USA > Maine > Lincoln County > Waldoboro > History of old Broad Bay and Waldoboro, Volume 2 > Part 27
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 | Part 57 | Part 58 | Part 59 | Part 60
You know, I suppose, that this is about the season of our country parties, and as usual they have not failed to make their display. They already begin to be frequent. There have been two or three at Mrs. Bela Haskell's. I was at the last one which embraced all the young people, and think it was the best I have known in Waldoboro excepting one at Col. Ludwig's. I will not attempt to describe it to you; but as your experience will help your imagination assist me by picturing to yourself Bela in his new capacity, George Sproul and Thomas, his brother, Dr. Brown, Dr. Daggett, Hovey, G. Ludwig, Farley, George, Gorham,28 and myself, and all the ladies in the place, with addition of one or two from out of town, all in their usual attitudes, but making twice as much noise.
Our Lyceum,29 which as you know was so lively last winter, has not revived, and I fear it will die unless some of the Literati undertake to shield it's infancy.
Colonel Reed's years in the Post Office were stormy ones, subject to the assaults of his political opponents, and of those in his own party who wanted the job. Jane Ann, writing from her visit in Bangor with Doctor Brown's family, January 29, 1839, reports to her brother Charles in Boston that letters from home inform her "that the Tories have sent on a petition to have Pa removed from the post office and Mr. French appointed post-
25 Dennis McCobb, Jr., later lost at sea, circa 1835.
26Col. Reed was the postmaster. Charles Miller, his brother-in-law, and a fellow Whig, apparently had an eye on the Colonel's job. 27Letter in possession of Dr. Benj. Kinsell of Dallas, Texas.
28 The two Smouse brothers.
20The Waldoboro Lyceum, fathered by Edward Reed, met in Sproul's Hall. Jones Hovey was secretary. It discussed abstract ethical and political questions, for example: "Has every man his price?"
235
Annals of the 20's and 30's
master and Mr. Balch assistant postmaster. I suppose McCobb and his party consider Pa is the mover of the investigation which had been made into his conduct in his office and are now retaliating."
The closing of the annals of these two decades in such a key is not unfitting. On the contrary it is highly characteristic, for fam- ily feuds and political controversies in these days were vehement and bitter beyond anything known in our times. The creative vi- tality and passion which men brought to their business enterprises was the same which men carried over into party feeling, religious strife, and personal antagonisms. It was the principle of power politics in family, church, and economic life, and usually, as in feudal days, the henchmen, retainers, or party followers lined up behind a powerful family head or a party leader and visited their spite quite generally against those enrolled under the banner of another family or leader. In reality these were embattled and stir- ring days.
XXXVIII THE RESURGENCE OF MORALS
If the ancients drank wine as our people drink rum and cider, it is no wonder that we hear of so many possessed with devils.
JOHN ADAMS
TR HE COLONIAL PERIOD in Puritan New England was in many ways a rough, roistering one. Life was hard and pleasures were crude and few. An agricultural economy held the yeomen through the four seasons in strict servitude to the never ending tasks of the farm. Nor did religion bring any surcease, for the theology of the all-dominating and embracing church was a bitter and fearsome thing, offering little in the way of sweet consolation to the spirit and much in the way of harsh discipline to the flesh. Its precepts were written into the civil law, and they offered little elbow room to individual volition. Escape, if escape there was to be, had to come through other channels, and it came through a unique pat- tern of social life evolved in part under drab economic pressure, and in part by the settler himself in response to the pricks of the hair shirt in which he was garbed by his rural economy and his established church.
The main positive influence in the character of the Puritan came perhaps from the spirit of neighborliness. This was in part an economic necessity, and it also arose from the escape urge. It assumed divers forms such as the barn raisings, the husking and chopping bees, and the quilting parties. It also cultivated, ofttimes to a ruinous degree, the social ideal of conviviality, and the outlet for such an escape mechanism was the tavern, with its warmth, cheer, its genial host, its cider, and its rum. The "ordinary" of Puritan days, or tavern, as it was generally known after 1700, met a great variety of social needs. It was a meeting place for neigh- bors; here the overnight guests tarried, told their stories, related new experiences, and brought the news from distant parts.
