USA > Maine > Knox County > Rockport > Camden Hills; an informal history of the Camden-Rockport region > Part 4
USA > Maine > Knox County > Camden > Camden Hills; an informal history of the Camden-Rockport region > Part 4
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Before passing on we will reprint from "Sailing Days on the Penobscot," Lincoln Colcord's compilation of vessels built at Rockport and Camden in the year 1856, one of this town- ships greatest shipbuilding years. The figures indicate ton- nage, length, breadth, depth in that order.
1856
Ship Thirty-One States, 1,000 x 168 x 34 x 17. Carle- ton, Norwood & Co., et al, Rockport. Lost on the coast of Spain with most of her crew.
Bark R. A. Allen, 566 x 135 x 30 x 12. Carleton, Nor- wood & Co., Rockport, et al. Alive in 1885.
Bark Adeline C. Adams, 399 x 124 x 30 x 12. Cam- den. Alive in 1885.
Brig Katahdin, 349 x 120 x 27 x 12. Carleton, Nor- wood & Co., et al, Rockport. Thomas Ames- bury, m. Renamed Colleen Bawn.
Brig Lizabel, 298 x 112 x 28 x 11. Thomas Buck- master, Camden, et al.
Brig J. McIntyre, 289 x 116 x 28 x 11. Carleton, Norwood & Co., et al, Rockport.
Brig O. C. Clary, 248 x 109 x 26 x 9. Judson Phil- brook, Camden, et al.
Schooner Snow Squall, 187 x 94 x 25 x 9. S. E. Shep- herd, et al, Camden.
Schooner Lucy A. Orcutt, 198 x 96 x 26 x 9. Wil- liam Amesbury, et al, Rockport.
Schooner Ellen H. Gott, 95 tons. Sunk by ice in Potomac River in 1877.
Schooner Cherokee, 85 tons. Condemned and brok- en up in 1879.
Schooner C. H. Taggard, 41 x 45 x 15 x 7. Ruel Philbrook, Camden.
"Lost on the coast of Spain," says this brief commentary
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about the ship Thirty-one States. Here is the story we find in the old journal of James Stinson of Rockport, now in the possession of Mrs. James Miller. " It was re- lated to me (writes this now departed Rockporter) by two of the sailors Mr. Fred A. Norwood and Mr. Barzilla H. Spear. In the year 1861 when the North and the South went to war, she was chartered to go south for a cargo of cotton but a blockade being put on, it was changed and she was chartered to go to St. John, N. B. and load general cargo for Genoa, Italy. They stopped in Liverpool a few weeks and then con- tinued on their voyage. Captain George Carleton went in com- mand. A Mr. Fales was first mate, Edwin Grant, second mate, Fred A. Norwood, third mate, John Carver, steward. The cook was a foreigner. They had in all 18 men. They went along slowly on account of much fog and bad weather.
"One night, the Captain came on deck (it was midnight) and said to the watch, 'Is that the loom of land' and soon after called all hands aft. He told them that they were near a bold shore and that there was not room to ware round (It was the rule that on a long voyage the chain was unshackled from the anchor and put below, so they could not anchor.) The Captain proposed to take a boat and all had their choice; some pro- posed to remain aboard. It was nearly calm except a very high sea and so dark one could not tell one from the other when moving about.
"A boat was lowered but it was stove and another was put over all right. The Captain went down into it first. He fell or jumped and as no sound came from him, the boat was dropped astern but in a few minutes he called for them to haul the boat up alongside and ordered two buckets to be sent down (He had broken several ribs in the fall). As they enter- ed the boat, two Grant brothers stood by the rail, asking each other to get into the boat but one would not leave the other.
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It may be they thought, if they both got in, the boat might be overloaded, so they remained aboard. Mr. Spear was last to go down into the boat with a bucket on each arm, a heavy sea rolled over him, filling both buckets, but he hung on to the rope after losing a bucket and was taken into the boat. No doubt when ordered, one of the Grant boys cast the painter off. The ship soon shot away, the sails hanging every way and her lights were only seen for a few minutes. All night they kept the boat head to the sea and when morning came it was found there were nine men in the boat and nine had remained aboard the boat and how singular, the officers were divided for those lost in the ship were nine, including the first mate, Mr. Fales who was engaged to Miss Helen Pitts of Rockport (sister to Al Pitts), the cook; Edwin Grant, second mate, George Grant, his brother (they lived on Mechanic Street) ; Hiram McAllister (brother to Charles McAllister). The cook dressed in his best and said: "Where I go, I may as well wear my best."
