\nThis program over the years, has given much attention to Maine’s narrow gauge railroads, especially the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington, and the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes, both located in Central Maine. The little narrow gauge at Monson has not been entirely neglected on this program, but I have never before told you about it in detail.<\/p>\n
In 1867, a company was organized to build a broad gauge railroad from Old Town to Moosehead Lake. One of the promoters was Hannibal Hamlin, ,who had been Vice President of U.S. during Lincoln’s first term, and the line was called the Bangor and Piscataquis Railroad. In 1869 it was opened to Dover. Before its absorption into the Bangor and Aroostook in 1892, the road had been extended to Greenville, and a profitable branch was in operation to the Katahdin Iron Works.<\/p>\n
It was the successful running of the broad gauge Bangor and Piscataquis in the early 1880s that convinced other promoters that there ought to be a connection from that road to the slate quarries at Monson. So, in October 1883, a little two foot line six miles long extended from the junction with the other road at a place thereafter called Monson Junction to the village of Monson and its celebrated quarries of slate. Because it was two feet wide and six miles long, the little railroad was affectionately known as the “Two by Six”. Its Laconia-made passenger coach was called “The Buggy”. Like the cars I knew on the old Bridgton and Saco River narrow gauge, “The Buggy” had oil lamps, ac, pot-bellied stove, and single seats. But unlike the Bridgton road, which had two passenger cars, the Mount Pleasant and the Pondicherry, “The Buggy” was the Monson road’s only car for passengers.<\/p>\n
In its heyday, the Monson Railroad had only eight boxcars and 16 flat cars, and two locomotives which originally burned wood. The train made four trips a day, timed to meet trains on the Bangor and Piscataquis, but its trips were seldom on time. Rarely did the speed exceed twenty miles an hour. Over its six miles the track spanned only one bridge, Ladd Brook Trestle.<\/p>\n
In 1900, the Monson Slate Co. took over ownership of the road from its out-of-state promoters, leader of whom had been H. A. Whiting of Wilton, N. H. The Monson slate quarries, some with a depth of over 1000 feet, were doing a thriving business at the turn of the century. They produced hundreds of thousands of slate roofing tiles, innumerable slate sinks, and the then quite new electrical panels.<\/p>\n
Almost every schoolhouse in New England had blackboards made from Monson slate. The business made it possible for Monson to have not only thriving stores, but also a sumptuous hotel.<\/p>\n
How the little railroad took advantage of disaster is an interesting story. In 1918 the to- station~ne house at Monson burned, destroying a locomotive.\u00a0 In an attempt to battle the tremendous snows that fell that winter, storms that piled as much as eight feet on some sections of track, workmen took the iron framework of the burned engine and built a V-plow on it. It proved to be too light, as it rode up over the drifts rather than through them. So the men rebuilt it as a spreader plow similar to those used on the broad gauge railroads. That did the job, except that it couldn’t be reversed, but had to be turned around on the old turntables at each end of the lines.<\/p>\n
Until it ceased operation in 1943, the Monson Railroad had neither air brakes nor automatic couplings. There were no split switches on the tracks, but the line did have a complete rock Jadbed, the only one in Maine, built of waste from the slate quarries. The Monson Roads’ only bow to railroad progress was in lighting. Not inside the passenger car, for the old, dim oil lamp persisted there. But in 1925 the engineers, unhappy with the poor light from the old, oil headlamp, replaced it with an automobile headlamp powered by a storage battery.<\/p>\n
Just as was the case with Maine’s other narrow gauge lines, it was the automobile that spelled the Monson’s doom. By 1935, much of the pulpwood that had been moved by the little narrow gauge, supplementing greatly the loads of slate, was being moved by truck, and Henry Fords’ Model T and Model A had reduced passenger traffic nearly to zero. Whereas in 1916, the little Monson narrow gauge had hauled 7600 passengers, the number for the entire year of 1933 was only 210. Receipts for all passenger fares that year were only $40. For all operating expenses exceeded receipts by $1,000. The four-man section crew was laid off, and even the line’s superintendent wielded crowbar and pickaxe on the track. Somehow, freight but no passenger trains, continued to run until the midst of World War II in 1943, when iron and steel were at a premium and it seemed a good time to tear up the track and sell the rails for scrap. The cars were run into a gravel pit and burned so that the iron on them could be more easily salvaged.<\/p>\n
So, in the end, no passenger car, baggage and mail car, or caboose reached the marvelous collection of Maine narrow gauge rolling stock that Ellis Atwood assembled at Carver, Mass.<\/p>\n
But Mr. Atwood did obtain two of the Monson locomotives, still in use on the six mile ride around the Atwood cranberry bog in Carver. Visitors to Maine are astonished to find that the largest of the New England states has only 16 counties. In other parts of the nation counties are smaller and more numerous, and they are often more powerful administrative units of government. In fact, more then once it has been suggested that Maine’s counties be abolished as no longer meaningful. So, historically, it may be well to remind us how Maine’s counties came into existence.<\/p>\n