With the advent of newspapers the only copy in the district was to be found at the tavern, and here the illiterate might gather and listen while the host would read aloud the complete columns
237
The Resurgence of Morals
of the press amid interruptions, comments, and endless arguments. Such gatherings were the scene of interminable and bitter political bickerings, and also the center of excitement arising from betting and games of chance. There was also a darker side to the picture, for here was the exhilaration, the lightheartedness, and also the moral degradation arising from the consumption of great quanti- ties of cider, flip, toddy and rum.
The tavern was not only a social necessity in early days, it was also a legal requirement, ostensibly to provide for the travel- ling public. As early as 1656 the General Court made towns liable to a fine for not maintaining an ordinary, and the towns were ad- monished to conform to this law just as they were required to maintain a church or a school. The Puritan statesmen also recog- nized the tavern as a potential evil as well as a good and hedged it about with some of the most refined of Puritan sumptuary leg- islation. The innholders could not "knowingly harbor in house, barn or stable, any rogues, vagabonds, thieves, sturdy beggars, masterless men or women," and the Puritan magistrates dealt harshly with drunkards and excessive drinking. Fines were heavy, and in addition there was the elaborate Puritan machinery of the bilboes, cages, stocks, whipping posts, and the dreaded scarlet let- ter D. The tithingmen too kept the tavern under surveillance as well as the parish. Despite all such safeguards, all the social evils associated with the consumption of strong drinks rose like a re- lentless tide, sweeping aside many of the moral barriers of Puritan- ism and littering the social scene with human wreckage and debris, until the resurgence of morality in the nineteenth century set strong counter currents in motion.
In these respects Waldoboro was no different from other New England towns after the coming of its Puritans. The Ger- mans who preceded them were essentially a sober people. Those of the colony of 1752 who came from the sunny, grape-growing districts of the Rhine had, to be sure, bemoaned the lack of wine,1 but they were all too poor to use available fruit for wine, their barley for beer, or their rye for whiskey. Mild or stronger liquors among them were rare and were consumed in strict moderation until their economy became more settled and productive. Nor did the Germans have any taverns. Their hospitality in earliest times was of and in the home, where it was their wont to receive stran- gers and to share generously with them the little which they had. The local taverns were Puritan institutions. They came to Waldo- boro with the early English settlers, where they were but one phase of the new culture, destined slowly but surely to effect
1Cyrus Eaton, Annals of Warren, 2nd ed. (Hallowell, 1877), p. 148. Cited on the authority of Joseph Ludwig.
238
HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
marked modifications in the German feudal viewpoint and social pattern.
The earliest taverns in New England were located in consid- erable part near the ferries, which, of course, were the main line for travellers afoot and on horse, and places where delays in travel would occur if the ferrymen chanced to be absent from their posts, or if the tide happened to be down. The two earliest taverns in Waldoboro were both on the main line of ferry traffic, and both were founded and kept by Puritans, Charles Sampson and Thomas McGuyer.
Captain Charles Sampson and his son, Captain Charles, Jr., had come to Broad Bay from Duxbury in 1769 and acquired the property roughly embraced in the present-day farms of Messrs. Stephen Patrick and James Bain. While Captain Charles senior continued as master of a coaster, his son managed the land end of the partnership, which included farming, real-estate speculation, and a tavern. In 1773 when Broad Bay became Waldoborough, Charles Sampson, the innholder, was elected as the first essayer2 of the town. In the course of time the Sampsons erected a large square-roofed mansion on the property on the crest of Thomas Hill ridge. This house served as the Sampson homestead and tavern. It is interesting that the four friends, Waterman Thomas, Charles Sampson, Abijah Waterman, and Colonel William Farnsworth all built houses of the same type. The Waterman and Farnsworth houses still stand, but the Thomas mansion was destroyed by fire many years ago. These were all pretentious homes. Tradition has it that the militia used to drill in Captain Sampson's kitchen.3
A tavern in such a location will seem strange to the reader, but not if he recalls that at this time there was no village; that the present county road through to Warren was little more than a bridle path; that the Thomas Hill area bade fair to become the center of the new town, and that much of the travel east and west was through the southern part of the present town, hitting the river at Waterman's ferry, the farm next south of the tavern. Here Abijah Waterman ferried travellers across to the Dutch Neck shore, from whence they made their way through West Waldo- boro and on westward over the Old County Road, the only over- land artery of travel to Falmouth and Boston.
