<\/p>\n
Over the years on this program we have several times referred to the ice industry of the Kennebec. So lucrative was it at the height of its boom that folks called it White Gold. I want to tell you a bit more about that big winter business, including some facts and figures I have only recently learned.<\/p>\n
The peak period of Kennebec ice was the last twenty years of the 19th century, but the business started long before that. Late in the fall of 1826 the brig Orion came up the river and, because of early freezing, the river was ice-locked opposite Dearborn’s Wharf in Pittston. In the spring the vessel was ballasted, of all things, with floating ice and set sail for Baltimore. There the ice — what of it that had not melted — was sold for $700.<\/p>\n
It was the beginning of a big industry. In 1828 Rufus Page of Richmond built an ice house at Cedar Grove, just south of the Gardiner town line. It held 1,500 tons. Ice to fill it was cut the hard way, by hand. The next summer one load of ice from the Page house was shipped to the West Indies, the first of millions of tons of Kennebec ice that would go to the Caribbean before artificial ice ended the business.<\/p>\n
By 1850 Yankee ingenuity had materially reduced the cost of harvesting the ice. A plow was invented with cutting teeth and iron to play lines across the ice field and greatly reduced the amount of hand sawing. Oxen were used to haul the ice up long ramps to the storage places inside the ice houses. Later an endless chain with crossbars and operated by a steam engine did that work.<\/p>\n
By 1880 the methods of cutting, storing and loading on ships was so well developed and the market for the ice had so expanded that more than 600,000 tons of ice were harvested annually on the Kennebec. By that time outside interests controlled the ice business on the river, with their enormous ice houses. At that time 55 great plants dotted the river bank between Gardiner and Merrymeeting Bay. Single capacity of one of those huge ice houses ranged from 30,000 to 35,000 tons — an immense increase over the 1,500 ton capacity of the original Page plant. A single plant employed as many as 150 men in the cutting season. Scraping the ice began often as early as mid-December. The cutting was done during January and February.<\/p>\n
Farmers with their horses gathered in huge numbers at Gardiner. Roads were literally filled with teams on the way. Many of the men expected to stay at the river during the whole cutting season.<\/p>\n
In the 1880’s pay for a man and a pair of horses was $4.50 a day, more than twice what he could get working on the road with the same team in the summer. In the ice field a farmer could earn enough to pay his year’s taxes and after paying expenses would have from $100 to $200 left over. A laborer earned $1.50 a day. The most skilled workers got as much as $2.50.<\/p>\n
Sometimes the operators needed more labor than they found at hand. One enterprising owner provided bail for hoboes lodged in the town jails if they would work on the ice even for a few days. If one of the tramps would work thru the season, the operator would not only pay him $1.50 a day, but when the cutting season ended would send the fellow off with a new suit of clothes.<\/p>\n
Every large ice plant operated its own boarding house, thus providing big sources of business for the grocery stores. A fellow who worked a nine-hour day in the ice, in bitter wind, naturally worked up an appetite. It was a common sight to see grocery teams pull up to a boarding house loaded with great sides of beef and several barrels of flour. Grain stores also did a huge business supplying feed for the horses.<\/p>\n
Many men who worked on the ice wore calked boots just as did the lumberjacks. Railroads would not let those men wear their boots in the cars. So those workers crowded into the old railroad cars in stocking feet. Sometimes as many as a hundred men would be waiting for transportation at the Gardiner railroad station.<\/p>\n
Old timers will tell you that, from Gardiner to Richmond, when the harvest was finished, almost no ice was left in the river. When spring came, the three and four masted schooners were towed up river to load ice at the wharves. At one time in 1885 fifty of those vessels lay at anchor between Gardiner and Cedar Grove.<\/p>\n
While it lasted the ice industry of the Kennebec was certainly big business.<\/p>\n
Now for another subject. Ever since I have known anything about the town of Fairfield I have of course been aware that the old name for Fairfield Village was Kendalls Mills and that it was named by the pioneer settler and promoter of the region, General William Kendall. But only recently have I become aware of the peculiar genius of the general’s oldest son, William Kendall, Jr. The son was born in 1783, just before the family came to Fairfield from Sandwich, Mass. When he was 66 years old, and had long been a victim of bad business dealings, William Kendall, Jr. wrote a memoir which has been preserved for 126 years, because that memoir was written in 1849 when the writer was himself getting along in years. He had just passed his 66th birthday.<\/p>\n
