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How long has it been since you have seen a banknote? The paper money we now have in circulation is issued entirely by the U. S. government, the issuance of paper currency by individual banks having been outlawed some time ago. Yet within the memory of persons younger than I those banknotes were common.<\/p>\n
Banknotes have today become collectors’ items, and one of the finest collections is in the hands of Ralph Austin of South China. He has spent many years assembling notes issued by Maine banks, and it has been his aim to secure eventually at least one copy of every denomination issued by every Maine bank, even those banks that have long been out of existence. I have had the pleasure of examining Mr. Austin’s collection, and I assure you it is outstanding.<\/p>\n
By the time I was old enough to handle paper money, the smallest banknote was a five dollar hill. Ones and twos were then all U. -So <\/em>government issue. But there was a time when the banks issued three dollar bills and even fractional currency. In fact one of my own prized possessions is a three dollar bill issued by the Calais bank in 1838.<\/p>\n Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, especially in periods of financial depression, those banknotes caused a lot of trouble. The banking laws were nowhere nearly as strict as they are today, and many a bank issued notes in excess of any ready assets. Frequently a rumor would start people turning in the notes of a particular bank, and the bank simply couldn’t pay in the required silver or gold.<\/p>\n One of the best examples of how banknotes could become worthless is supplied by the financial history of the Civil War. The Confederate Government issued vast quantities of such notes, some in as small denomination as five cents. When the South lost the war, those Confederate notes had no value. Confederate paper money amounting to several millions of dollars in face value is scattered around the old homes of America, to say nothing of the quantity in the hands of collectors.<\/p>\n When Maine became a state in 1820 there were just fifteen banks authorized to issue banknotes in what had been the old Massachusetts District of Maine. Two were located in Portland, two at Hallowell, and two at Bath. The other nine were, going across the state from west to east, located at Kennebunk, Baco, Augusta, Gardiner, Waterville, Wiscasset, Bangor, Castine and Calais.<\/p>\n Thirty years later, in 1850, the number of Maine banks issuing notes had increased to 41. Surprisingly Bangor had more banks than did Portland, seven to Portland’s six. Two of Portland’s banks, the Canal and the Casco, survive today. The Canal Bank was formed purposely to promote the building of the Cumberland and Oxford Canal, to connect Sebago Lake with Portland Harbor. Through parts of Raymond and Windham traces of that old canal may still be seen today. One of Bangor’s banks was owned by General Veazie, the man who had taken over the first railroad in Maine, built from Bangor to Old Town, and had extended it, getting it ready to be placed in the longer line that would be called the European and North American, designed with the ambitious project of connecting Boston and Halifax by rail.<\/p>\n So we see that the two cities of Portland and Bangor accounted, in 1850, for almost a third of Maine’s 41 banks. Augusta then had three banks, as did also Bath. Waterville boasted two: the Ticonic and the Waterville. Other places with two banks were Brunswick, Saco and Rockland. So it was that only eight Maine communities accounted for 27 of the 41 banks. Where were the other fourteen located?<\/p>\n One had just been opened in the comparatively new village of Lewiston Falls. Except at Portland and Brunswick, there was no other bank in Cumberland County. Besides the two banks at Saco,<\/em> York County had banks at Biddeford and South Berwick. On the Kennebec River, besides the banks at Augusta, others were in operation at Gardiner, Hallowell and Skowhegan. Topsham, across the river from Brunswick, had a bank. There were not only 2 banks at Rockland, but even larger banks at Thomaston and Waldoboro.<\/p>\n As one went along the coast and up the rivers beyond Casco Bay, he found banks at Wiscasset, Belfast, Ellsworth,. Eastport and Calais. Judged by today\u00b7s standards, some of those banks had amazingly small capitalization. Thirteen of them, including the Waterville Bank, were capitalized at only $50,000. Waterville’s Ticonic Bank was one of five with a capital of $75,000. Of all the 41 banks in Maine only six of them had stock issued at more than $100,000. The largest was the Canal of Portland, with $400,000. It was followed by its rival, the Casco, with $300,000. Third in size was General Veazie’s bank in Bangor, with \u00a7200,000. The Merchants in Portland had capital of \u00a7150,000, as did also the Biddeford Bank, while the Bank of the State of Maine in Bangor stood at $125,000.<\/p>\n Believe it or not, some of the banks in 1850 were paying as much as five percent annual dividend on deposits, although several were paying as little as three percent. Depositors got the best dividends in Portland, Bangor, Augusta, Hallowell, and Bath. Evidently the two Waterville banks were then not so prosperous. The Ticonic Bank paid 3-1\/2 percent, but the Waterville Bank only three.<\/p>\n It is interesting to note the executive officers of the two Waterville banks in 1850. The president of the Ticonic was Waterville’s leading citizen, lawyer and financier, Timothy Boutelle. His cashier was Sumner Percival. Of the older Waterville Bank the president was S. P. Shaw and the cashier A. C. Perkins.