<\/p>\n
A listener has reminded me that there is one Kennebec County town that has seldom been mentioned on this program, and that it is a town worthy of some historical attention. That town is Vienna. Just as Maine people pronounce the name of the Franklin County town Ma’drid, not Madrid’, so they call the Kennebec town Vi’enna, not Vien’na. Vienna has always been a small town, never numbering a thousand inhabitants. Like most of Maine’s rural towns, it had its largest population when the census was taken in 1860. At that time 878 persons lived in Vienna. After that, the population steadily declined. At the turn of the century in 1900 it was 460. Now it is less than 400.<\/p>\n
The first settlers came to the place in 1786, taking up land purchased from Jedidiah Prescott of Windham and Nathaniel Whittier of Readfield, who held title under a deed from the New Plymouth Company. It was Prescott who personally surveyed the region and lotted the land. It was first organized as a plantation under the name of Goshen, and was later called Wyman Plantation. It was incorporated as the town of Vienna in 1802, the same year that Waterville became a separate town. Vienna than had exactly thirty-five inhabitants.<\/p>\n
No one seems to know just why this tiny Maine town was named for the famous European city of music and dancing. Our leading authority on Maine place names, Miss Ava Chadbourne, says: “The name was given in honor of one of Europe’s oldest cities, capital of the Austrian empire. Vienna in Europe was noted for its palaces, churches, charitable and literary institutions, as well as for the gaiety of its society. It was a happy choice for a Maine town seeking to honor a foreign city.”<\/p>\n
Besides the small villages at Vienna and North Vienna, there were once several hamlets whose names have now been nearly forgotten: Egypt, Frog Hollow, and Vienna Mountain. Lonely cellar holes in out-of-the-way places and old stone walls are all that is left of many of the early settlements. Most of those first homes were made on the hills, where the builders felt safer from the Indians and freer from early frosts.<\/p>\n
Joshua Howland, the first man to build a cabin in Vienna in 1786, worked much of the time for an earlier settler in Farmington. Since he was thus obliged to be away from home several days at a time, his wife stayed alone, having her nearest neighbors five miles away at Farmington Falls. In the other direction the nearest settlement was at Bishop’s Mills, the old name for Mt. Vernon village.<\/p>\n
Before 1790 Vienna had no roads. Settlers found their way to the place by means of blazed trails through the forest. The nearest mill for grinding their corn was at Winthrop. One historian tells us that, because of the long distance to a mill, many bushels of wheat and corn were ground at home in the tiny hand coffee mills, and that some people even adopted the Indian custom of crushing corn in a mortar with an old-fashioned pestle, making what was called samp.<\/p>\n
Many of the early settlers came from New Hampshire, especially from the older towns of Raymond, Candia and Chester in that state. It was no easy journey, before 1800, from New Hampshire to Vienna, Maine. Those who came to make their home in that Kennebec wilderness frequently made the journey in winter, when swamps and streams were frozen over. If the snow was not too deep, the trek could be made in the cold months much easier than in summer.<\/p>\n
The story is told that in 1789 one family came through by ox team, which would indicate that even thirteen years before the place became a town. the trail had been widened enough to accommodate an ox cart. Before starting on the journey, the mother had made four big kettles full of pea soup and set it out of doors to freeze. The knotted end of a piece of rope was suspended into each kettle to freeze solidly with the soup. The frozen soup was removed from the kettles and fastened to stakes of the ox sled, one on each of the sled’s four stakes. When the family stopped for the night, they would chop off a block of frozen pea soup, and heat it over the camp fire. The story doesn’t tell us what would have become of the soup in case of a quick thaw, but at any rate it is a soup recipe not found in modern cook books.<\/p>\n
One of the blazed trails passed near the cabin of the Whittier family. H. Warren Foss, a Colby graduate, who lived in Mt. Vernon, recalled that he had heard old Simon Whittier relate that, when Whittier was a boy, he had often seen his mother make a torch and at night go down the trail to meet her husband, returning from the Winthrop grist mill with their ground grain. In those days, because of wolves and bobcats and those terrorizing devils, variously called loucivee and Indian devils, travelling by night was not a favorite form of outdoor activity.<\/p>\n
People put up with a lot of hardship in those pioneer days. Here is the story of how the Allen family came to Vienna in 1792. The family came from Martha’s Vineyard, where father, mother, and six children set sail on the ship Speedwell on September 12. After twelve days of a very stormy voyage they landed at Hallowell. There they picked up a 17 year old Indian boy to guide them over the trail to Vienna. They hired Seth Luce of Readfield to haul their furniture as far as he could with an ox team for twenty dollars. They made quite a procession, because besides the eight members of the family, the Indian and Seth Luce, there were two horses, a cow, a heifer, six sheep and a hog. Just out of Hallowell the hog took such a dislike to the journey that he took to the woods, headed back toward Martha’s Vineyard. After a long delay the animal was captured, but only when they came to a settler’s cabin and were able to get some ears of corn, could the hog be enticed, an ear of corn at a time, to go along with the travelers.<\/p>\n
Following the ox team with the furniture came the father on horseback, with a bed across the saddle, a bundle of blankets behind him, and a two-year old child in his arms. Then came the mother, also on horseback, a five year old daughter behind her, and an infant in her arms. The party spent the night in a log cabin where Readfield Depot now stands. The next day they journeyed over Kents Hill, where already were two frame houses and a log cabin, continuing onto Wyman Plantation. their destination. The men slept in a shed with the animals; the women and children slept on the cabin floor of a neighbor until the Allens were able to put up their own cabin.<\/p>\n
