price for our advancing civi lization. The more we\u00a0have, the more dependent we are.<\/p>\n
My third and final comment on big storms concerns the children. That is\u00a0something that hasn’t changed with the fifty years. They don’t depend on elec~\u00a0. tric current or Internal combustion engines. They get out their steds and have\u00a0a grand time. We who are older and who think we are so much wiser than any\u00a0child may well take note of this: In a battle between nature and civi Ilzation,\u00a0a chi Id’s sympathy Is always with nature.<\/p>\n
One who delves into the old records about the common folk of the Kennebec\u00a0Valley in by-gone days, as I love to do, is again and again Impressed by the\u00a0va I uab Ie service rendered by persons who persuaded aged peop Ie to put into\u00a0writing, before it was too late, their recollections of pioneer days. We ought\u00a0to do more of that sort of persuading in our own day. Right here In Water”\u00a0ville are men and ~omen who ought to put Into written form thei r recollections\u00a0of sixty and seventy years ago — recollections that may otherwise pass into\u00a0oblivion.<\/p>\n
Hence I am very grateful tonight that a little more than a hundred years\u00a0ago, In 1848, a man and wife, John and Abigail Nichols, finally induced one of\u00a0the first settlers of Fairfield to record his memory of the early days. The\u00a0settler, then an aged man, had come to the wi Iderness that later became Fa I rfield\u00a0In 1782. He was Elihu Bowerman who, with his two brothers, settled In\u00a0the Vicinity of North Fairfield, became a prominent citizen and officer of the\u00a0town, and was the man who made the survey Into lots of the Nye and Dimick purchases\u00a0-~ those original sixty lots, of which the ten in the southwest corner\u00a0stl II bear the community name of Ten Lots.<\/p>\n
So let us give attention tonight to what Elihu Bowerman wrote Mr. and Mrs\u00a0Nichols about that earliest settlement of Fairfield. Some time in October, 1777\u00a0Mr. Bowerman’s father, a soldier In the Revolution, became so III with dysentery,\u00a0a common camp disease, that he was sent home for rest and recovery. At\u00a0the same time his mother’s mother was taken violently III. Grandmother and\u00a0father died within three days of each other, leaving Mrs. Bowerman with nine\u00a0chi Idren, the oldest only 14 years of age. That oldest was Elihu, and on\u00a0him fell the responsibility as male head of the fami Iy. For six years, unti I\u00a01782, when he was 20 years old, he faithfully worked to help his mother keep\u00a0the fam i I y together in the i r Mas sach usetts home.<\/p>\n
For some time, apparently, there had been talk of migrating to the Dis ..\u00a0trict of Maine, and in the spring of 1782 Elihu, with the young wife whom he\u00a0had recently acquired, came to Fort Halifax. With him also were his two brothers\u00a0Harper and Zachary.\u00a0On what is now the Watervi lIe side of the river Elihu hired a room in a\u00a0private family, where his wi fe could lodge, whi Ie he and his brothers struck\u00a0farther up the river into the wi Iderness. After Elihu had paid his wife’s\u00a0room rent for a per i od in ad,vance, he says that the tota I cap I ta I wi th wh I ch\u00a0the three Bowerman brothers struck out up Martin Stream was only 25 cents. The\u00a0only way they could get food was either out of the forest, or by working out\u00a0for one or more of the 01 der !=iett lers down ri ver near Watervi lie. During the\u00a0summer, Elihu says, he and his brothers worked out about two-thirds of the\u00a0time, for which they were paid in provisions, never in money; and the rest of\u00a0the time they felled trees on their own lot and prepared to build a log house\u00a0in the fal I. When autumn came they did put up the log house and covered it with\u00a0bark, using bark a Iso, liidd over the bare ground, for a f Iocr.<\/p>\n
Their mother was not we”: so It was decided that Harper should spend the\u00a0winter with her. On the other hand, the log house seemed now ready for a woman,\u00a0and Eli hu ‘s wi fe moved out of her Waterville room into the log dwe II fng\u00a0on Martin Stream. Elihu says they were not without furniture, but all of it\u00a0made only four loads on a hand sled.\u00a0t n the preceding summer the brothers had ra ised a few potatoes on the farm\u00a0of Remington Hobbie,the Vassalboro Quaker whom we have previously mentioned\u00a0on this program. Mr. HOOble allowed the brothers to store their potatoes in\u00a0his cellar, but the early winter was very severe, and before January the potatoes\u00a0were a II frozen.<\/p>\n