Kendall tells us that by occupation he was a millwright and had put in his first wheel in his father’s mill in Fairfield at the age of sixteen. At 21, he was recognized as a master builder. In 1815 he built for his father’s mill a big eight foot wheel with twelve buckets. When Kendall got around to seeking a patent for that type of wheel, he found someone else had already patented it. When he discovered that the patentee had once worked for his father, Kendall was suspicious. The fellow had the nerve to offer the General use of the wheel for a yearly fee. The general replied that his own son had been pleading with him for years to put in that very kind of wheel, and if the fellow would come over to the mill he could see it in operation. The fellow had of course patented Kendall’s wheel, but there was nothing Kendall could do about it. He simply should not have been so slow to file for a patent.<\/p>\n
In 1825 Kendall perfected the first horizontal shaft with reacting wheels and installed one in a Waterville saw mill. But trouble over patents still pursued the General’s son.<\/p>\n
Now let us pick up the memoir in Kendall’s own words: “I had expended over $300 on experiments with different draft wheels. To maintain my rights I battled as a parent would for a beloved child. A man who wrongfully patented one of my wheels used to call me Brother. I had given him money to relieve his destitute family and I held his note for $30. One day I met him on the Gardiner bridge. He bowed his head and tried to pass me without speaking. I accosted him, whereupon he said, ‘Yes, Kendall. I took your wheel because others would if I didn’t.’ ‘All right’, I said. ‘You can keep that wheel, but you just keep out of my way or I’ll have your scalp. “‘<\/p>\n
The memoir continues: “In 1824 at Waterville I built a wheel for blowing in an iron foundry and other machinery at the building set by the post road and the mill pond and dam.”<\/p>\n
Where was that location that Kendall describes? The post road was the river road up through Sidney by which the mail coach traveled in the early years of the 19th century. It then crossed the Messalonskee at what is now the Memorial Bridge at the entrance to Kennedy Drive. and the stage went down Silver Street to the Williams House near the present site of the Federal Trust Company.<\/p>\n
The dam was on the site of the present dam below the Memorial Bridge; the pond was the widened river above the dam and the iron foundry was the predecessor of the Waterville Iron Works, for that first foundry was built not on the Kennebec above the Head of the Falls, but on the lower Messalonskee behind the present site of Flo’s Greenhouse.<\/p>\n
When William Kendall, Jr. wrote that memoir he was so hard pressed financially, despite the fact that his father had died a wealthy man, that the son was eager to claim a reward for his services in the War of 1812. He wrote: “I, William Kendall, Jr. do hereby appoint B.S. Foster of Waldo my true and lawful attorney to make application to the proper authorities of the U.S. for county land due for my services rendered in the late war with England in Captain Chadwick’s Company, and my said attorney is hereby empowered to receive and receipt for the same.”<\/p>\n
A recent find of mine has been a 40-year old catalogue of books for sale by the John Wanamaker store in Philadelphia. It is interesting to see what people were urged to read and at what prices in 1926. The best seller in fiction was “Beau Sabreur” by Percival Christopher Wren. That sequel to “Beau Geste” sold for $2.00. For the same price you could get the latest Hugh Walpole novel, “Harner John”, the story of a cathedral town in Palestine. Dorothy Canfield had just written “Her Son’s Wife”; Edith Wharton came out with “Here and Beyond”; Kathleen Norris’ new book was “Hildegarde”. Selling better than Sherlock Holmes were the Father Brown detective stories of G.K. Chesterton. Margaret Deland, who had her summer home at Kennebunkport, had a Civil War story called “The Kays”. John Freeman’s novel was entitled “Kennedy’s Second Best”, but it didn’t refer to Teddy. Out of England came Arnold Bennett’s “Lord Range”, and Robert Chambers had just written “The Man They Hanged”.<\/p>\n
That year 1926 saw the publication of one of the most famous detective novels of modern times, Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”. Think of it, forty years later Agatha Christie is still writing about her incomparable detective, Hercule Poirot.<\/p>\n
In the non-fiction field, religion saw Harry F. Osborn’s “Evolution and Religion”, and James Gordon Gilkey’s “Faith for the New Generation”. In biography there were “Dean Briggs” by Rollo Walter Brown, George Bryan’s “Edison”, Rupert Hughes’ “George Washington”, and Paul de Kruif”s “Microbe Hunters”. Not one of those books cost more than $4.00, and if you wanted to brush up on geography you could buy the “Universal Atlas of the World” for two dollars.<\/p>\n
Year: 1966<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #699, Broadcast on October 9, 1966<\/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":[42954,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8627"}],"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=8627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8627\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}