<\/p>\n
Probably a number of my listeners knew a remarkable man who, some ten or a dozen years ago, lived in the house at the Lombard Dam, where the Outlet Stream crosses the highway between North and East Vassalboro. The man kept his cub hydroplane on the little pond back of the dam. I mention him because he has just published another book on his favorite subject of mountains.<\/p>\n
The man is Dr. Terris Moore. who has made distinguished careers in three fields college teaching and administration, flying, and mountain climbing. From 1955 to 1957 Moore was on the staff of Colby College, coming here from the University of Maine, where he had conducted a prominent extension program. At Colby he taught in the Department of Business Administration. For four years, from 1949 to 1953, Moore served as President of the University of Alaska. He has long been an accomplished pilot, flying his cub plane allover the United States and Canada, and often into the far Alaskan wilds. He has climbed mountains allover the world. When he was only 24 years old, he was rope leader of a climbing team that reached the top of 24,900 foot Mount Minija Konker in the Himalayas, the highest achievement until the final conquest of Mt. Everest.<\/p>\n
Terris Moore once said to me: “Maine and Alaska are parts of the same great North Country, stretching from the Bering Strait to Newfoundland and I love every foot of it.”<\/p>\n
Moore’s new book, fresh from the press only a few weeks ago, is entitled: “Mt. McKinley, the Pioneer Climbs”. Many books about mountains are stodgy, dreary accounts of the climbers’ attempts, with an occasional thrill of adventurous incident. But there is nothing slow or stodgy about Moore’s book. Though scholarly and thoroughly documented, it is lively and eminently readable. It has many elements of a good mystery story the who-done-it element being the question of who first climbed North America’s highest mountain.<\/p>\n
One of the most interesting features of Moore’s book is what would at first seem to be something quite unconnected with Mt. McKinley — <\/strong>the bitter controversy over the contentions of Admiral Peary and Dr. Cook as to which first reached the North Pole. The connection is made by Cook’s claim that he was the first to reach the summit of Mt. McKinley. That claim was so completely proved false that it made people more and more skeptical about Cook’s claim to have reached the Pole.<\/p>\n In fact this man, Terris Moore, a recent resident of Waterville, played a significant part in proving Cook’s Mt. McKinley claim fictitious. Cook had published, both in Harpers Magazine and in a book. a photograph of a mountain top with a man waving a flag on the summit. Cook claimed it was a picture of the peak of Mt. McKinley. Moore was a member of an exploring party that finally obtained a photo of Mt. McKinley, taken from exactly the angle that Cook claimed. The picture was entirely different from the one Cook had published. Finally, to clinch the matter, Moore proved that the peak Cook had photographed and passed off as Mt. McKinley was a peak only 8,000 feet high and some 200 miles distant from the big mountain.<\/p>\n Moore points out a fact of topography that I suspect has seldom occurred to any of us who are not skilled mountaineers. He says: “In all the mountain ranges of the world there are no two hilltops that are exactly alike. We knew that, if we could find one of the peaks shown in Cook’s photographs, we could trace him peak by peak and snowfield by snowfield, to within a foot of the spot where he had taken his pictures. Now we know that. when he took the summit picture, he was not even headed toward Mt. McKinley, but was up among the peaks at the head of the glacier, 200 miles from the mountain.”<\/p>\n Persons of my own age remember well the heated controversy over Peary’s and Cook’s claims to the Pole, and there are persons living today who still take Dr. Cook’s side.<\/p>\n It is interesting to note that Terris Moore, who has studied the conflicting claims long and methodically, and who himself proved Mr. Cook a liar about Mt. McKinley, cannot state finally and categorically that Cook did not reach the North Pole. Let us now hear Terris Moore’s conclusions of that matter in his own words: “If, when Mr. Cook got into a favorable position for a dash to the Pole, by setting base camp at the north end of Axel Heiberg Island, he then decided to fake the whole thing, it is incredible that he would thereafter spend thirteen more months, including the awful rigors of an Arctic winter, away from his Greenland main base. By returning quickly to civilization, he could have reached New York in 1908 and thus have beaten Peary by a full year. It seems much more likely that Cook actually went forward in a real attempt to reach the Pole, got lost far out, and was thus forced to spend the winter away from his Greenland base. I think it unlikely that Cook reached the Pole. But it just could be that he and his two Eskimos did make it to somewhere near the Pole a year ahead of Peary. It is easier to accept that possibility than to believe that he ever reached the top of Mt. McKinley.”<\/p>\n Then Moore concludes with these intriguing words: “What an ironic twist of history, a sort of poetic justice, if the real discoverer of the North Pole was denied acceptance of his feat because, when he returned, there arose to haunt him the spector of his false claim to have made the first ascent of Mt. McKinley.”