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This broadcast begins the 20th consecutive year of Little Talks on Common Things. The long life of the program is certainly not due to any excellence or any importance. It has neither. It is only proof that, at any time in which we live, there are many people who are interested in local happenings of long ago — not necessarily in formal history of political or economic nature, but in what is called social history — the doings of ordinary people in ordinary ways of life -their employment, their recreations, their code of behavior, the food they ate, the clothes they wore, the tools with which they worked. That kind of history has always been and will continue to be the subject matter of this program. Because people still listen to it is the only reason why it continues on the air.<\/p>\n
The development of the company that sponsors this program is itself an excellent example of how social history develops. By the turn of the century, 68 years ago, there was developing a need for cheaper, lighter, but stronger and more serviceable throw-away plates, especially for bakers. Martin Keyes hit on a plan of making such plates from molded pulp. Out of that grew gradually the present Keyes Fibre line of dishes of all kinds, both disposable and more permanent. As is always true in social history, demand stirred invention, then the invention spurred more demands and improvement. Keyes tableware is made because people want it, and utility and excellence stirs people to want it.<\/p>\n
Along with the demand for cheaper tableware of excellence and utility, there grew a demand for containers. My father, who was born in 1861, the year when the Civil War broke out, could remmeber when the first paper bags came to Maine rural communities. When people then bought anything in bulk, they usually brought a container to store it — a wooden bucket for sugar, a tin pail for lard, a wooden box for crackers. But sometimes the grocer had the tough job of putting up such things as sugar in a sheet of paper. Many of those grocers showed great skill in the forming of a cornucopia, into which they poured the sugar, then cleverly tied up the open end. Twine was in use long before paper bags.<\/p>\n
In my boyhood, in my father’s store in Bridgton, very few things came in packages. By that time there were packaged soda, cream of tartar, and spices, corn starch, cocoa, and, of course. vegetables, fruits and meats in tin cans. But by far the majority of all commodities were sold in bulk. We used dry measures from one quart to half a bushel. liquid measures from a pint to a gallon and scales for hundreds of items. There was no such thing as a bag of flour or a bag of sugar. That is why I can still tell the weight of the contents of a barrel of flour 196 pounds. When we put it up, by scooping it from a barrel, a bag of flour was exactly 1\/8 of a barrel, not 25 pounds, but 24 pounds.<\/p>\n
What changed all that was the development of packaging, and in that story too, Keyes Fibre has played its part — packing for eggs, for bottles, for light tubes, for displayed fruits and vegetables and other eatables. In packaging as well as in tableware, Keyes Fibre has been at the forefront of the movement we call social history.<\/p>\n
Now let us turn down the river a few miles to Vassalboro. A catalogue of Oak Grove Seminary for the school year of 1853-54 provides some interesting information. The tuition was $3.50 a term, or $14 for the year’s four terms. Board in families near the school was $1.50 to $2.00 a week. Many students got their own meals, a common practice in those days. The student would go home after school closed on Friday, and return Sunday evening loaded down with provisions for the week.<\/p>\n
Concerning the school’s location the catalogue said: “It is situated half a mile from Vassalboro Corner (also called Getchell’s Corner), eleven miles from Augusta, and is accessible by stage from that place and by steamboats which ply the Kennebec.”<\/p>\n
Getchell’s Corner was a regular stop on the stage line from Augusta to Bangor, and some 18 horses were regularly kept at the stable attached to the Vassalboro Hotel. The Oak Grove catalogue proudly stated that, before the end of the coming school year, there would be railroad connection with Augusta. That railroad was the Somerset & Kennebec, which extended the Portland and Kennebec from Augusta to Skowhegan, crossing the tracks of the Penobscot and Kennebec — the line from Waterville to Bangor — at a junction point between Waterville and Fairfield.<\/p>\n
A prominent trustee of Oak Grove in 1853 was John Lang, founder of the woolen mill at North Vassalboro. In 1870 he was appointed Commissioner of Indian Affairs by Pres. Grant, Lang, like most of his fellow Oak Grove trustees, belonged to the Society of Friends, and they were proud that Oak Grove had become well known as a Quaker school. The school then had only three teachers, one of whom, John Pinkham, instructor in geography, was employed only part time. The only full time teachers were the principal, Franklin Page, and his assistant, Adelaide Brown. It is worth noting that 1853 was one of the few times during the 19th century that the Oak Grove principal was not named Jones.<\/p>\n
