<\/p>\n
The way Maine people lived in the years immediately following the Civil War is clearly shown in a long memoir written by a Waterville man 40 years ago at the request of his children. Many of us older present residents of Waterville knew this man well. He was Roscoe Bowler, a resident of Nudd Street, and a foreman in the Lockwood Mills. I knew him very well; both because he was President of the Men’s Class at the First Baptist Church in the 1930’s, when I was the teacher, and because his son Lawrence and I were classmates at Colby College. Visitors to the First Baptist Church sanctuary, beautifully renovated in 1951, will see a wall plaque noting that the new sanctuary lights were placed in memory of Deacon Roscoe and Mrs. Bowler.<\/p>\n
A younger relative of Mr. Bowler is Mrs. Shirley Holmes, wife of a prominent dairy farmer on Waterville’s County Road, and I am indebted to Mrs. Holmes for a chance to read this interesting memoir written by Mr. Bowler.<\/p>\n
Roscoe Bowler was born on a farm in Palermo in 1855. The farm had been cleared by his grandfather, whose parents had lived in Alna. That grandfather’s mother was a woman of strong character. Left alone with two small children, she carried on the wilderness farm alone. As a boy, Roscoe heard many thrilling stories about her enterprise and persistence. Carrying a child in her arms she would make the long horseback ride to Wiscasset over a roughly blazed trail to get needed supplies. On one occasion the few products she brought to barter came to more than the goods she was absolutely obliged to buy. So she splurged the rest on a large earthen jar. With the jar under one arm and the child in the other, she took the long ride back home.<\/p>\n
Many of us try to identify our earliest childhood recollection. I am interested that Roscoe Bowler, like myself, remembered something that happened before he was three years old. My own earliest recollection, during my third year, was of riding on the tailboard of a big wagon, held on by my uncle, as our family goods were transported to a new home in the village where we lived.<\/p>\n
Mr. Bowler’s two-year-old recollection was more dramatic. He went with older brothers out to the barn to see a new calf. While there, he picked up an axe placed in the cleft of a sled’s tongue. He dropped that axe on his foot. He says he has no memory of pain or the sight of blood, but that scar remained on his foot throughout his life.<\/p>\n
Roscoe was the youngest of several children, all but one of them boys. He was, in fact, so young in the family that his oldest brother was 17 years older. In 1859, when Roscoe was only four, that brother went to California, and the next year was killed in an accident in a lumber mill. Roscoe wrote: “I wanted to go to California with Melvin and often expressed that wish. Melvin said it was a rough and tough place with many bad men, and a person going there must learn to sleep with one eye open. Night after night I tried to go to sleep with one eye open. Needless to say, I never learned to do it. So I never got to California.”<\/p>\n
An example of the way he was cared for by his older brothers is this account of a winter scene. “Once we children were playing in the dooryard in the first snow of winter. Melvin opened his outside coat and wrapped me in it close to his body, then lay down and rolled in the snow. Just then Mother came to the door and shouted, ‘What are you doing with that child?’ Melvin replied, ‘I’m only trying to toughen him.” Mr. Bowler said, because he was the baby of the family, neighbors considered him spoiled.<\/p>\n
After that oldest brother died 3,000 miles from home, the father saw to it that one reminder of him was sacredly retained. Before going west, Melvin had been a member of the crew of a fishing schooner to the Grand Banks. On his return, he hung his fisherman’s oil skin suit on a peg in the corn shed. The father forbade anyone to touch it. Roscoe wrote: “It was there years later when I sold the place.”<\/p>\n
One of Roscoe Bowler’s brothers, Marquis, was a veteran of the Civil War. This is what the memoir says about him. “Brother Marquis enlisted in the First Maine Cavalry in 1862. He did so against the wishes of his parents, who never favored the President’s policy to put down the Rebellion by force. Discussion in the home the night after he enlisted was bitter. What was worse, as Father and Mother saw it, was Marquis’ decision to reenlist after his two years were up, and Marquis did so for the duration of the war. It was a blue time at home when he made that decision. I was old enough to realize what he was going back to.<\/p>\n
“Time rolled on and one day I saw a man jump the fence at the corner of our field and walk toward the house. I knew at once it was Marquis, and I ran to meet him. I was proud of my soldier brother. Joy filled all our hearts to have him home safe and to know that the war was over.”<\/p>\n
Mr. Bowler had a vivid recollection of Maine’s reaction to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In the spring of 1865, having business in Augusta, Roscoe’s father took the ten-year old boy along. It was the first time he had ever been in the State Capitol, though it was not far from the Palermo farm. He saw most of the stores and many homes draped in black for the martyred president.<\/p>\n
