<\/p>\n
Tonight I begin a series of broadcasts on old-time Waterville, largely derived from information I have secured from recently discovered records at City Hall. You will perhaps remember that last spring I told over this program how, in the spring of 1962, in a long abandoned lavatory in the basement of City Hall, there was found, dumped on the floor and apparently abandoned, precious records of our city dating as far back as the original separation from Winslow in 1802. I have already told how those discovered records included the first town orders ever issued in Waterville, several years of tax lists, warrants for early town meetings, the auction of paupers, the care of soldiers’ families, many petitions for everything from a new road to commitment of an insane person, liquor licenses and reports of the town’s liquor agent and, most surprising of all, something that is probably not duplicated by any other Maine town — <\/strong>the individual receipts given by heads of households in Waterville for receiving their share of the returned surplus from the federal treasury in 183’\/.<\/p>\n During the past year I have been going over the several hundred pages of notes which I made when City Treasurer Welton Farrow invited me to examine those old papers last spring. I decided to organize the result of that study into a series of broadcasts, the first of which is this one tonight.<\/p>\n Now let us see what the old records tell us about the history of Waterville streets. I have often wondered which streets came first and why. Those old records provide the answer, but I want to acknowledge at once that I could not have interIreted those records correctly without the help of a man who knows old Waterville better than anyone else in the community. That man is Attorney Raymond, Rogers. His knowledge comes because, from boyhood, he has had an interest in old things and old ways of our town; because as a lawyer dealing constantly with real estate holdings he has become thoroughly familiar with the old maps, the old lot lines, and the old markers; and also because he is the son-in-law and was long the professional partner of Waterville’s great lawyer, Harvey D. Eaton, a man who had stored in that unforgetting brain of his a tremendous amount of knowledge about Waterville from its earliest days.\u00a0 l owe to Raymond Rogers, therefore, the ability to speak with assurance tonight about Waterville’s ancient streets.<\/p>\n Let us first bear in mind that in every town in America that had its beginning :before 1800, and in many later towns as well, the first streets followed already traveled roads. Those roads were built to connect certain points. Since Waterville’s earliest industries were not on the Kennebec but on the Messalonskee, we should expect to find that very early roads connected the sites of those mills with one or more points on the river where the products of the mills could be loaded on to barges or ships. And that is exactly what happened.<\/p>\n Before we take this up in detail, let us go back a bit to see how such roads were developed. The first ways overland, many of which followed ancient Indian trails, were what are generally called blazed trails, because along the route trees were marked by hewing a chip off a tree on each side of the path, especially where it took a turn. When the underbrush had been removed, a man could pass on foot, with a pack on his back. The next improvement came when the path was widened enough to permit the passage of a pack horse in summer and a sled in winter.<\/p>\n Meanwhile no intercepting stones or roots were touched. The traveler just had to get around them as best he could. Only when such obstacles were removed, could wheeled vehicles get through, and at first those vehicles were two-wheeled carts. The use of four-wheeled wagons hauled by oxen, driven abreast, called for further smoothing and the building of causeways and bridges. The final step came when the road was made safe for the passage of carriages.<\/p>\n We have no evidence that, by the time when Waterville was incorporated in 1802, any road in this community was fit for a passenger carriage, and we have reason to believe that no one owned a carriage in Waterville earlier than 1808. In fact, the Augusta and Hallowell historians tell us that the first carriage came to that region in 1805.<\/p>\n We are now ready to see where, before the days of any streets at all, Waterville’s early roads were located. One was the road to Fairfield Meeting House, the place we now call Fairfield Center. It extended from a landing on the river, near the later site of the Lockwood Mills, up what is now Main Street, over what we call the Mountain Farm, to the first meeting house in the town of Fairfield, which stood where the Fairfield Center Methodist Church now stands.<\/p>\n Another road, called the Norridgewock Road, <\/em>rambled from near the present Crescent Hotel out in the general direction of the present Silver Street over Western Avenue, past the site of Mount Merici, up over Mayflower Hill to the Rice’s Rip road, then down past the present Stetson Farm to the Holmes Farm, out to Ten Lots, then swinging northeast to Norridgewock. That later became the regular stage route from Waterville to Caratunk Falls via Norridgewock.<\/p>\n A third road connected the mills on the lower Messalonskee below the Emerson Bridge ~~th the landings on the river, following approximately the present line of Silver Street; and another road ran south from Main Street along the river, as far as the present Gold Street. On that road were located all of Waterville’s early business establishments. There too were the first ferries across the river, one at the foot of the present Sherwin Street, the other near what is now the south side of the Ticonic Bridge. Both ferries of course soon went out of existence after the bridge was built.