Amid all the things said pro and con about what goes on in our schools\u00a0today — and I proclaim loudly that our schools are not nearly so bad as the\u00a0critics contend — there are some practices so different from those of an earlier\u00a0generation that they may deserve a bit of comment.<\/p>\n
Frequently I meet boys and girls on their way home from the afternoon’s\u00a0last classes at the Watervi I Ie junior and senior high schools. I am constantly\u00a0amazed at how few of these young people are carrying books home for study. The\u00a0girls are better than the boys, but not a lot better. The boy who takes home\u00a0books from school seems to consider it almost a social disgrace, a losing of\u00a0face among his pals.<\/p>\n
This situation should not be blamed on the schools. It is clearly the\u00a0fault of the home. Men and women of my age recal I very distinctly how our parents\u00a0insisted that we do regular and consistent evening study. Some of us were\u00a0al lowed to go out only on Friday and Saturday evenings.<\/p>\n
I know there are plenty of folk who wi II contradict me, but I make the\u00a0blunt statement that the outstanding difficulty faced by teachers and administrators\u00a0in our high schools al lover America is that home study is not the social\u00a0thing to do; in fact, under present American mores, it is socially the\u00a0thing not to do.<\/p>\n
How unrealistic, therefore, is the statement published in the Directory\u00a0of the State Department of Education, which came from the press about a month\u00a0ago. That statement says: “A unit is the credit given toward graduation for\u00a0a subject pursued a minimum of 200 minutes per week for the entire year and requiring\u00a0a comparable amount of time in preparation outside of class.”<\/p>\n
Now of course the pupi Is have some time in school for this outside preparation,\u00a0but the school day just isn’t long enough to provide 40 minutes each for\u00a0four classes and another 40 minutes for each of four preparations. Furthermore\u00a0it takes a better than average pupi I to do satisfactory work with only 40 minutes\u00a0of preparation five days a week on any subject. The better pupils spend much\u00a0more than that.<\/p>\n
Now don’t get me wrong. I have nothing but prai1se for the pupi Is and their\u00a0parents who respect the need for home study and observe it. But those pup i Is\u00a0and parents are in the mi nori ty. And as the i r numbers conti nue to decrease, we\u00a0approach nearer and nearer to the day when, for our high school boys and girls,\u00a0not on Iy home study but any serious study wi II be not the th ing to do.<\/p>\n
I n “Kennebec Yesterdays n have a chapter ca lied “I tch i ng Feet”, te II i ng\u00a0how Mai ne boys left our towns for a II parts of the country and even to far-away\u00a0lands in the years between 1850 and 1880. The migration, of course, has never\u00a0stopped. Ma i ne boys sti II leave the state in I arge numbers.<\/p>\n
The exodus from Ma; ne just before the Ci vi I War was not, however, a departure\u00a0merely of unmarried young men. Whole fami lies went to the beckoning lands\u00a0of the West. Since I wrote that chapter on “Itching Feet”, I have picked up\u00a0a lot more information about the migrations from Maine. There is, for instance,\u00a0the story of what happened to our Franklin County town of New Sharon, a town\u00a0that we may almost claim as in the Kennebec Val ley, for it is on the Sandy River,\u00a0which flows into the Kennebec.<\/p>\n
As early as 1848 a New Sha~n man was doing a brisk business in Ohio o He\u00a0was Charles E. Witham, who showed up in eastern Ohio towns selling lightning\u00a0rods. But he was looking for something even more profitable. Between his trips,\u00a0which placed rods on almost every barn in Ohio, Witham took a course in medicine\u00a0at Cincinnati, got his diploma, and left Ohio for Iowa, where he became a pro-\u00a0mi nent and revered .,country doctor.<\/p>\n
When The vii lage of Anoka, Minnesota was organized in 1853, one of its\u00a0first town officers was David McLaughlin of New Sharon, who in a few years became\u00a0prominent in the erection and management of grain elevators. It was Elias\u00a0Connor of New Sharon who bui It the first suspension bridge across the Mississippi\u00a0at Minneapolis.<\/p>\n
The Minnesota lumber industry owes a lot to the importation of hardy, experienced\u00a0I umbermen from Maine. In 1850 Nathanie I Tibbetts went from New Sharon\u00a0to the big forests along Minnesota’s Elk River. The next year Nathaniel was\u00a0joined by his younger brothers Joshua, Benjamin and James. All became prosperous\u00a0in lumber and real estate.<\/p>\n
