<\/p>\n
Clinton Thurlow of Weeks Mills has written another book about Maine Railroads. Like his two previous volumes, “The Weeks Mills Y” and “The WW&F Two-Footer, Hail and Farewell”, this third volume, entitled “Over the Rails by Steam”, is devoted chiefly to Maine’s narrow gauge roads. But Thurlow correctly calls it “A Railroad Scrapbook”, because he includes bits of intriguing information about other railroads, some of them not even propelled by either steam or electric current.<\/p>\n
Such a horse-powered railroad was the first rail line ever built in Maine, and one of the earliest in the United States. It was the Calais Railroad, connecting the lumber mills at Milltown with the wharves at Calais, only two miles away. The cars were drawn by horses along tracks that were iron strips two inches wide and a quarter of an inch thick, fastened to two-inch planks laid across ties. It was long before the day of the T-shaped iron rail.<\/p>\n
The cars had no brakes, but were stopped by putting the end of a heavy bar under the frame of a car wheel, then over the top of the wheel. By hanging on to the bar for dear life, the operator could stop the train. He would then trig it by putting a piece of wood under each side of a wheel. The horses could usually keep ahead of the cars on a gentle down grade, but if the train got to moving too fast, the driver would proceed to use the brake to avoid running the horses down.<\/p>\n
Fascinatingly, Thurlow tells the story of Maine’s only recorded ox railroad, a lumber line at the head of Moosehead Lake. From the earliest lumbering days in that region, it had always been a problem to get logs to the water’s edge, especially into the Penobscot. So in 1847 a charter was obtained to build a railroad over the three mile carry from the north shore of Moosehead Lake to the West Branch of the Penobscot. Among the ten incorporators were two members of Central Maine’s most famous lumber family, Abner and Philander Coburn of Skowhegan.<\/p>\n
The builders of that Moosehead Lake Railway, as it was called, were faced with the serious problem of what to use for rails. The country’s first railroads which became the nucleus of the Baltimore and Ohio, was only 15 years old. It and its few successors had all used sawed boards to lay across the ties before attaching strips of iron on which the car wheels would run over long lengths of wood. But in 1847 there was no saw mill within many miles of the proposed railroad site. With typical Yankee ingenuity the builders solved the problem. They simply cut logs, 50 to 60 feet in length, then hewed one side flat to receive the iron strips. They probably made a rather bumpy road, but since the cars went over it at a speed no faster than a man’s walk, that didn’t matter too much.<\/p>\n
The motive power for that Moosehead Railway was a big ox. I am sure more than one of my listeners has at some time in life read Henry David Thoreau’s book “The Maine Woods”. That hermit of Walden Pond paid his respects to the Moosehead Railway, which he first saw in the 1850’s. He wrote: “The steamer approached a long pier projecting from the northern wilderness. and built of some of its logs. The boat whistled where not a cabin nor a mortal was to be seen. There was not a single cabman to shout ‘Coach’ or invite us to a United States hotel. At length a man approached with a truck drawn by a single ox over a rude log railway through the woods.”<\/p>\n
Mr. Thurlow has, however, found an account of that unique railroad much more detailed than Thoreau’s. Written by Theodore Winthrop. it said: “The steamer dumped us and our canoe on a wharf at the lakehead at four o’clock. There we found, for population, one man and one great ox. Following the inland pointed nose of the ox, we saw penetrating the forest a wooden railroad. Ox-locomotive, and no other, used those rails. The train was one big cart on which we packed our traps, roofed them over with our turned-up canoe, and without the ceremony of a whistle we moved on. Our cloven hoofed engine did not whizz over the rails. Slow and sure the knock-kneed chewer of cud stepped from log to log. With speed his duty and sloth his nature, the ox seemed to protest and groan at every step. Whenever the engine driver stopped to pick a few blueberries, the train stopped also, and the engine took on fuel from the tall grass between the sleepers. At last, after a full hour, we came to the end of the three mile railway. The chewer of cud was disconnected and plodded off to his stall. The cart slid down an inclined plain to the Penobscot.”<\/p>\n
Mr. Thurlow suggests that the Moosehead road may well have given first currency to a common slang expression for a locomotive, “the bullgine”.<\/p>\n
Just as was true of Thurlow’s earlier books, this one is memorable for its illustrations. How even a man of Mr. Thurlow’s persistence could dig up these marvelous pictures is almost incredible. They alone are well worth the price of the book, which in paper covers sells for less than two dollars.<\/p>\n
One of the illustrations is an old engraving showing the ox railroad at Moosehead. Another shows the old house off Cumberland Street in Bangor, which was one terminus of the old Veazie R.R. to Old Town. Another shows the old roadbed of that railroad in the vicinity of Stillwater. Another is a picture of the area on the same road known as Hogtown, where an old lady,whose hog had been killed by a train. greased the track for some distance with hog grease so that a train was stalled for several hours.<\/p>\n