"Those in the boat saved were nine, Captain George Carle- ton; third mate, Fred A. Norwood; steward, John Carver; Barzilla H. Spear; Andrew J. Morton; John Packard; all of Rockport, also a Mr. Skinner of Bangor. (This is all the names I have been able to find).
"They rowed to an Island where they met the American Consul. The next day some of them rowed over to where they thought the ship might be and the only thing to be seen, high upon the rocks was the hail Camden, Me. No one of their brother shipmates were there to greet them while a part of the stern on the rocks told the story of the end of the fine ship Thirty-one States.
"The place where the ship was lost was on the Northwest coast of Spain, in the bay of Biscay."
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THE HATHAWAY-CUSHING HOUSE
John Hathaway, Camden's first lawyer came to town in 1796. Marrying Deborah Cushing, he built a law office on what is now the Town Common, on the corner of Chestnut and Elm Streets. With a bright future assured, this talented young man began constructing this gracious home on Chestnut Street in 1799. He was stricken that same year with typhus and died at the age of 26 leaving a wife and infant son. Tragedy descended again upon this house twenty-three years later, when this only son of Deborah and John was lost at sea. Deborah Cushing Hathaway continued to live alone in this house until her death at the age of ninety-one. This old Cam- den home was once owned by Edna St. Vincent Millay. It is now the property of Edwin Sears of Boston. John Hatha- way's law office was moved in recent years to Hosmer's Pond where it is the property of Charles Dwinal.
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IF, in those crowded decades after the Civil War, ships were king, it was limerock that was heir apparent. The limerock upon which the whole region rests originated some millions of years ago when calcareous skeletons of minute organisms were precipitated into a submarine ooze in quiet off-shore waters.
The basic element in limerock is calcite and even our very earliest settlers knew that roasting of calcite would drive off carbon dioxide and leave quick lime. From Camden's very beginning there were quarries and kilns dotted over the coun- tryside, the most famous of which was the Jacobs' lime quarry near what is now the Camden-Rockport line and which was once a part of the Jacobs' farm.
In the early days a good portion of both villages had a fin- ger in lime. The coming of the new patent kilns in the late fifties brought a change. Lime became big business. The new kilns, first introduced by Carleton, Norwood & Company, David Talbot and Jotham Shepherd, took less time, burned less fuel and had the added advantage of not requiring its fires
drawn after each operation. The small producer couldn't com- pete with these modern contraptions and soon the old fashioned kiln and the small backyard independent operator became ob- solete.
Thus another big business, another boom came to the Township. Before the end of the century, Rockport was to become the center of one of the greatest lime producing regions in America.
For almost half a century after the coming of the patent kiln, Rockport was one of the most thriving communities on the Penobscot. Lime burned night and day and a steady ca- valcade of teams over Limerock Street fed the hungry kiln maws throughout the daylight hours, laying a pall of dust and smoke over the village.
Lime sheds and sprawling cooperage sheds ranged along the shore. Back country, every other farm house had a small sparetime cooperage to keep abreast the almost insatiable de- mand for more and still more casks. The kilns consumed an average of thirty cords of wood a day bringing into the cove, until the freeze, an unending procession of wood coasters. These "Kiln-wooders" were a bobtail ragtag breed of vessel, the only qualification being they would float. Many of them were loaded so high that a watch on top of the deck load was required to direct the helmsman.
The lime coasters or "Limers," however, had to be con- siderably more seaworthy. The job of carrying lime was a particularly hazardous assignment. This wasn't any job for a leaky vessel for quick lime and water didn't mix. Water was lime's deadliest enemy. If a fire broke out below decks the last thing you could fight this fire with was water. There wasn't much you could do but seal the vessel tight, plaster every crack and seam and pray that the blaze would smother.
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There were many times during this bustling period when the terrifying news of a limer on fire in the harbor brought the town to the water's edge. The stricken vessel became a pariah. She was moored offshore, her crew dismissed and the waiting would begin. The crisis was sometimes a matter of days; sometimes it was a fearful vigil that ran into weeks. There was no way of inspecting the fire for admission of air was fatal. Frequently, if after a long vigil, it still appeared that a fire seethed below decks, the doomed vessel was towed into a secluded cove and holes bored into her bottom to allow sea water to get at the firey cancer. This was the heroic, last ditch treatment. There was an outside chance that something could be saved of the vessel. Sometimes a vessel survived. More often she burst into flame and burned down to her keel. Rock- port Harbor can still show a few charred skeletal remains of limers that met their ends by this ordeal of fire and water.
