<\/p>\n
In a recent broadcast about the Morrill family of Waterville’s Winter Street, I mentioned that a distinguished descendant of Llewellyn Morrill is Dr. Morrill Illsley of California. The name Illsley — a very famous New England name long connected with both the Baptist denomination and Colby College — is related to the Morrill’s four daughters. Waterville people knew well the three who did not marry, and who long lived together in the Winter Street home. The fourth sister, Mary, after her graduation from Colby in 1891, married her classmate, Reuben L. Illsley who, after ten years as a high school principal in Maine and Massachusetts, entered the Office of Internal Revenue in Washington and rose to head one of its divisions.<\/p>\n
Mr. Illsley’s father was a distinguished Baptist minister, George Boardman Illsley, a graduate of Colby in 1863. Himself the son of a clergyman, George Illsley had been named for Colby’s first graduate and missionary to Burma, George Dana Boardman. The Illsley family had been for more than 200 years on American soil when the present Dr. Morrill Illsley’s grandfather graduated from Colby in 1863. In the family is still preserved the will of William Ilsley dated at Newbury in the County of Essex, New England, Massachusetts, February 26, 1679. Some of the terms of that will are both quaint and illustrative of the time: “I give unto Barbara, my wife, a feather bed, bolster and pillow and two pairs of sheets, with blankets, coverlid and rug, for her use during her natural life. She shall have a being in the house, and my son Joseph shall provide for her all things necessary in sickness or in health. My son Joseph shall cause to be paid to her yearly ten pounds in good merchantable wheat, pork, barley, malt and Indian corn, as she shall need, and provide her with firewood ready cut for her use, shall give her four bushels of fruit, apples and pears, and give her liberty to keep three or four fowls.<\/p>\n
“I give to my son Isaac a parcel of land that I am about to build on near Henry Jacques.<\/p>\n
“I give to my son William 50 pounds, to be paid 5 pounds in barley and Indian corn, and the rest in meat cattle.<\/p>\n
“I give to Samuel Moore, husband of Mary Ilsley, besides what he has already received of me, five shillings.<\/p>\n
“I give to Samuel Hale, husband of Sara Ilsley, ten pounds value in good merchantable country hay within three years after my wife’s death, excepting a bearing blanket and a pillow board, which, if my daughter Sara die without issue, I then give them to my son John, his wife and children.<\/p>\n
“I give to my son John 50 pounds, to be paid after mine and my wife’s decease, and I give him my land at Jericho in Amesbury bounds and to have all my goods and lands not otherwise disposed of after my death and funeral expenses have been discharged.<\/p>\n
“I desire my loving friends Richard Knight and Nicholas Noyes to be the overseers of this my will and testament.”<\/p>\n
It is well known that Henry David Thoreau, the nature-loving recluse of Walden Pond, once visited the Maine wilderness, being one of the earliest of Massachusetts men to explore the Allagash. Out of his experiences in the region of Moosehead Lake and the wilds north of it, Thoreau wrote his book, “The Maine Woods”.<\/p>\n
Not so well known is the journey to Moosehead of another New England writer, contemporary and friend of Thoreau, James Russell Lowell. Lowell went to Maine’s biggest lake in the summer of 1853, and wrote about it under the title of “A Moosehead Journal”, in Volume One of his literary Essays.<\/p>\n
Especially interesting to us is the fact that, on his way to Moosehead, Lowell stopped overnight in Waterville. He came by way of railroad — not through Augusta, for the rail line from Augusta to Waterville was not completed until two years later — but on the A & K RR through Lewiston, Winthrop and Belgrade. He traveled from Boston to Portland on what was then called the Eastern RR, through Portsmouth, later the eastern division of the Boston and Maine.<\/p>\n
Reporting the first leg of his journey, Lowell commented on the morbid curiosity of human nature, something that I suspect is just as apparent and regrettable today as it was a hundred years ago. He wrote: “The only event of the journey until I reached Waterville was a boy hawking exhilaratingly a newspaper giving account of the latest railroad smash, thirteen lives lost. No doubt the boy wished it had been fifty. This mercantile interest in horrors, a kind of stock interest in murder, misfortune and pestilence, must have an odd effect on the human mind.”<\/p>\n
