<\/p>\n
It has occurred to me that as often as I have mentioned that controversy in Maine railroad history known as the Battle of the Gauges, I have never told you that story in detail. This May evening is a good time to tell it.<\/p>\n
From the granting of Maine’s first railroad charter in 1836 until final consolidation of the Maine Central in 1870 there was continuous dispute among Maine railroad builders concerning the proper gauge — that is, the width of the track, the distance between the rails. One group insisted on the British gauge of 4 feet 8t inches, which is said to have been adopted from the length of the axle of the Roman chariots that traversed Britain’s famous Roman roads 1,800 years ago. The other group, headed by A. C. Morton, the civil engineer in charge of building the Atlantic and St. Lawrence road for John Alfred Poor, advocated a wider gauge of 5 feet 6 inches. The Atlantic and St. Lawrence, the railroad from Portland to Montreal, afterward called the Grand Trunk, was therefore built 5 feet 6 inches wide. That gauge was indeed for some time called John Poor’s gauge, and the narrower one was in Maine called the Boston gauge, for that was the width of track between Portland and Boston. The Massachusetts Railroad, which later became the western division of the Boston and Maine, through Dover, had been built 4 feet 8t inches wide; so the Portland, Saco and Portsmouth Railroad (later the eastern division) used the same gauge. Therefore there could be no interchange of traffic at Portland with the line to Montreal. This so troubled John Poor that he spent much time and money trying to induce the Eastern Railroad to lay a third rail, especially after he had persuaded the incorporators of the road planned from Portland to Bangor to adopt his wider gauge.<\/p>\n
It was the Androscoggin and Kennebec, the first railway to reach Waterville, that decided to use the 5 foot 6 inch wider guage, because they made direct connection with the Atlantic and St. Lawrence at Danville Junction. The Kennebec and Portland, however, in order to connect with the Boston line at Portland, used the 4 foot 8t inch guage to Brunswick and Bath, and later to Augusta, Waterville and Skowhegan.<\/p>\n
So it happened that two conflicting guages started operating in Maine. The Androscoggin and ~ennebec connected at Waterville with the Penobscot and Kennebec, so that there was continuous wider guage all the way from Danville Junction to Bangor. The guage war was further stimulated by rivalry between the cities of Lewiston and Augusta. The A & K decided to leave out Augusta and go from Lewiston through Winthrop and Belgrade to Waterville. When the Portland and Kennebec road to Augusta built its line through to Fairfield and later on to Skowhegan, it was at the junction in Fairfield that the two guages came into sharpest competition. Passengers faced a mean dilemma. If a passenger from Bangor wanted to travel by train to Boston, he had to change to the narrower guage road at Fairfield and thus make direct connection with a Boston train at Portland, or he he had to go across Portland from the Grand Trunk Depot to the Boston Depot.<\/p>\n
In 1856 the Maine Legislature passed the famous “Ninth Section”, which provided that passengers between Fairfield and Portland were entitled to travel over either route for the same fare. As a result of this law, the wider road, the A & K, in order to secure more business from the west for parts east of Fairfield, ran their trains at high speed so they could leave Fairfield for Bangor before the Portland and Kennebec train via Augusta reached Fairfield.<\/p>\n
In 1858 the legislature passed a law intended to compel connection between the two schedules at Fairfield, and the law established a Board of Railroad Commissioners with power to regulate schedules and rates for the connecting roads. The A & K simply refused to comply with the law, and its superintendent was arrested for the violation. Decision of the Maine Law Court resulted in repeal of the famous “Ninth Section”.<\/p>\n
In 1862 the A & K and the Penobscot and Kennebec were consolidated as the Maine Central Railroad, thus giving to one management the 5 foot 6 inch lines from Danville Junction to Bangor through Lewiston and Waterville. There was still no direct connection with Boston by means of that line. All westbound freight had to be hauled across Portland by team, with no assurance it would be handled expeditiously, even if it was received at all by the Boston road. In the same year John Poor took a crushing blow. The Maine Legislature passed a law forbidding third rail construction on any road within the state, so Poor’s persistent scheme for a third rail on the Eastern Railroad from Portland to Boston was finally defeated.<\/p>\n
The unsatisfactory condition continued until 1870. In that year the Portland and Kennebec and the Somerset Railroad were drawn into the Maine Central system and standard gauge was adopted for all its lines. In November, 1870 the gauge from Waterville to Bangor was changed to 4 feet 8t inches, which by that time allover the country had become known as Standard Gauge. By Christmas in 1871 all Maine Central tracks had been made that standard gauge. The last wide, 5 foot 6 inch railroads in Maine were the European and North American and the Bangor and Piscataquis. John Poor’s influence in the former, built largely with European capital, had caused that road from Bangor to Vanceboro to be built on Poor’s favorite wider gauge. And it was the management of the European and North American that took over the road from Bangor to Dover-Foxcroft called the Bangor and Piscataquis. In 1877 those last two survivors of the wide gauge gave in and were changed to standard gauge.<\/p>\n