So many men and fami lies left New Sharon in the 1840’s that one wonders who\u00a0and what STarted such a big and long-continuing migration. Were New Sharon folk\u00a0unusua Ily restless? Oi d thei r feet itch worse than thei r nei ghbors? Was New\u00a0Sharon, as a town, all played out? Or was it overpopulated? Did it have too\u00a0many peop Ie to get a I i vi ng off its soil? We do not know the answe r. What we\u00a0do knOll is That emi grants from New Sharon scattered to a II parts of the Ameri can\u00a0West. More often than not, like the four Tibbetts brothers, they were up-andcoming, energetic, industrious people, quick to see a chance and quick to grab\u00a0it. When opportunity knocked at the door of a New Sharon man, it didn’t have\u00a0to knock tw i ce \u2022<\/p>\n
Next TO New Sharon, the town which saw its population most severely depleted\u00a0in the twenty years before the Civil War was the tOlin of Corinna, between\u00a0Newport and Dexter. In 1856, just a hundred years ago, the largest fortune\u00a0in Minneapolis was held by Levi Stewart, who had come from Corinna, Maine.<\/p>\n
He had seen the opportunities offered by the little towns of Minneapolis and\u00a0St. Paul, had bought real estate at a bargain and sold it at handsome profits.<\/p>\n
Benjamin Hi Iton and his wife Prisci Iia left Corinna in 1844, pioneered in\u00a0I I linois, then in Wisconsin, where they were living when the Civi I War broke\u00a0out. The end of the war found them in Iowa, where Hi Iton founded a paper called\u00a0the “Boone County Advocate”. In 1870 the Hi Itons moved agai n, th is ti me to Li ncoin,\u00a0Nebraska, where they opened a hotel. There the fami Iy finally settled\u00a0down and soon persuaded other people from Corinna to join them. Among the Maine\u00a0folk who went to Lincoln was the Reverend Fifield, who served as chaplain for\u00a0the convention which drew up Nebraska’s first state constitution.<\/p>\n
Wherever Maine people went in the developing West, they took with them not\u00a0only the flat, twangy Maine speech, but also Maine customs and Maine mores. After\u00a01851, when Neal D~ won his great victory for prohibition, ardent Maine\u00a0dries carried the campaign against liquor into hundreds of settlements from Ohio\u00a0to Oregon. Among those crusaders was a Maine Carrie Nation. She was Harriet\u00a0Bishop, a tal I, thin spinster who had been born in Vermont, but had later become\u00a0a schoo I teache r in Ma i ne \u2022 In 1848 she had gone to St. Pau I, where she opened\u00a0a school with seven pupi Is, two white boys and five Indians. Harriet was a\u00a0rousing prohibitionist. She seized and smashed many a bottle; crusaded in a\u00a0score of Minnesota towns for a prohibition law. Encouraged by Neal Dow’s success\u00a0in Maine, Harriet and her fel low prohibitionists got a simi lar law through\u00a0the territorial legislature of Minnesota in 1853, and Harriet saw to it that\u00a0the vi ctory was ce lebrated by the ri ngi ng of every Protestant church be II in st.\u00a0Paul. Harriet was tearing mad when a chief justice declared her law unconstitutional,\u00a0and she vented her wrath on the saloon keepers. Leading a vigi I ante\u00a0group, she attacked st. Paul’s Empire Saloon, operated by Daniel Dudley, himself\u00a0a Yankee, but not from Maine, breaking doors and windows and pouring his\u00a0stock of liquor into the street. Dudley promptly reopened, but within two\u00a0weeks, his P I ace was destroyed by fire, as the authori ti es sa i d, “of undetermined\u00a0origin”.<\/p>\n
One interesting story of Maine’s itching feet tells how the famous Jesse\u00a0James gang of robbers met their match in Henry Sumner French of Sandy Point,\u00a0Maine. French had gone to Minnesota in 1868, had settled in the growing hamlet\u00a0of Northfield, and had become the vi I lage postmaster.<\/p>\n
On September 7, 1876, eight horsemen, including Jesse and his brother\u00a0Frank James, and the three brothers named Younger, rode into the main street\u00a0of Northfield and moved toward the bank. The first to suspect what they intended\u00a0was Jos i ah A lien, another Yankee, who operated the town’s hardware store.<\/p>\n
He ran into his store, shouti ng to the men who happened to be there, “Get your\u00a0guns, boys.” To the assembled unarmed men Allen passed out his store’s stock\u00a0of new rifles and shotguns and the necessary ammunition. A New Hampshire youth,\u00a0Henry Wheeler, took up the alarm, dashed into the hotel across the street from\u00a0the bank, picked up a handy Army carbine, and went into action.<\/p>\n