Mr. Thurlow knows a lot about the old locomotives and into this book he has put photographs of more than a score of them, from an old wood-burner on the Princeton, St. Croix and Penobscot in 1854 to the last to pull a passenger train out of Waterville just 100 years later on June 13, 1954.<\/p>\n
One of the most interesting sections of Mr. Thurlow’s new book is his chapter on wrecks. Most of those he described occurred on the narrow gauge line that he knows best, the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington, with its Y, or junction, at Mr. Thurlow’s home village of Weeks Mills. And what a wonderful job he has done collecting photographs of those long forgotten train wrecks. One picture of an overturned locomotive with a man sitting atop it Mr. Thurlow can’t identify, so he simply labels the picture “Who and Where Am I?”<\/p>\n
Certainly wrecks were frequent along the line of the WW&F, that little two-foot road whose initials, detractors said, stood for “weak, weary and feeble”. There was the cream car wreck at Wiscasset, pouring rivers of white liquid down the track; the ditching of a whole train at North Whitefield; a bad smash at Cockeyed Curve in Sheepscot, when two cars of baled hay mixed with two cars of canned corn piled up in the woods below. Then there was the pile-up of cars at Lovejoy Pond just south of Albion in 1927, and the famous Mason’s Wreck, when a big delegation of the square and compass were on their way to a celebration in Wiscasset. There was the wreck that plunged into the stream at Head Tide, and the locomotive that landed completely upside down at Windsor. Especially interesting is a photo showing oxen pulling a locomotive out of the ditch at Whitefield.<\/p>\n
This little book of Clinton Thurlow’s is one that many of you will want to own, and it will make an excellent Christmas gift to any friend interested in Maine’s old narrow gauge roads.<\/p>\n
A well known man of this part of Maine 150 years ago was Dudley Gilman, who has many descendants now living in the Waterville-Winslow area. One of those descendants is Mrs. Charles Wixson of the Garland Road, who for many years has been a correspondent of the Waterville Sentinel. Through the mother of her great-grandfather Dudley Gilman, Mrs. Wixson traces descent from one of New England’s most prominent families, the Dudleys. Dudley Gilman’s mother was Elizabeth Dudley, who married Samuel Stevens Gilman.<\/p>\n
Elizabeth Dudley was a sixth generation descendant of Thomas Dudley, first deputy governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He had come to America with John Winthrop, the first governor, in the ship Arabella in 1630, and four years later had himself been elected governor of the colony. In the early years of the settlement at Boston it was customary to change governors in each annual election, though after a lapse of one or more years a former governor was very likely to be chosen again. Thomas Dudley served as governor in 1634-35, again in 1640-41, again in 1645-46. and for a fourth time in 1650-51. He was deputy governor for thirteen separate, non-consecutive terms. Thomas Dudley had the reputation of being a very strict Puritan, and on several occasions he clashed openly and violently with John Winthrop for being too liberal and leaving the paths of orthodoxy.<\/p>\n
The Wixsons are themselves a Winslow family that has a proud heritage. Shubael Wixson was a Revolutionary soldier who had cleared a farm on the west bank of the Kennebec in Augusta, just south of the Sidney line. He died in 1831, and soon afterward his son Shubael also died at the early age of 40. The second Shubael’s four children were put out to live in homes of relatives or friends. One son, Elias, went to live, at the age of eight, with a family who resided just across the town line in Winslow. Elias’ son Atwell Wixson served in the Civil War and died in the notorious Libby Prison. Another son of Elias was Joel, the father of the present Charles Wixson.<\/p>\n
Among the odd items I like to pick up are old handbills, announcements or programs of entertainments of long ago. Such a handbill that recently attracted my attention advertised an entertainment in Mount Vernon, Maine 81 years\u00b7ago on July 4, 1884. The heading said: “Fourth of July! Grand entertainment under the auspices of the Hall Klub, at School House, Mount Vernon Village, Friday evening, July 4, 1884.”<\/p>\n
The first number on the program was a farce entitled: “No Cure, No Pay”. It had an all feminine cast, on which were the two Brown sisters, Alice and Martha, and five other girls of the village. The farce was followed by an oration by “the noted colored philosopher Pompey Squash, Esq. “Then there was a group of Civil War songs, a patriotic reading, and another farce, “Servants that Never Fight”. This time the cast was all male, and consisted of only three persons, W. M. Tyler, F. G. Butler and N. C. Leighton. The program closed with a Grand Tableau in which a young lady representing the Statue of Liberty was surrounded by 13 other girls representing the original states. The admission charge was 15 cents.<\/p>\n
Year: 1965<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #667, Broadcast on November 21, 1965<\/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":[792,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8549"}],"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=8549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}