<\/p>\n When Nehemiah Getchell and Asa Redington built a dam across the Kennebec in 1792, businesses sprang up on the river bank above the dam, and the necessity for a road to those stores and shops gave us the first crude highway that has since become Front Street. Very early a road was also built down over the hill from Silver Street to Water Street, and it was that road that finally became Sherwin Street.<\/p>\n One of the earliest roads was a county highway from Waterville to Kendalls Mills, or Fairfield Village. Contrary to what one might suppose, that road did not go up close to the river, as does the present College Avenue. In fact, there was no road at all there until the first college building was erected in 1819. The original road to Fairfield Village was not up College Avenue, but by way of what is now called Drummond Avenue. That road left the road to Fairfield Meeting House somewhere near the present Main Street railroad crossing and swung in a curve in the general direction of Ticonic Street to Drummond Avenue, then straight on to Fairfield. Still another early road led to West Waterville, now Oakland, from the Emerson Bridge at the foot of Silver Street out very nearly as the Uakland Road now runs, if we consider several important changes made in later times.<\/p>\n Besides those well traveled roads, many lesser and shorter roads connected farms outside the village then known as Ticonic Falls, the little cluster of houses along Water Street up the hill to Hain Street as far as Temple, likewise along Front Street and out Silver Street to the bend at Spring Street. When Waterville became a separate town in 1802, there was nothing except farms above Temple Street. In fact a farmhouse, surrounded by woods, stood where the Elmwood Hotel now stands.<\/p>\n Before we consider Waterville’s first streets, we should bear in mind two things: first, those streets were largely improvements on the roads I have just been discussing and, secondly, what is now Waterville’s major business section, Main Street, was then its residential area. The businesses were located on lower Front Street and the northern end of Water Street with the industries located at Crummett’s Mills, near the site of the present Pumping Station on Western Avenue, and along the stream below the Emerson Bridge.<\/p>\n The earliest record of Waterville streets found among the old papers at City Hall bears the date 1802, the very year of the towm’s incorporation. In that year 13 leading citizens, including such well remembered names as Asa Redington, Abijah Smith, Moses Appleton and Isaac Temple, petitioned the justices of the Court of General Sessions of Kennebec County for the laying out of a regular turnpiked highway from lithe west side of the Kennebec River near the saw mill owned by Nehemiah Getchell and others to the south end of the tovm of Fairfield near Jeremiah Tozier’s dwelling house, and likewise that the county road from Asa Emerson’s to the south line of the town of Fairfield near Thomas Gullifer’s be altered for the public good.” The result of that petition was improvement for regular travel of the older crude road along Drummond Avenue.<\/p>\n Among the old papers at City Hall is one carrying the title: “Ls.ying out of several roads, Nay, 1808”. The first listed is a widening, improving, and some change of route, in the road from Emerson Bridge to Ticonic Village the road that was later given the name of Silver Street. The second describes the laying out of Sherwin Street. We have no time to give you the details of any of these streets, and it would be too tiresome for you to listen to them. But the description of Sherwin Street is so short and so typical of all the others, that I want to give it to you just as it was recorded in the handwriting of some scribe here in Waterville 155 years ago. Note especially how the landmarks are described. Here, then, is the original Sherwin Street: “Beginning at a stake and stones on the south line of the road from Emerson Bridge to Ticonic Village (that is, Silver Street), near the potter~s shop at the southwest corner of EInathan Sherwin;s land, thence south 74 degrees east 52 rods to a stake and stones near one of said Sherwin’s poplar trees, marked with a split circle enclosing a triangle; thence south 48 degrees east 11 rods to a stake and stones; thence south 73 degrees east 30 rods to the Kennebec River at a white oak tree standing in the line near the blacksmith shop.”<\/p>\n The third street described in this old paper ran from that blacksmith shop on Water Street up to what is now Lockwood Circle, right across the little park there and up Front Street to “a stake and stones near James Hasty’s store opposite the north end of the meeting house common.” That was where the City Hall now stands. The fourth road, called the Ferry Road, ran from Bacon and Gilman’s store near the present southwest corner of Front Street, down to the ferry landing on the site of the Lockwood Mills.<\/p>\n Those four early streets no longer existing Ferry Road Silver, Sherwin, Front, and the were, except for the through roads we described at the beginning of this broadcast, Waterville’s first streets. That is all we have time for tonight.<\/p>\n Next week we shall continue with other old streets that came with the growth of Ticonic Village.<\/p>\n Year: 1963<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Read the script for “Little Talks” program #567, Broadcast on March 3, 1963<\/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":[796,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8264"}],"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=8264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}