One of the important cooking utensils in log cabin days was the trinet. It was a grate. triangular in shape. on each corner of which was placed a dish of some part of a meal. By rotating the grate before a huge open fire. all three dishes could be kept warm.<\/p>\n
Warren Foss said that when he was a small boy he at one time needed a pair of new shoes. His grandfather said, “What that boy needs ain’t shoes. He needs a good pair of cowhide boots.” So grandfather took the boy to an old shoemaker in North Vienna who even in the 1890’s still knew how to make cowhide boots. As Foss told the story: “The shoemaker looked me over, measured my feet. and figured on the job. In two weeks I went back for the finished boots. The leather had come from a Vienna cow, and the hide had been tanned in Chesterville. My boots didn’t have the old hand-made pegs which the old-time shoemakers usually made themselves. Mine were up-to-date cowhides with machine-made pegs. Sylvanus Fairbanks of Mt. Vernon had invented a machine for sharpening the pegs, and his pegs were both good and cheap. Most things in the world wear out, but my boots never did. I still have them around somewhere.”<\/p>\n
In the early days of the Vienna community the largest settlement was at North Vienna, where there was established the town’s first post office in 1808. Vienna village did not gain supremacy over its northern neighbor until 1854, when its mills became active and its own post office was authorized. One of the first merchants in that village was Lewis Bradley. When Bradley started business, he invited all the neighbors to come in and have a free drink at his bar. Then he cut away the bar and answered that he was done with the liquor traffic. Lewis Bradley of Vienna thus preceded Neal Dow by at least twenty years as a convinced prohibitionist.<\/p>\n
By 1800 Vienna people no longer had to carry their grain to Winthrop for grinding. In that year Patrick Galbraith laid a dam across the village stream and built a grist mill. A bit later was opened a carding and fulling mill, for like other parts of Maine, the Vienna pastures supported many sheep. Then came a shingle mill and a shoe peg mill. In 1892, when Kingsbury wrote his “History of Kennebec County”, there was at Vienna a mill where Henry Trask made handles for hoes, forks and shovels, and in another building Henry Colby made wagons and carriages. The Maine Register for 1900 tells us that in that year Vienna had a grist mill run by G. H. Mooers; a mill where P. Whittier & Son turned out shingles and barrel staves; another where H. C. Trask made picker sticks and at North Vienna a mill where Arthur French made boxes and wooden measures.<\/p>\n
Speaking of wooden measures, some of us remember how, in the first decade of this century, many things how sold by weight were sold by dry measure. When I worked as a boy in that old Bridgton store, we would never have thought of weighing a peck of potatoes, although we very well knew it ought to weigh fifteen pounds. We simply took a peck measure and filled it. Whether the customer got more or less than fifteen pounds depended on how much one heaped the measure. In those days I never heard of anyone weighing apples or other local fruit. In our store were several nests of four measures each: one quart, two quarts, four quarts, and a peck. For occasional use we kept a single half-bushel measure.<\/p>\n
By 1905 one commodity, formerly measured, was being sold by weight. That was dried beans. Does any listener know how much a quart of dry pea beans is supposed to weigh? Well, I’ll tell you. One pound and fourteen ounces. Nobody ever asked for a pound of beans. It was always a pint or a quart, and the large families often bought two quarts a week. When cooked, two quarts of dried beans makes quite a sizable serving.<\/p>\n
Last summer the community of Paris Hill paid honor to the memory of its most distinguished son, Lincoln’s Vice-President, Hannibal Hamlin. On the very day that Paris Hill was celebrating, I accidentally ran across an item in the Waterville Mail for August 21, 1862. In the midst of the Civil War, Waterville College was about to open its fall term. The Mail said: “The entering class at Waterville College will be as large as could reasonable be expected in the present condition of the country. The agent who is soliciting funds in the campaign being conducted jointly with Brown University was able to make a very hopeful report at the recent commencement, and the Trustees adjourned confident that new impetus had been given to a liberal endowment of this Waterville institution. Among other subscriptions was that of VicePresident Hannibal Hamlin for a scholarship of $1,000.”<\/p>\n
You who remember your history will recall that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863. It may surprise you to know that not everyone in Waterville approved that proclamation. One of the opponents was the Rev. W. A. P. Dillingham, pastor of the Waterville Universalist Church. Here is how the Waterville Mail reported a meeting held in this town on Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1863: “Rev. Dillingham announced that he did not at all approve of the proclamation, but because it had been issued by the President, he would, as a good citizen, continue true allegiance to the head of the Union. When Mr. Dillingham finished, Mr. Nye introduced a resolution: Resolved, that we cordially approve the President’s Emancipation Proclamation, not only as a necessary and effective war measure, but also as an act of tardy justice to the oppressed. No one, not even Dillingham, objected, and the resolution was passed unanimously.”<\/p>\n
Year: 1959<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #433, Broadcast on November 8, 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\/8013"}],"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=8013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8013\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}