The most famous kiln towards the end of this era was "Gran" Carleton's big kiln on the west shore of the cove. Using soft coal he invented a new method and this roaring monster established some kind of a new world record in burning more than 2800 casks in seven days.
It was in the eighties that a number of the most prominent kiln owners, notably Herbert Shepherd, organized the Lime- rock railroad, a narrow gauge line to carry limerock from Simonton's Corner to the Harbor kilns. The road carried lime for eight years when, in 1894, it was abandoned.
In 1900, the Rockport-Rockland Lime Company was formed and with a capital of $2,000,000 it consolidated and took over all the lime properties in Rockport. Methods were even further modernized, economies were instigated in an at- tempt to compete more favorably with other lime producing sections of the country. But cheap wood was gone. Rockport was too far off a railhead to buy coal at an advantage. The
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great days were over. Gradually the Rockport quarries were abandoned. The fires in the kilns went out. Rockport's boom- ing lime industry went the way of her wooden ships. Dark days were ahead for Rockport and it was to be generations before the village began her slow recovery.
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ند٧٠ لندا
WATERFRONT, ROCKPORT
This recent woodcut by the local artist, Carroll Berry, shows a section of Rockport's inner harbor. In the foreground is the Maine Coast Sea Food lobster smack, Mishawauka, moored before the plant. The plant has been considerably expanded since this woodcut was made and now has a tank capacity of two hundred thousand pounds, making it the lar- gest distributing plant in Maine. In the background stand Rockport's brick blocks, the first to the left being the old Carleton-Norwood & Company building. On the second floor of this brick building is the Old Union Hall, the scene of the heated Town Meeting in 1891, that resulted in the separation of Camden and Rockport.
Ten
IT had been coming for a long time. For a hundred years, despite stresses and strains within the body politic, the Town- ship of Camden had held together. Practically, there was something to be said for division by the middle of the nine- teenth century. The villages within the township were each, to a large extent, maintaining an independent and self-suffi- cient life of their own, both economically and socially. Citi- zens of Rockport and Camden seldom mixed, except at town meetings. There was no particular reason for journeying to a neighboring village. For one thing it wasn't the few minutes trip it is today. As late as 1895 the stage coach, one day in the mud season, consumed seven hours between Rockland and Rockport. As the twentieth century approached all that was holding the two villages of Rockport and Camden together was a common bond of history and a few miserable roads. Yes, there was something to be said for division but the manner and atmosphere in which it was effected was unfortunate.
It had been discussed at town meetings for many years before the final break. In fact this delicate question of divi- sion made lively town meetings for almost twenty years. It was in the great bridge fight in 1884 that a healthy rivalry began to turn to bitterness. Rockport wanted an iron bridge over Goose River and Camden Village just didn't want to help pay for it. It was as clean and simple as that. Rockport got her iron bridge; (the same bridge that was sent toppling into Goose River in the fall of 1946 when a trailer truck struck one of its abutments) but the vote was close. The bad feeling stir- red up in that fight never really healed. From then on it was just a matter of time.
For the next six years the question of separation took on the emotional color of a "cause." The Spring town meetings were a series of violent verbal battles. The lines were drawn quite sharply, village for village. Camden wanted to be set off. Rockport wanted to continue as one township. During those heated days it was a fool-hardy man, indeed, who ven- tured alone into enemy territory. A Rockporter or a Cam- denite who thought contrary to the sentiment of his own vil- lage, and there were a few, was considered the vilest of traitors and spurned like a pariah by his fellows.
Even so the whole bitter affair might have died out from sheer exhaustion had it not been for a small, influential group of Camden citizens who persisted in a fight for dissolution. In the last several meetings before 1891, the climax was reached. It was reminiscent of a saloon brawl in the days of the old frontier. They say that P. J. Carleton, no youngster at the time, figured personally in half a dozen of the free-for-alls that broke out in the hall that day.
That day it was done. A petition was sent to Augusta from the Camden contingent. The fight was carried to the State House. One august Senator was moved to remark that
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the two villages should have been celebrating its centennial rather than suing for a divorce. And so it was on February 25, 1891, a hundred years almost to the day after the formation of the Township, that Rockport and Camden called it quits and each went its separate way.