<\/p>\n He is a skillful writer, as well as a valiant mountain climber, this man Terris Moore, who kept his little hydroplane on the pond behind Vassalboro’s Lombard Dam.<\/p>\n Now let us turn to a subject that concerns this area nearly 90 years ago.<\/p>\n One of the churches that has long played a significant part in the religious life of the Greater Waterville community is the Universalist Church at Oakland. Some twenty years ago the pastor of that church was the Rev. Will Kelley, whose wife was the former Eu1a Skinner, teacher of Home Economics at the Waterville Junior High School. Mrs. Kelley has recently sent me a clipping taken from the Gospel Banner, the Universalist organ published at Augusta. The date of the clipping is November 15, 1879.<\/p>\n The story concerns the dedication of the remodeled Universalist Church in what is now Oakland. The story starts thus: “The Universalist Church in West Waterville, which is now a substantially new building, was rededicated by appropriate services on Wednesday of last week. The dedicating sermon was by Rev. J.C. Snow.”<\/p>\n The account gives us a description of the remodeling, depicting the new pulpit, the new choir stalls, new pews, and the beautifully frescoed walls and ceiling, and new stained glass windows. The writer of the Banner article said: “We have not for a long time seen a church in such perfect keeping with the wants of the people. We understand the expense has exceeded $1,600, five hundred of which was paid by the Ladies Circle and the Sabbath School.”<\/p>\n It seems that the Wednesday afternoon program was only the start of a two-day celebration by that Oakland church. In the evening there was another sermon by Rev. C.A. Hayden of Portland. The reporter said attendance was so large that chairs had to be placed in the aisles. On Thursday morning there was a third sermon by the editor of the Gospel Banner, and in the afternoon still another by Rev. W.G. Haskell of Lewiston.<\/p>\n The long story in the Gospel Banner then proceeds to give a brief historical account. It said: “The old meeting house of the Universalists in West Waterville was a substantial structure, one of the best in the State when it was erected in 1833. It was then a Union meeting house, built jointly by Universalists, Calvinist Baptists, and Free Baptists, and was dedicated in 1834. When it was built, its location was in a beautiful grove of sugar maples, and at the time was the only meeting house in the western section of Waterville. Now every vestige of the maple grove has disappeared. On either side of the Universalist edifice are now other churches, while the surroundings in all directions are occupied by new streets, dwellings, shops and stores.”<\/p>\n The account continues: “West Waterville Village is situated on Emerson Stream, a very fine water power draining the lakes above, and forming a tributary to the Kennebec. Here is a remarkable cascade, highest in the State, and is much visited for its picturesque scenery. For a long time the place has been noted for the manufacture of scythes. From 1838 to 1842 it turned out 3,600 scythes annually, all of fine quality. Now the Dunn Edge Tool Co., incorporated in 1856, makes annually 240,000 scythes, 60,000 axes, 30,000 grass hooks, 4,800 hay knives — and employs a hundred men. The company consumes yearly 700 tons of coal, 12,000 bushels of charcoal, 325 tons of iron, 100 tons of steel.”<\/p>\n The Banner account pointed out that the Dunn Company was not the only toolmaker in West Waterville. The account said: “Hubbard and Blake, another concern in the same business, turns out annually 84,000 scythes and 60,000 axes. They employ sixty men.<\/p>\n “Some can confidently state that every year more scythes and axes are manufactured in West Waterville than in any other village in the United States. It requires about one-eighth of the whole population of the community to run this industry.”<\/p>\n It is a fact that this account in a religious journal, designed to record only the dedication of a remodeled church, devoted more than half its space to the development of the village in which that church was located. So the whole story ended with these words: “W.V. Leonard, Esq., who keeps a store centrally located in West Waterville, informed us that he sells annually 1,200 barrels of flour, and corn and other grains in proportion. He now has on hand 20,000 pounds of wool, brought in from the surrounding rich agricultural region.”<\/p>\n The Banner story ended with these words: “So we have given our readers a kind of bird’s eye view of West Waterville. It is a community of rapid industrial progress. We trust the people have made at least equal progress in all things moral and spiritual.”<\/p>\n Year: 1968<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Read the script for “Little Talks” program #753, Broadcast on January 28, 1968<\/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":[1199,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8785"}],"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=8785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8785\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}