Meanwhi Ie, what of Maine’s Henry French from Sandy Point? Hearing the\u00a0alarm, he looked around the post office for a weapon. Finding nothing more formidable\u00a0than a broom, and disdaining that woman’s weapon, Henry rushed out into\u00a0the al ley behind the post office, picked up an armful of sizable rocks, and began\u00a0bouncing them off the astonished desperadoes in the street. In the whole\u00a0lurid history of the James-Younger gang, this is the only recorded instance when\u00a0anybody attacked those notorious two-gun men with a barrage of stones.<\/p>\n
Although two of the bandits got inside the bank and ki I led the cashier,\u00a0they never got the safe opened and fai led to get a cent of money. They were\u00a0forced to leave in frustration because their protecting accomplices in the\u00a0street were hav i ng too much troub Ie. With the fi rearms from A lien’s store, the\u00a0aroused Yankees of Northfield had become decidedly busy. In a few minutes six\u00a0of the bandits were in flight, two of them badly wounded. The remaining two\u00a0I ay dead in North fie I d t S rna in st reet\u00a0In the quiet, peaceful town of Northfield there reposes today a relic of\u00a0that street battle of 1876. In a plush-lined case in a Northfield museum is an\u00a0object that once belonged to one of the bandits – his right ear.<\/p>\n
I am often asked whether I know the origin of certain Indian names that\u00a0have come down to us as the desi gnaTi on of Mai ne ri vers and nounta ins, and hence\u00a0of Maine towns. Unfortunately no one has done a thorough piece of research on\u00a0the Indian place-names in the Kennebec Val ley, but Fannie Hardy EcksTrom did\u00a0a splendid, scholarly work with her “Indian Place-Names of the Penobscot Valley\u00a0and The Ma i ne Coast”. Thanks to Mrs. Eckstrom we know how the I ndi ans named\u00a0places for physical features of the land and streams. One suspects aT a glance,\u00a0for instance, that Passadumkeag and MaTTawamkeag have something in common, and\u00a0so they have. Both refer to a grave I bar ina stream. Passadumkeag means above\u00a0the gravel bar; Mattawamkeag means below, or at the mouth of, the gravel bar.<\/p>\n
Most, but not all, The Indian names which end, in English spelling, wiTh “keag”\u00a0refer to points of land formed by the action of two confluent streams. Perhaps\u00a0there was once such a name for the juncTion of the Sebastioook and the Kennebec,\u00a0but, if so, it was long si nce lost, or perhaps overwhe I med by the better known\u00a0UTi con i c” whi ch, at fi rst, referred To The fa lis. Mrs. Eckstrom admi TS that\u00a0the origin of Tioonic is uncertain, but she thinks the best explanation is “a\u00a0greaT crossing”, for above the falls, near the spot where the old college bui I….;\u00b7\u00a0dings now stand, was once a favorite crossing place.<\/p>\n
Sebago, the name of one of our moST beautiful lakes, is a corruption of the\u00a0Abnak i word “Mas i begatff big, sti II waTer. Damariscotta means “fish going up”.\u00a0Mati n i cus means cut-off or far-away is I and. Monhegan means simp Iy HThe I s I andit\u00a0,\u00a0the one great, prominent island off the coast, but near enough to approach. Olanon\u00a0means red paint; Mattanawcook signifies “at the end of the island’!; Wytopit\u00a0lock i s “the 0 I de r p I ace n \u2022<\/p>\n
Wi scasset is a comb i nat i on of ‘~ech i” — wants to run, and “kas i ka” -”\u00a0scrapes as it goes”; and therefore means a concealing outlet. OgunquiT signi-\u00a0fies a neck of land adjacent to a marsh.<\/p>\n
InteresTingly enough, Cape Newaggen does not refer to a cape, as does Cape\u00a0Eli zabeth. I t comes to us from a sing Ie I ndi an word, “kapah i gan”, mean i ng a\u00a0closed up openi ng in a waterway, and thus a p lace where the Indi an trave ler had\u00a0to carry his canoe over land. Cape Newaggen in Indian times, therefore, was\u00a0a p lace where a water trave fer crossed the I and.<\/p>\n
So with these references to names we gOT from the Red ~n, we bi d you\u00a0good night for old times’ sake.<\/p>\n
Year: 1956<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #298, broadcast on March 25, 1956<\/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":[790,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7618"}],"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=7618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7618\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}