But what Roscoe remembered even better was crossing the covered bridge at Augusta. In spite of the fact that a foot passenger had to pay extra toll, Roscoe persuaded his father to let the boy walk across the bridge. Roscoe said, “I looked out of every open window on both sides of the bridge. I just couldn’t see enough of that mightiest river I had ever seen.”<\/p>\n
In spite of the fact that Roscoe Bowler never graduated from high school, he taught school in various Maine towns for more than ten years, and the reason why he decided to come to Waterville was that, even though then a married man, he thought he might complete his education at Coburn and thus prepare himself for better teaching positions. But, as he later wrote, “Exhaustive study and confinement my health could not stand.” So he spent the rest of his life with the Lockwood
\nCompany.<\/p>\n
As a boy he attended most of the short terms offered by the one-room schools. He wrote: “Father and Mother were determined that their children should have education. My sister Louisa was sent to high school at Weeks Mills. Father wanted James also to go, but James felt his clothes were not good enough. When I was 14, I went to a high school opened at Branch Mills, four miles away, walking both ways each day. The next spring three of us boys from Palermo hired a room over a shop at Branch Mills. We supplied our own furniture and took food from home. The next fall, I went to Weeks Mills, where I lived in the family of a cousin.”<\/p>\n
So in the fall of 1871, when he was 16, Roscoe attended the high school in Weeks Mills. At the close of that fall term in 1871, a Somerville man asked Roscoe to teach school in that town. The man told him the district had only $20 to run a school for five weeks. Roscoe could have the whole $20 for teaching those five weeks, in addition to board in district families. The 16 year old got a certificate from the superintendent of schools and went to work.<\/p>\n
The school had no bell and Roscoe had no watch. He called the pupils in by rapping on the window. He said no one ever complained about the hours, at which he could only guess. The man who hired him brought a load of wood to the schoolhouse, which the teacher himself had to saw and split. He had thirty pupils, several of them older than himself.<\/p>\n
The next year Roscoe had a school in his home town of Palermo, then in 1873 he was back again in Somerville.<\/p>\n
His first school at any long distance from home was in the winter of 1874 at Cushing, near Thomaston. There one of his pupils was his future wife, Jennie Gonia.<\/p>\n
In 1874, Roscoe gave up teaching in distant parts to return to the Palermo farm, but before that he had seen other employment besides teaching. In 1871, his brother James married and decided to live with the parents on the home farm. No longer needed for summer work at home, Roscoe, then 16 years old, got a job on a farm in Searsport, for which he was paid $15 a month and his keep. He worked every day that summer, including the Fourth of July. In fact, he spent-four months on that job and came home with the full $60, and a new pair of shoes that the farmer had made for him by a local shoemaker and would not let the boy pay for.<\/p>\n
Roscoe liked the job so well that he returned the next year. But this time he says he did not save all his wages. He says, “I spent some money on play. I went to Howe’s London Circus in Belfast.”<\/p>\n
Then he got a job in the granite quarry in Hallowell at $2 a day, and he paid $4 a week for room and board.<\/p>\n
Now let us have in Mr. Bowler’s own words what happened to bring him back to the home farm. “In the spring of 1874 typhoid fever struck our neighborhood. I had it in April and recovered, but was unable to go to work until July. Brother James died of it in March. He left a widow and one child. His death broke the plans made between him and my parents. The farm, half of which had been deeded to him with understanding that he should have the other half when Father and Mother died, provided he cared for them on the place while they lived.<\/p>\n
“The farm was of no use to James’ widow. So Father had to buy her half. I turned in all my savings and joined Father in giving a note to the Augusta bank for the rest. I kept on teaching and worked on the farm summers, and in a few years we were out of debt.<\/p>\n
“Father lived for seven years after I went back to the farm. He gave me a deed to the place, and I signed a bond to care for Mother.<\/p>\n
“About three years after Father died I sold the farm for $900. It was the timber that made it worth even that much. The location was poor, the soil thin, and the buildings in bad repair. I sold the horned cattle and all but one of the horses. At the end I had an auction. I brought one of the horses to Waterville and sold it to Hod Nelson, owner of the famous race horse.”<\/p>\n
In conclusion let us note a method of financing that Mr. Bowler used and strongly recommended. He wrote: “A plan we followed regarding bills always seemed to me wise. We owed only one man, to whom we gave notes when we needed money to pay various bills. Thus we kept our credit good.”<\/p>\n
And that is the story told by Waterville citizen and Baptist deacon, Roscoe Bowler.<\/p>\n
Year: 1975<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #1061, Broadcast on October 19, 1975<\/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":[42942,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9577"}],"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=9577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9577\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}