<\/p>\n One of the memorable events of the past summer was the local Kiwanis Club’s recognition of the 100th birthday of their oldest member, Henry Winters. In fact Mr. Winters is the oldest Kiwanian in the world. Even at his present advanced age he seldom misses a meeting, in Waterville in the summer and in Florida in the winter. Most of you read in the newspaper last July the account of the huge, seven-foot high, birthday cake made for that birthday occasion, and of the fine things Mr. Winters has done for Waterville since he moved here in 1882. The Kiwanis Club honored me by asking me to be the speaker at their banquet honoring Mr. Winters, and I took the occasion to tell a bit of what Waterville was like when Henry was born in the neighboring town of Unity in 1862. Perhaps the listeners to this program would like to know about it too.<\/p>\n I do not need to remind you that Henry Winters has seen the coming of many common things in our lives today that did not exist in that year when he was born a hundred years ago. Then there were no bathrooms, no electric lights, no telephones, no cash registers, no automobiles, no radios, no television, and blessing of all blessings, there was no income tax.<\/p>\n But it was a critical, perilous time. The nation was divided against itself, in the throes of Civil War, a war that was to see more Americans killed than fell in both the First and Second World Wars. July of 1862, when Henry Winters was born, was one of the blackest periods for the Union cause in that war. Stonewall Jackson had just swept up the Shenandoah Valley. Johnston had won the impressive Confederate victory at Fair Oaks. Seven fierce days of battle had come to a stalemate before Richmond, and in one of those battles, that at Gaines Mill, had fallen young William Heath, who only a year before had, with his brother Francis, recruited right here in Waterville a company of the Third Maine. Before Henry Winters was two months old the Second Battle of Bull Run had ended like the First, in bitter Union defeat. It is true the North had captured New Orleans and Colby’s graduate Ben Butler held military rule over the city.<\/p>\n Of course Waterville was stirred by the war in that summer of 1862. Patriotic meetings were frequent andmcruiting was active. There was considerable competition among the Maine towns by way of bounties paid to men who would enlist. No sooner had Waterville matched Augusta’s bounty of \u00a7100, then both towns learned that Hallowell was paying $150. Such competition kept raising the ante until by autumn it was costing Waterville $300 to get soldiers to fill its expected quotas. A year later the draft act was making it even more difficult.<\/p>\n In 1562 Waterville was still predominantly a farming community. Next to lumber, in terms of dollars, Waterville’s largest export was wheat; then came oats, and only in fourth place was what one would have supposed to have been larger, corn. In 1862 Waterville had three times as many oxen as horses, and only one farmer in eight owned a mowing machine.<\/p>\n By 1862 Waterville’s first great industry, that of ship building, was gone. Once there had been five big ship yards between Ticonic Falls and the foat of Winslow Bay. Sloops, brigs, schooners, and even full-sized ships had been built at Waterville, then floated down the river to be fitted with masts and sails at Hallowell. Only seventeen years before Henry Winters was born, John Lang had launched an ocean-going ship, the Ocean Bird, at his ship yard in Vassalboro, located on the river bank on what later became the Burleigh farm, about two miles above Getchell’s Corner. It was that Lang ship, the Ocean Bird, which on its return trip from Africa, brought to the United States; the first peanuts ever sold in this country. Although the slave trade had been pretty well swept from the seas by that time, Lang’s ship did bring back one Negro boy, personal servant of the captain, who was immediately declared free when the ship returned to Maine.<\/p>\n In 1862 Waterville’s largest factory in terms of number of employees was a place called the Laundry. Only the very oldest of our present inhabitants have the faintest recollection of that name for the place, but the place itself everyone here still knows. The Laundry was the old name for the Hathaway Shirt Factory on Appleton Street. It was popularly called the Laundry because most of its employees were women who spent all their working time ironing those stiff-bosomed white shirts. It took only a few cutters,’sewers and button-hole makers to turn out all the shirts a whole army of girls could iron.<\/p>\n In 1862 Waterville’s second largest factory was the Iron Works of Webber and Haviland, where all the employees were of course men. F. B. Blanchard had about 30 men making doors, sash and blinds, and a tannery employed about 20. The village had three harness makers, one of whom also specialized in saddles.<\/p>\n On the Messalonskee were a planing mill, a plaster mill, and a place where shovel handles were made.<\/p>\n In 1862 Waterville was a prominent stage center, where no fewer than 16 stage lines converged to meet the trains of the Androscoggin and Kennebec, the Somerset and Kennebec, and the Penobscot and Kennebec Railroads. Waterville’s 4,392 people were served by four livery stables, two of them at the town’s hotels, the Elmwood and the Williams House. Such was Waterville a hundred years ago when Henry\u00a0 Winters was born.<\/p>\n Year: 1962<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Read the script for “Little Talks” program #544, Broadcast on September 23, 1962<\/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":[1182,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8195"}],"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=8195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}