let us now turn to Elihu Bowerman’s own words in his statement to the\u00a0Nichols: “Our provisions were all gone”, he writes, “and we had nothing left\u00a0to purchase more with. But soon I met a man In Winslow that would let me have\u00a0corn and wait for his pay unti I spring. That corn, with about 25 pounds of pork\u00a0and some smoked herring, with the frozen potatoes, were all the provisions we\u00a0had for the whole winter. We got our corn ground and carried It home on our\u00a0backs, a di stance of 17 mi les. The on Iy bread we had for 16 months was made\u00a0by mixing a little of this corn meal with our frozen potatoes, then baking the\u00a0mixture like johnny cake over our open fire. We had no vegetable sass of any\u00a0k I n’d.\u00a0“late in the winter we hau led about 700 feet of boards four miles on our\u00a0hand sleds from a saw mi II to our house, put some of them on the roof in the\u00a0parts where it leaked through the bark worst, and the rest of them on the floor.<\/p>\n
That board floor was a lot warmer than the bark on the cold ground. We had no\u00a0nails and not a square of glass in that log house. It was a hard winter, but\u00a0never once did I wish myself back in my native land, nor did my wife once murmur\u00a0or complain. It was a hard life, but we were not discouraged.”<\/p>\n
A II that wi nter the iron Iy beverage other than water was boxberry tea,\u00a0without milk or sugar. How they must have relished the coming of maple sugar\u00a0time. “That spring”, wr6te Elihu, “we made plenty of sap sugar, which was\u00a0the first sugar of any kind on our table.”\u00a0That pioneer life was hard on women. Elihu’s wife had not seen anotherwoman for six months, when in March she decided that the time had come to paya visit to a neighbor who I ived a mi Ie and a half away. So. Mrs. Bowerman put\u00a0on snowshoes and went to see her neighbor. She made a nice long cal I -~six hours — and came back in fine spirits.\u00a0When the snow was gone and spring had really come, the Bowermans got\u00a0possession of two cows, so that mi Ik and butter were then added to the sugar\u00a0which the maple trees had supplied. Those cows had no fenced pasture, but\u00a0ran in the woods, and Eli hu says he chased those creatures hundreds of mi les\u00a0that first summer, often going barefooted, though he was a grown man.<\/p>\n
Living conditions were much improved by the fall of 1783. By that time\u00a0the brothers had burned two acres of fe lied trees, cleared the ground of logs I\u00a0<\/em>sowed rye, planted corn, potatoes and beans. So, writes Elihu, “in the fallof that year we had plenty of rye and corn meal, some potatoes and other sass,\u00a0with mi Ik, maple sweet and butter as much as we could desire.”\u00a0When winter came, Elihu decided he must make sure how his mother fared\u00a0down in Massachusetts. He made the long journey only to find her, as he had\u00a0suspected, in t I I hea Ith and having a hard time financially. So he persuaded\u00a0her to sell the property and come to live with him in the Maine wilderness.\u00a0Elihu disposed of the old home for $700, his mother getting her legal third,\u00a0and the rest d i v i ded among the nine ch i I dren \u2022<\/p>\n For manv years Elihu’s mother had been used to living in a frame house\u00a0and in the midst of neighbors. When she got her first sight of Elihu’s log\u00a0dwelling on Martin Stream, she expressed her disappointment. She told Elihu\u00a0the p lace looked more like a cow shed than a house. But when she was f Ina II V\u00a0se’ttled in the house, with most of her chi Idren around her — for now all but\u00a0two of the nine had come to Fairfield, and three besides EI ihu had homes of\u00a0their own near by — it seemed to her, as Elihu puts it, “like Joseph’s meeting\u00a0with his brothers in the land of Goshen.” The elderlv Mrs. Bowerman accepted\u00a0the wi Iderness and the log house grateful IV, for it brought her fam! IV\u00a0togethe raga in.\u00a0Elihu says that by 1785, when his sister Waite married Benjamin Swift\u00a0and settled two mi les away, allof his brothers and sisters except one sister\u00a0who had recently died, were now married and in their own cabins between his\u00a0house and the Swifts. This gave his mother opportunity to visit with all of\u00a0her living children, and it meant a lot to the old lady unti I her death In\u00a01794 at the very advanced age of 95.