<\/p>\n
We shall probably never be rid of controversy between the proponents of public education on the one hand and private education on the other. Personally I believe there is not only room for both in America, but that both are needed in the interest of all the children of all the people. More than a hundred years ago the controversy was hot. In its issue of May 7, 1853 the Kennebec Journal said: “The Committee on Education of our Legislature has reported adversely on any further endowment of academies by the state. The report assumes that the multiplication of academies is prejudiced to the advancement of public education; that thereby the good will and support of the wealthier class is withdrawn from the common schools, and consequently the children of the poor and the bulk of the middle class do not receive proper privileges. The committee contends that it is the true policy of the state to diffuse education among the whole people, and hence the funds of the state should be appropriated exclusively for our common schools. That it might have been good policy in the past to encourage the establishment of academies, they do not deny, but they believe a different policy should now be pursued.”<\/p>\n
Maine has traveled a long way in educational progress since that legislative report in 1853. At that time it was considered the duty of each community, whether or not assisted by the state, to provide for every child a common school education — that is, an education through what we would today call the eighth grade. If a child went further, it must be to one or another of the academies, where the parents had to pay tuition. As academy attendance became more common, plans were gradually worked out for the town, by vote in town meeting, to appropriate a certain amount toward the year’s support of a local or nearby academy, in return for which the academy gave free tuition to children of that town. More rarely a town would vote to pay a certain amount per child enrolled in the academy, but that practice was less common because the town could never be sure in advance just how many children it would have to pay for, and Maine Yankees in town meeting want to know exactly how many dollars they are committed to.<\/p>\n
Before the Civil War a few communities had established what they called high schools, like the famous Boys’ High School in Portland, over which Dr. James Hanson presided between his two terms as the best remembered principal of Coburn Classical Institute. In the 1860’s Waterville too had a high school, but it was not the out-and-out public institution we know today. It was not even called a public high school. The town did appropriate a small sum each year for its support, but it was operated chiefly on tuition fees paid by parents. The town appropriation kept the tuition fee <\/em>low and made possible the attendance of boys and girls who would otherwise have been too poor to attend. But, before 1870 the total attendance at that old Waterville high school never exceeded fifty.<\/p>\n Then in the 1870’s came the rise of the public high schools. Allover Maine they sprang up. In my native town of Bridgton one was started in 1873 and the first class was graduated in 1875. My father’s older sister was a member of the second graduating class known as the centennial class, because it graduated in the hundredth year of the nation’s birth, 1876. My father himself graduated in the sixth class in 1879, and my mother in the eighth class in 1881. My own graduation from the same school was in 1909, just thirty years after my father received his diploma.<\/p>\n Long after 1853 the State of Maine continued to grant special aid to the academies. In fact it was not entirely stopped until two years ago, when the Sinclair Law put the academies on exactly the same basis as high schools that received students from other towns. A town not operating a public high school must pay the tuition of a pupil from that town who attends an accredited Maine academy or a public high school in another town. That tuition is all the money an academy now receives from public funds unless it has a contract with a town to serve in place of a public high school as is the case in such towns as Pittsfield, Athens, Monmouth and notably in the case of Maine’s largest academy, Thornton Academy at Saco.<\/p>\n One of the prominent women of Waterville in the later years of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth centuries was the woman who was always called Mrs. Dr. Pepper. She had come to Waterville as a young bride in 1861 when her husband, George Dana Boardman Pepper, became pastor of the Baptist Church. Because he lived until 1913, there are many Waterville people still living who remember him well. He served the Waterville church through the trying years of the Civil War, though for a part of that time he insisted upon several months leave of absence to serve as a chaplain with the Army of the Potomac.<\/p>\n Dr. and Mrs. Pepper enjoyed a long and happy life together. They left Waterville in 1865, serving a notable pastorate at Saco, and then as a professor at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. In 1882 Dr. Pepper was called back to Waterville to begin a distinguished service of seven years as President of Colby College. He and Mrs. Pepper continued to make their home in Waterville after he left the college presidency in 1889, and for some time he continued to serve the college as Professor of Biblical Literature.<\/p>\n For more than thirty years both husband and wife taught classes of college students in the Sunday School of the Baptist Church. Mrs. Pepper was a remarkable woman — a leader in many civic projects. She personally wrote to Andrew Carnegie, and was one of three Waterville women who finally induced him to donate the building which is now the Waterville Public Library. Before the days of PTA, she organized a group in the interests of the Waterville schools. She was actively concerned about the poor, especially families in the tenements at the Head of Falls and on the Plains.<\/p>\n It was with delight, therefore, that I recently ran across a statement written by Mrs. Pepper in 1910, describing the recognition which Waterville friends and others from outside the town had given to the Peppers’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. She, whose maiden name was Annie Grassie, had married Mr. Pepper at her home in Bolton, Massachusetts on Thanksgiving Day in 1860.