The shire or county system was of course, brought from England by the founders of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies early in the 17th century. In 1635 the Council of Plymouth, England, under their original royal grant, divided the American land between the St. Croix River and New Jersey into 11 royal provinces. Four of those provinces were in what is now Maine. One extended from the Piscataqua to the Saco, another from the Saco to the Kennebec, a third from the Kennebec to the Penobscot, and a fourth from there to the St. Croix.<\/p>\n
In 1691, the Charter of William and Mary to Massachusetts Bay set up only two divisions of all of Maine. One, called the Province of Maine, extended from the Piscataqua to the Kennebec, and the other, the Province of Sagadahoc, from the Kennebec to the St. Croix. In 1716 these two divisions were combined into the single county of Yorkshire.<\/p>\n
Fifteen years before the Revolution and only six years after the building of Fort Halifax here on the Kennebec, Massachusetts divided Maine into three counties, the names but not the original boundaries of which have been retained to the present day. The one nearest Massachusetts itself was York County, with its original county seat at York, not as now at Alfred. The second county was Cumberland with county seat at Falmouth, whose name was later changed to Portland. All the rest of the vast extent of Maine was then put into the County of Lincoln, with its county seat at Pownalboro, where in recent times the old court house has been restored. Later that county seat was moved to Wiscasset.<\/p>\n
It was 1789, two years after the adoption of the U. S. Constitution, before Maine had more than these three counties of York, Cumberland, and Lincoln. When Maine separated from Massachusetts in 1820, there had been added only six: Hancock, Washington, Kennebec, Oxford, Somerset, and Penobscot. Our own Kennebec County had come in 1799, and only ten years later there was carved out of it the county of Somerset. So when Maine became a separate state, there were only nine counties. The remaining seven were set up between 1827 and 1860, their territory, in each case, coming out of the existing counties. Three of the counties came close together – Piscataquis in 1828, Franklin and Aroostook, both in 1829. Sagadahoc, Maine’s smallest county was set up in 1854, largely because of the rapid growth of Bath as a seaport and shipbuilding center. In the same year, the development of Lewiston Falls had made possible the new county of Androscoggin. Maine’s last and 16th county was Knox, created in 1860.<\/p>\n
In all New England, and especially in Maine, it has from colonial times been the town, not the county, that has been the chief governmental unit. The more recent district system, most significant in the administrative school district, has never reflected county lines, and it is possible Maine counties may be on the way out.<\/p>\n
Let us close this broadcast today with reference to a family that meant much not only to their native town of Skowhegan, but also to Waterville especially to our educational institutions. That family was the Coburns, of whom the best known living representative is Joseph Coburn Smith, a prominent trustee of Colby College and at one time its alumni secretary. Retiring a few years ago from the nationally famous firm of Martz and Lundy, Joe Smith is now a resident of Cape Elizabeth.<\/p>\n
The pioneer Eleazer Coburn was one of Maine’s most prominent land surveyors, and it was the knowledge he thus obtained that led him into an increasingly prosperous lumber business. His son Abner also became a surveyor, and with his brother Philander set up with their father, in 1830, the lumber firm of E. Coburn and Sons, buying extensive lands and timber rights in Somerset and Piscataquis counties. When the father died, the company took the name of A. & P. Coburn. So common had it become for Abner to sign checks and other documents A. & P. Coburn, that when he became governor of Maine, he more than once absent-mindedly signed state papers the same way. For more than half a century those Coburn brothers were known as the leading business men on the Kennebec. It has been said that Scottish clansmen were never more loyal to their chiefs than were Maine lumber workers to the Coburns. Their good wages and fair dealing won the loyalty of American and Canadian lumbermen alike.<\/p>\n
In 1854, the Coburn brothers became interested in railroads. They led the movement to extend the Portland and Kennebec from Augusta, through, Waterville to Skowhegan. Abner, an original director of that Somerset and Kennebec, later became president of the Maine Central. For a long time the Coburns f superintendent of operations was Herman Whipple, father of Waterville’s well known Lewis Whipple.<\/p>\n
It was Abner Coburn who also gave Coburn Classical Institute its principal building. It was his niece Louise who was Colby’s first woman trustee. Her grandfather Eleazer had been an early trustee of Colby. Louise herself had been one of its first women graduates and four generations of the family were Colby students.<\/p>\n
And with that salute to a splendid Maine family, we must say goodbye until next week.<\/p>\n
Year: 1971<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #899, Broadcast on September 19, 1971<\/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":[42946,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9178"}],"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=9178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}