<\/p>\n How did Eli hu Bowe rman happen to come to the Kennebec Va II ey I n the first\u00a0place? Soon after his father’s death in 1777, although Elihu was only a boy\u00a0of 14, he was determined to get Into a region where land was cheap and opportunity\u00a0for its development good. So he says: “It was in 1700 that I made my \u00a0first journey TO the Kennebec on the lookout for land.” That summer he\u00a0worked for John Taber at Vassa I boro. Taber persuaded the youth to attend\u00a0Friends Meeting at the home of Charles Jackson, a little below Vassalboro town\u00a0landing. At that time no member of the Bowerman family had Quaker Inclinations. Although the Bowerman manuscript does not say 50 exp I icftly, the reader\u00a0can eas I I y I mp I y that the Bowe rman fam Ily got the i r chance to sett Ie In th I s\u00a0reg ion through the kind Iy he I p of the Vassal boro Quakers — Jackson, Taber and\u00a0perhaps most of all Remington Hobbie. They helped the Bowermans get their\u00a0land and unquestionably helped them in many ways through the first, most difficult\u00a0years. And it was because of them that the Bowermans became resolute\u00a0Quakers and finally established the active and Influential Friends Meeting at\u00a0North Fairfield. But at first, of course, they had to go far to attend a\u00a0meeting. In fact, Elihu says he subscribed $6.00 which he earned by working\u00a0In the hay field for a Sidney farmer at 75 cents a day.<\/p>\n The Friends of Fairfield were thus attached to the Vassalboro Quarterly\u00a0Meeting, and It was quite a journey to attend services there. Elihu wrote,\u00a0“At that time our roads were no better than cow paths, and we had no horses.\u00a0Men and w.ornen had to go on foot to attend meet i ng at Yassa I boro, an d a fte r\u00a0the meeting corne back on foot to Fairfield, a distance of 14 miles. In winter,\u00a0before we had horses, I have known our young men to take the ox sled\u00a0and some of our women on it, and carry them to Vassalboro meeting. They went\u00a0and came as lively and cheerful as though they had been in a superfine four~\u00a0wheel carriage.\u00a0“After we obtained horses, the trip to Vassalboro was faster, but there\u00a0were sti II no real roads, only beaten trails. Of course there were no bridges.When the water was low in the Kennebec and the Sebasticook, we often rode\u00a0across. Sometimes, when the water was half way up a horse’s side, a woman\u00a0would have a man on each side of her to prevent her falling off into swift\u00a0water. remember that once a man and a woman, riding on the same horse, both\u00a0fe II off, but fortunate Iy Into shoa I water. They went back to shore, wrung\u00a0out their clothes as best they could, and rode on nine mi les to meeting with “”\u00a0out dry cloth ing.\u00a0‘~here we usually crossed the Sebasticook was a narrow ledge with uneven\u00a0bottom. The water ran swift oVer the ledge, and on Its lower side” where the\u00a0horse had to go, was four or five feet deep. It was a dangerous place” especially\u00a0for a woman.<\/p>\n “At our Kennebec crossing the bottom was covered with small, round rocks.\u00a0It was not easy footing for a horse. We started diagonally down, then in the\u00a0middle of the river turned diagonally upstream to a sma I I island, then\u00a0straight across on the treacherous round rock bottom. We took this route\u00a0scores of times, often in miserable weather; yet’ never heard man or woman\u00a0speak of the danger or show any fear.”<\/p>\n After ten years the settlers at North Fairfield decided they ought to\u00a0have a meeting house of +heir own. On the knoll where in 1952 the Friends\u00a0Meeting House at North Fairfield still stands there was then an unoccupied\u00a0house of two rooms. There the Friends convened. On bus lness meeting days the\u00a0men and the women separated. On one such day, while the men conducted business,\u00a0the floor gave way and let them down a foot or more. That experience, wrote\u00a0EI ihu, “set us thinking how we could get a better meeting house. At last we\u00a0concluded to bui Id a house 25 feet square. We infor,med our Vassalboro\u00a0Friends of the plan. Eefore building we decided we needed a larger house, so\u00a0we bui It it 30 feet square, with a partition In the middle. We gathered and\u00a0hewed the timber, our Vassalboro Friends supplied nal Is and glass; and at last\u00a0we had the meetl ng house ready. At first we sat on loose seats, and be Ing\u00a0very empty handed, it was many years befofe we got better ones.\u00a0person in the community had contributed what he could — money, materials or\u00a0labor. When the house was finished, no one had done too much, no one person\u00a0had done a II. So we met together in our new meeting house and in love and\u00a0friendsh I p, somewhat Jl <\/em>ke Joseph and hi s brethren.”<\/p>\n Six years after he wrote his fascinating account to John and Ablgai I\u00a0Nichols, Elihu Bowerman died at the age of 96, a true patriarch of old Fairfield.\u00a0With complete fitness he was buried in the Quaker cemetery at North\u00a0Fairfield almost a hundred years ago, on May 24,1854.<\/p>\n Year: 1952<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Read the script for “Little Talks” program #137, broadcast on February 24, 1952<\/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":[787,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7291"}],"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=7291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}