The division was made legal by a scrawl of the Governor's pen but it was to be another half century before the wounds of that bitter battle were healed. For many years, the rela- tions between the two towns were strained and barely civil. The small fry reflected and carried on the feud of their fath- ers. The youngsters of the estranged sister towns were wont to meet and stand embattled at the quarries or at Porgy Notch, that once heavily wooded stretch along Union Street between Rockport and Camden, hurling names and rocks.
The Camden urchins would shout: "Rockport paddy- whackers live on sody crackers !" The young Rockporters had the answer for that one: "Camden bum lives on rum!"
Today, although rivalry does exist, there is little trace of this ancient bitterness remaining. The two towns have come a long way on the road back to mutual respect and coopera- tion.
Hard upon the heels of this great political fight, came Camden's greatest catastrophe. Men are prone to make mile- stones of tragedy. The tenth of November, 1892 was a date long remembered. This was the day of Camden's great fire.
It began in the early hours of the morning in a wooden building on the east side of Main Street. Driven by a stiff easterly, the fanned flames swept down to the shore and leaped the street. According to witnesses, burning embers were car- ried as far as Simonton's Corner that frightful night. In a matter of hours, virtually the whole business section of the town lay in smoking ruins.
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After a cheerless winter, Camden began to re-build but it was many years before the scars of this holacaust were erased. As a result of this costly fire, Camden adopted an ordinance requiring new construction in the business district to be of fireproof materials. Modern fire-fighting equipment was purchased, laying the ground work for what is today, un- der Chief Allen Payson, one of the most efficient Fire Depart- ments in the State.
Rockport's great fire came fifteen years later in the sum- mer of 1907. It started early Sunday evening in the Eel's lime kiln on the west side of the harbor. Fires in the kilns were common occurrences and this was just another fire until the wind suddenly shifted to the westward and began carrying burning embers across the cove. The ice houses, then ranging along the entire east side of the cove, caught and began going up like torches. The fire departments of all the surrounding towns were summoned to the scene. The fire fighters fought a stubborn fight all that night. Although most all the houses on Mechanic Street were afire at one time or another before the fire was brought under control, they were saved with neg- ligible damage. But the ice houses burned to the ground, leav- ing ice standing in the sun; the kilns on the west shore of the harbor, with one exception, were destroyed.
In the thick of the fight that night was Rockport's famous hand pumper, the G. F. Burgess, winner of many a muster in her colorful career. She now stands in honored retirement in a dark corner of Rockport's fire house, an affectionate remin- der of by-gone days. Also in the fight that night was Charles "Ed" Rhodes, who retired as chief engineer of the Rockport Department in 1946, after thirty-five years of service.
The great fire marked the beginning of the end to an- other of Rockport's dwindling industries. Two of the ice houses were replaced and the Rockport Ice Company continued
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to cut ice and ship it for a number of years; but the ice busi- ness was on the way out when the fire dealt this staggering blow. The high days when 50,000 tons of ice were cut each year from the Lily Pond, half of which went direct from the Pond into the holds of ships at harvesting time, were already passed. Also gone were the "good old days" when a few Rock- port fortunes were made by the simple process of cutting ice at the Pond for 25 cents a ton and selling it at the wharf one half mile away at $4.00 a ton. During the years around the turn of the century, Rockport was the largest ice producing town in the state and the trade mark, Lily Pond Ice, was fa- mous throughout the east.
It is only today, with the opening of the Penobscot Bay Ice Company plant, geared to produce 30 tons of artificial ice a day to augment its natural supply, that Rockport once again is achieving its old position as one of the most important ice producing centers in Maine.
The events of the last few decades are too close to be pro- perly viewed as history. Within this span were two World Wars and a valley between them of an uneasy peace. When the war came in 1917, Camden went back to building ships. Robert L. Bean, son of Holly, began laying keels for wooden ships at the old Bean Yard. At its peak, some 200 men were back at their old trades, fashioning vessels to meet the war- stimulated need for more bottoms.
Five four masters were built in Camden in the next sev- eral years : theAnnie L. Barnes, Edna McKnight, Charles A. Dean, Robert L. Bean and the T. M. Barnsdall. Then, once again, this famous old yard was silent. It took another twen- ty-five years later to revive Camden once more as a shipbuild- ing town.