<\/p>\n She and Dr. Pepper had planned a quiet family observance of their golden wedding, but they were too well loved in the community for that to happen. Mrs. Pepper wrote: “When it was decided to make ‘a big fuss’, as we called it, we told Dr. and Mrs. Whittemore that we had finally consented to a reception. Mrs. Whittemore rose to the emergency. She is a little woman with the energy of half a dozen. Years ago, when Annie was married, Mrs. Whittemore made the Baptist Church so glorious that it is spoken of proudly to this day. At that time quantities of laurel from Mount Tom were sent to us by Clara Bushee. So again we appealed to Clara, and again the laurel came. George Balentine brought beautiful evergreens from his woods. Mr. Pepper’s class of college boys made a platform in the large parlor of the church and my class of girls decorated it. Ernest Moore arranged extra electric lights. In the center of the parlor there hung from the ceiling a ring of 32 tungsten lamps of great brilliancy. Above the platform hung a transparency with the two dates 1860-1910. They had wound the laurel into long streamers that hung from corner to corner of the large room and over the windows and doors. The refreshment tables were made glorious with ferns and roses and golden chrysanthemums.<\/p>\n “Mrs. Whittemore had heard me tell how my bridesmaid, Mary Lizzie Grassie had brought me a bunch of camellias fifty years ago; so she tried to get some for this occasion. However, the florists told her camellias were old fashioned flowers, no longer raised in hot houses for the market. So she had to settle for lilies of the valley — a modern bridal bouquet. It did very nicely.<\/p>\n “A long window box of ferns and cyclamen was much admired. A table was set in a prominent place to hold the wedding cake, which was the gift of our Waterville baker, Augustus Otten. It was a work of art, and we sent lots of it by mail allover the country to many friends.<\/p>\n “Mr. Hager had done a wonderful job as caterer and had his crew on hand to care for everything. Mrs. Horatio Dunham served at the punch table. The ice cream was served by Mrs. Arthur Roberts, Mrs. Mattie Baker Dunn, Mrs. Bert Drummond and Miss Hattie Parmenter. A guest book, the gift of the R. W. Dunn family, was in charge of Mrs. Whittemore.<\/p>\n “In the receiving line were Or. Whittemore, our son, Charles Hovey Pepper, and his wife Frances Coburn Pepper, and our two daughters, J9$ie- Pepper Padelford and Annie Pepper Varney. In spite of the storm, Louise Coburn and Grace Coburn Smith came down from Skowhegan.<\/p>\n “There in the church parlors, from 3 to 5 in the afternoon, we received friends from Skowhegan, Fairfield and other towns outside Waterville. It was a a day of pouring rain and strong wind, and in the evening turned to snow. It was astonishing how many turned out in spite of the bad weather. The evening reception was for our Waterville friends, and again we stood in line from eight to ten o’clock. One woman in the evening line interrupted my surprise at seeing her for the second time that day_ She said, ‘When you sent out the invitation, I lived out of town; so I came this afternoon. But now I live in town; so I came again this evening.’ She was Mrs. C. E. Owen. We were unspeakably happy, surrounded by those who had known us for many years -some for all of half a century. Toward the end of the evening Dr. Whittemore read Julia May’s poem ‘When the Sun Runs Low’, written for the occasion; also the poem Louise Coburn had written for her grandfather Miller’s golden wedding. Then Dr. Whittemore presented Mr. Pepper with a gold headed cane from the church. Mrs. Samuel K. Smith, who was in Waterville when we first came here in 1861, gave me, from the church, a beautiful amethyst brooch outlined by pearls — twenty-five of them, one for each ‘two years of our married life. Father and I said a few probably inappropriate words, then Marie Stewart went to the piano and played Mr. Pepper’s favorite hymn, ‘Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me’.<\/p>\n “People talk about heavenly bliss. They don’t know anything about it. Earthly bliss is good enough for me while here on earth. Let heavenly bliss come later. They talk about heaven on earth. That I can understand, for I believe heaven is the same story continued in the next chapter in the other country, and we are all the chapters.<\/p>\n “The next day we distributed the flowers to the sick and shut-in. Mrs. Whittemore told us of a little sick girl down on Western Avenue, who never in her life had seen a hot house flower and never could unless we took her one. ‘Let us each select the prettiest rose we can find’, I said, ‘and put them all in a box for that sick girl’. How many lives beside ours were brightened by that wealth of flowers I really don’t know. One good woman who wanted to go to the reception, but could not, sat down and cried for joy when a bunch of golden chrysanthemums was left at her door.”<\/p>\n Mrs. Pepper tells how they came to consent to such a big reception. “Fannie and Charlie and Annie kept telling us how much pleasure they would get out of a celebration of our golden wedding and how much our friends wanted it. We held out against it until one day they took Father aside and won him over. He came to me and said ‘The children want a party, a real golden wedding party, and we ought to stand aside and let them have their fun. It is lovely of them to want to honor us in this way.’ So we agreed to say ‘Yea verily and amen’, and withdrew to the rear. All trouble’and expense we were to be freed from, if we would only keep well and look happy “when the time came. It was an easy contract on our side.”<\/p>\n And that is how a wonderfully gracious and dearly loved Waterville couple celebrated their golden wedding nearly fifty years ago.<\/p>\n Year: 1959<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Read the script for “Little Talks” program #406, Broadcast on February 1, 1959<\/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":[800,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7932"}],"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=7932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7932\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}