While our thoughts are down there in Vassalboro, let us turn to some information provided me during the past summer by Raymond Manson, a man deeply interested in Vassalboro history and one of the best informed on the town’s once flourishing ship building industry. Mr. Manson called to my attention an item published in the Kennebec Journal on May 3, 1849. Here is what the item said: “The hulls of two vessels have passed through the Augusta lock within a few days from Vassalboro. They will be rigged here at Augusta. One is a bark of 200 tons, owned by M.S. Varney and others. The other is a brig of 150 tons owned by Sturgis, Cox and Lambert. There is a considerable quantity of ship timber in Vassalboro, and the business may be carried on there advantageously in building vessels of 100 to 200 tons burden. Larger ones cannot pass through the lock. Some inconvenience is occasioned by the shallowness of the water at one point below the lock. A dredging machine will remove the evil in a few days.”<\/p>\n
On August 23,1849 the Kennebec Journal said: “Sailed from Bath for California the new bark Sarah Mooers, 225 tons, Capt. C.M. Scammon, sailed on August 15th. The bark was built at Vassalboro, is coppered and copper fastened. She is owned by Moses Varney of Vassalboro and Otis Kimball of Bath.”<\/p>\n
Another reference to a Vassalboro vessel appeared in the Journal on November 8, 1849: “The brig Maria, Capt. J. Towner, left Augusta on Friday bound for San Francisco. She is sent out by R.T. and J.T. Bosworth of Augusta and Ira Sturgis of Vassalboro.”<\/p>\n
Here is some more information about traffic on the Kennebec above Augusta more than a century ago. In 1849 the steamer Halifax, Capt. Brackett, left Vassalboro daily except Sunday, for Bath at 5 a.m. Stage left Waterville at 3:30 a.m. to meet the Halifax at Vassalboro. The return left Bath at 1:00 p.m. The fare was 75 cents.<\/p>\n
By 1856 several steamboats were plying the Kennebec between Augusta and Waterville. Among them were the Balloon, the Clinton, the Halifax and the Ticonic. There was great rivalry among the captains. One day when Captain Nathan Faunce was taking the Ticonic down the river, he was hailed by a man at Langls Mills, but refused to stop for him because he knew there would be more passengers at Getchell’s Corner, and if he stopped the Halifax would pass him and pick up those passengers. The man at Lang’s Mills was in for a day of hard luck. He felt better when the Halifax picked him up, but that was the very day when the Halifax blew up in the Augusta lock and the man was killed.<\/p>\n
In 1869 a small steamer, the Riverside, ran regularly between Augusta and Getchell’s Corner, and went on to Waterville when there was enough water. Mr. Manson has compiled a list of 36 vessels built at Vassalboro between 1801 and 1853. The largest was the bark Sarah Mooers, already referred to earlier in this broadcast. Called by the newspaper a bark of 220 tons, its actual tonnage was 221.16. John Lang’s Ocean Bird, which I have talked about several times on this program, was built in 1850 and had a tonnage of 172t.<\/p>\n
The Vassalboro man who both built and owned home-built vessels was Jacob Southwick, trader, operator of a potash kiln, lumberman and shipper. Vassalboro was the home port of only three of the vessels built there during the first half of the 19th century. One was Levi Thatcher’s Eunice and Sally, built in 1806; another was Southwick’s Minerva, built in 1838; and the third was John Lang’s Ocean Bird in 1850. Most of the vessels had their home port at either Augusta or Hallowell, but three of them sailed from Boston, three from Yarmouth, one from Nantucket, and one from Wilmington, Delaware.<\/p>\n
Getchell’s Corner at Vassalboro was a busy place for ships and shipping during those years before the Civil War, and especially before the coming of the A & K railroad to Waterville in 1849, to be followed up the east bank of the Kennebec from Augusta by the Somerset & Kennebec in 1855.<\/p>\n
I have told in some detail on this program the story of Waterville’s streets, how the first were highways to the south, the north and the west, how others were built as access routes to river landings, how West Temple Street was “the road to the burying ground”, why the original name of Western Avenue was obviously Mill Street, and why Park Street was originally Church Street.<\/p>\n
It has occurred to me that some of you may not recognize the names of streets no longer so named that were here only fifty years ago in 1918. One was Marston Avenue. It was the extension of Western Avenue to the Oakland line. Western Avenue then stopped at the First Rangeway. Its extension, called the Marston Road, ran past the Chase Farm (now Mount Merici), over Mayflower Hill to the Oakland line where it joined the Rice’s Rips Road. What we now call the Webb Road was then the Mitchell Road. Connecting it with the Oakland Road opposite the First Rangeway was a highway called the Cross Road.<\/p>\n
A hundred and fifty years ago the Plains meant the high plateau between Silver and Summer Streets. Long, before 1918 it had come to mean an area nearer the river, and the 1918 City Directory defined the Plains as “Water Street from Sherwin to beyond Grove”.<\/p>\n
What we now call Armory Road was Webb Avenue. Then there were Terry Street, from 117 College Avenue east to the M.C.R.R., Mechanic Square, out of 41 Temple Street, and Howard Street, east from College Avenue near the Libby Memorial Hospital.<\/p>\n
And with that reference to old streets, we must say goodbye until next week.<\/p>\n
Year: 1967<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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