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When the second World War came to America, the Bean Yard was the Camden Shipbuilding & Marine Railway Co. and in the hands of three newcomers, Richard Lyman, Clinton Lunt and Cary Bok, son of one of the region's great benefac- tors, Mary Louise Bok (later Mrs. Efrem Zimbalist). This time when the call came for ships it was all but too late. The men who knew the art of building wooden ships were, for the most part, gone or too old to ply their trades proficiently. But the call went out and the region responded. There were, fortunately, a few who hadn't forgotten and more than enough eager to learn. And learning came astonishingly easy for it was there in the blood. Young men came out of the stores, off the farms and from the region's garages - fifteen hundred of them at the peak of construction. They built and launched in those three years: 2 Minesweepers, 3 Barges, 11 APC Troop Ships, 12 Salvage Tugs - a total of 23,000 tons of war ship- ping. During those busy years, Camden took on the color and aspect of a boom town. At the war's close, many who had come from distant places to work in the war effort, remained to live.
Between the two wars there were other changes in the region. Camden, partly through the efforts and generosity of Mrs. Bok, built its library and its Garden Theater. Rockport, during the dark days of the depression, underwent a face lift- ing with the help of this same benefactor. The decaying re- mains of another era - old stores and sagging icehouses, vacant, windowless homes, long untenanted - were torn down and cleared away. It was during these days that Rockport became, for a period, the Summer Music Capitol of America. And Camden, too, in this era had a call to fame as the first town in America to have hanging flower baskets on its lamp- posts.
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And between those wars, the region of the Camden Hills began to assume its proper place as one of Maine's "lost" para- dises. It had never been lost, of course, but it was constantly being discovered. New fast roads were making Maine acces- sible and the summer vacation was becoming an American habit. What had been a trickle of summer visitors who kept their secret guarded now became a tide-rip of summer vaca- tionists who went around telling everyone of Camden's beauties. In 1935 Captain Frank Swift further gave the town a salty fame when he reconditioned one windjammer, offering to the countless who had never been to sea, an oppor- tunity to sail the ocean blue in true fo'c's'le style. His venture met with such astonishing success that today he has a fleet of eight and Camden's Windjammer Cruises have become na- tionally famous.
Of course, the Camden Hills had been discovered many times since Captain George Waymouth sighted the "great mountains" from the quarter deck of his ship Archangel. This summer business had had its small beginnings way back be- fore the Civil War when a few experimental householders took in a few boarders who wished to escape the summer heat of Bangor. Later, several hotels sprang up to accommodate the visitors in a more professional manner. It wasn't, until the 1880's that the region enjoyed its first little boom as a water- ing spot. In the course of the next two decades, scores of new summer homes began sprouting on the shores and in the foot- hills.
The impact of this business, gradual as it was, brought changes that were profound and far-reaching. Many of the region's once prosperous industries were prostrate. This new infusion was a godsend. Yet, desperately as this new money was needed, it appeared at first as a mixed blessing.
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As this summer business became more and more of a major "industry," an awareness dawned that the region was developing a lop-sided economy ; a cycle of summer prosperity, a hard winter and a long uphill haul through the spring. Once this fact was grasped, the region was faced with a two-horned dilemma. The people of the region, aware of their past, were convinced that their future salvation lay, not in living on it, but rather freeing themselves of dependence and once more getting back into the stream of progress. The summer popula- tion, on the other hand, preferred that the villages remain old and unchanged.
Today this honest conflict is being resolved. The new generation of summer colonists, many of them sons and daugh- ters of the early summer families, more and more tend to be- come a part of the villages. Less and less is there a sense of a new way of life super-imposed upon the old. The two are mixing and working together toward a common end, a healthy balanced economy based on small, diversified industry.
Camden, from its raw beginnings, grew and prospered by infusions of new, young blood. The summer "visitor" is giving way to the summer resident, who, holding a profound respect for Maine and its people and aware of its past, is committed to its future.
That morning in 1791 at Peter Ott's Tavern, the newly elected First Selectman was doubtlessly called upon to say a few words. John Harkness was certainly a man of few words, a thoughtful, self-educated man with a solid sense of values. "Boys," he might have said, looking about him at the hills and at the sea to the eastward, "none of us will ever get over rich here, but it looks like a nice place to live."
Over a century later, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who spent all her growing years in Camden, uttered her feelings in an-
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other way. RENASCENCE, one of the finest poems in our language begins :
All I could see from where I stood Was three long mountains and a wood ; I turned and looked the other way, And saw three islands in a bay, So with my eyes I traced a line Of the horizon, thin and fine Straight around till I was come Back to where I'd started from; And all I saw from where I stood Was three long mountains and a wood. Over these things I could not see : These were the things that bounded me ;
She, too, had the Maine idea.
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HECKMAN BINDERY INC.
SEPT 96
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