The War of the Gauges was waged for thirty years. The nearest occasion to violence came in 1852 when Wyman Moor of Waterville, a prominent stockholder in the Penobscot and Kennebec wider road, announced that his road would plant a battery at Kendalls Mills and blow the narrower gauge Somerset road to smithereens. So for a time the connection at Fairfield was derisively called Moor’s Battery. As soon as the authorities of the Pen and Ken learned that the rival Somerset road had located and intended to build a line from Augusta to Fairfield, they proceeded at once to exercise their prior right of location on that part of the route between Waterville and Fairfield and started building on the exact location filed by the Somerset. But in 1853 the legislature confirmed the right of the Somerset road to build their 4 foot 8t inch line right along with the other. So the battle of train fares and speeds and all sorts of competitive tricks went on until the consolidation of all the lines into the Maine Central in 1870. Then at last the battle of the gauges was over.<\/p>\n
In the year when the Civil War broke out, Maine newspapers, as they do now, published in the spring a supplement containing the laws passed by the most recent legislature. But in those days a lot of the papers were religious weeklies, not secular newspapers. One such was the Gospel Banner, published at Augusta. It must have had a canny editor, for unlike some of his contemporaries, he did not leave either as blank space, or filled with plate items, the space left over after the text of the laws had been set up. He scurried around and sold ads to fill that extra space. He wasn’t wholly successful, for about a quarter of his eighth page was still blank. But he did pretty well.<\/p>\n
Since the paper was published in Augusta, many of those 1861 ads were from that town. R. H. Dolliver announced a big assortment of men’s ready-made clothes. Moses sold watches, jewelry and silverware, and assured the public he paid special attention to repairing fine watches and clocks. Joseph Anthony of Water Street was a shipper of furs and he urged Maine trappers to deal with him.<\/p>\n
There was an ad for Fairbanks scales, which had already become famous before the Civil War, but it seems that they had competition, for on the same page is an ad for Stephen~on’s Balances and Scales, which the advertiser said were guaranteed for “accuracy, durability and nicety of operation”.<\/p>\n
Joseph Percival of Waterville was agent for a combined cultivator and harrow, ballyhooed as “the best grain and peas coverer in the universer. If you dealt with George Leonard of Augusta, you could get a Parker Sewing Machine for $40. John Means announced: “I have a new hay cutter which is giving perfect satisfaction; also root cutters and Yankee corn shellers.” And at Goodwin’s Apothecary you could get Richardson’s Sherry Wine Bitters, good for all manner of human ills.<\/p>\n
Or, if you happened to be in Bangor, you could drop in at W. L. Alden’s for anyone of the three famous Hunnewell remedies: Eclectic Pills, Cough Syrup, and Tolu Arrodyne.<\/p>\n
A very useful institution of state-wide importance today is the Maine State Library. It sends books by mail to any citizen of Maine on request and simple payment of return postage for the books. Its bookmobile brings good reading matter to people in remote Maine hamlets. But back in 1861 there was no thought of a state library for service of that kind to all the people of the state. In that year the legislature set up what is called “New Regulations for the State Library”. They provided that the Governor and Council should be a board of trustees for the library; and that they should employ a librarian at $600 a year, who should keep the library open every day of the year except Sundays and legal holidays. The only persons who could take out books were the officers of the state and members of the legislature, and the latter had use of the library only when the legislature was in session. The legislature provided $500 a year for the purchase of “books, maps, charts, and such other works as shall be useful.”<\/p>\n
We now have laws concerning vehicles that are too heavy or too large, but in 1861 Maine passed a law against having them too small. That law read: “No person shall use a sled drawn by two or more horses or oxen on any public road in the County of Aroostook or on the road from Houlton to Princeton, or on the road from Bangor to Mattawamkeag, less than 4 feet 4 inches from outside to inside in width, and any violation shall cause a fine of $5 for each offense for the use of the town in which the offense is committed.”<\/p>\n
Finally it is with pride that we may be reminded how in 1861 the Maine Legislature showed wholesome contempt for the national Fugitive Slave Law. They decreed: “No officer of this state or any of its counties, cities or towns, shall arrest or detain any person on account of a claim on him as a fugitive slave.”<\/p>\n
Year: 1958<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #382, Broadcast on May 25, 1958<\/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":[744,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7873"}],"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=7873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7873\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}