Now let us see what Lowell had to say about Waterville. It had been a long ride from Boston, with change of cars at Portland, not at a union station, but after a carriage ride across the city from the station of the Eastern RR to that of the A & K. This is what Lowell wrote: “Well, here at 10 p.m., I am in a neat and comfortable room under the care of the genial landlord of the Elmwood House in Waterville. After tea I set forth to explore the town. It has a good chance of some day being pretty, but, like most American towns, it is now in a hobbledehoy age, still growing, and one cannot tell what may happen to it. A child with good promise of beauty is often spoiled by its second teeth. We Americans are always tearing up and rearranging. (What a forecast of urban renewal.) For my part, I never saw a house old enough to be torn down. It is too like the Scythian fashion of knocking old people on the head.<\/p>\n
“It seems as if every American town must have its own specimen of everything, and so there is a college in Waterville. The buildings are three in number, of brick, and quite up to the average ugliness which seems essential in edifices of this description. We erect handsome factories for cottons and woolens, then put up monstrosities to make doctors, lawyers and parsons.”<\/p>\n
The next morning Lowell resumed his journey. Let us see how he described his trip on to Moosehead: “The coach leaves Waterville at 5 a.m. and one must breakfast in the dark at a quarter past four. A train also leaves at 20 minutes before five; so the passengers of both train and stage are pastured in the Elmwood dining room gregariously. My stomach resented for several hours a piece of beefsteak which I forced upon it. It was, more properly speaking, a piece of that leather conveniency that in these regions assumes the name of steak. Today has been the hottest day of the season, yet our drive in the stage has not been unpleasant. For a long distance we followed the course of the Sebasticook River, a pretty stream with alterations of dark brown pools and wine-colored rapids. On each side of the road the land had been cleared, and little one-story houses were scattered at intervals. But the stumps still held out in most of the fields, and the tangled wilderness closed in behind. As yet only the edges of the great forest have been nibbled away.<\/p>\n
“Now and then houses thickened into an unsocial-looking village, where we drove up to the grocery to leave and take a mailbag, stopping again to water the horses at some pallid little tavern, whose one red-curtained eye (the barroom) has been put out by the inexorable thirst of the Maine Law.” (That is a reference ‘to Maine’s prohibitory law, then quite new, which Neal Dow had persuaded the legislature to adopt in 1851.)<\/p>\n
Apparently Lowell didn’t think much of Maine taverns, despite his kind words for the Elmwood. “These places”, he wrote, “are to real inns as the skull of Yorick was to his live face.”<\/p>\n
Lowell was struck by one phenomenon that has puzzled many a visitor to Maine the isolation of some of the hamlets. He wrote: “Where these villages occur at a distance from the river, it is difficult to account for them. On the riverbank a sawmill or a tannery explains them, but away from the stream they seem unaccountably out of place.”<\/p>\n
The regular stage in which Lowell left Waterville took him only to Newport, where he had to make a change. He wrote: “There being four passengers for Moosehead Lake, a vehicle called a mud-wagon was detailed at Newport for our accomodation. In this we jolted and rattled along at a livelier pace than in the coach. As we got farther north, the country, especially the hills, gave evidence of larger civilization. About the thriving town of Dexter we saw fine farms and crops. The houses too became prettier; hop vines were trained about the doors; flowers were planted in the dooryards; and there were fruitful orchards. But everywhere we could see that war between man and the forest was still fierce.<\/p>\n
“At about 11:15 p.m. we arrived at Greenville, a little village which looks as if it had dropped out of the hills and settled in the hollow at the foot of the lake. We had accomplished 72 miles in 18 hours. The driver rapped on the barroom windows, and after a while we saw the intermittent light of unsuccessful matches followed by grumbles of vocal thunder. Presently the steady blur of lighted tallow succeeded the fugitive brilliance, a hostler fumbled the door open and stood staring at us but not seeing us, with sleep still sticking allover him. We at last contrived to launch him at the slumbering landlord, who came out wide awake and welcomed us as so many half dollars — 25 cents for bed and 25 cents for breakfast. We found the only roost to be in the garret, which had been made into a single room with eleven double beds. It was like sleeping in a hospital ward.”<\/p>\n
With that story of how James Russell Lowell came to Moosehead lake via Waterville more than a hundred years ago, we must say goodbye until next week.<\/p>\n
Year: 1964<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #625, Broadcast on October 25, 1964<\/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":[42956,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8426"}],"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=8426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8426\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}