In the New England towns the inns were kept by men of consequence. This was true of Charles Sampson and equally so of Thomas McGuyer, the innholder on the west side of the river. For fourteen years he was town clerk, and for five years first selectman. He came to Waldoboro from Bristol in 1784, probably
2Official tester of liquors.
3Mary Katherine Sampson, born circa 1812. Oral tradition from Ruth Turner George.
239
The Resurgence of Morals
drawn here by his marriage in that year to Sarah Sprague. In 1786 he purchased of Jacob Unbehind (Umberhine) for £146 the lat- ter's farm4 at the junction of the Old County and Bristol roads. On the north corner of the junction of the two roads on the lot now occupied by the home of Kenneth Creamer stood the McGuyer Tavern. This site was a natural location for a tavern. By its door passed all east-west travel afoot or on horse, and at this point travel split. The traveller either went south and crossed the Medomak at Waterman's ferry, or he went due east to the shore and crossed the river at Light's ferry, which plied between "Tommy Creamer's boathouse rock" and Merle Castner's shore. At this point he still had the option of going south on Friendship Road and passing on to the eastward through the southern part of the town, or of proceeding north to the head of tide and then east on the Warren Road over Willett's Hill. A third tavern of a sort was that of "Aunt Polly Klaus." The ell of the home of John Burgess is all that is left of this old landmark where Aunt Polly used to dole out rum and molasses between sermons to the Sabbath worship- pers at the old Lutheran church.
These old Waldoboro taverns had little in common with the inns of our own day. They were first of all the homes of the inn- keepers' families, and the sleeping quarters of the family were the only parts not open to guests. The large front room served as lounge, dining room, and tap room. Here also some of the meats were roasted in the big fireplace, but most of the cooking was done at the kitchen fireplace back of the front room. Few of the social amenities were observed. Guests of high and low degree ate with the family at the same table. Sleeping arrangements were less demo- cratic. A guest of little consequence might be bedded in the barn on the hay, or on the floor of the stable, or even the lounge. Those with more money or of greater prominence were better cared for, but they could secure little privacy, for rooms were few, and with from one to three double beds to a room it was the usual practice for strangers to share the same room and bed. Those who did not appreciate strangers as bedfellows were looked upon as obnoxious or fastidious and were not humored in their preference for privacy.
The principal source of revenue in these taverns was the great quantity of liquor sold to local folk. Here the poor mingled freely with their well-to-do neighbors, for social lines in Waldo- boro at this time had not become tightly drawn. Along with much drinking there were late hours, card playing, and gambling en- gaged in by all social levels, yeomanry, merchants, doctors, and even clergymen. Doctor Schaeffer and Parson Kroner were fre- quent tavern guests and heavy drinkers. Schaeffer was wealthy and
4Lincoln County Register of Deeds (Wiscasset, Me.), Bk. 20, p. 148.
240
HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
at this time had no reputation left to lose, but Kroner was a younger man, and the social life at McGuyers in the end definitely got the better of such spiritual promptings as he may at one time have felt.
Liquor on the whole was so cheap that everyone could drink and drink inordinately. In the 1780's rum sold for eight pence a quart, and molasses was twelve pence a gallon. The drinks most favored in these days are now no longer popular and in some cases not even known. They were blackstrap, cider, toddy, rum and flip. The blackstrap, a combination of rum and molasses, was char- acterized by Josiah Quincy as "truly the most outrageous of all the detestable American drinks." Casks of it stood on tap in every country store and tavern, and hanging close by was the salt cod, a quick stimulator of additional thirst. Flip was a lighter and more aristocratic beverage. It was mixed in great pewter mugs or earth- ern pitchers. Its base was mostly cider, sweetened with sugar, molasses, or sometimes pumpkin, and flavored with a gill or more of New England rum. Into this mixture was plunged a red hot poker, which made it foam or sizzle and imparted to it the burnt flavor which was its characteristic taste and one that was univer- sally approved. The old handless flip bowls would hold two or three quarts and to this day bear mute testimony of the thirst of these old tavern habitués.
The poker was an institution variously called a loggerhead, flip-dog, or hottle, and was as much a part of the fireplace equip- ment as the andirons or bellows. In fact, in most taverns it lay quite constantly amid the embers in readiness for instant use. Doc- tor Schaeffer and his friends in the younger set were great flip lovers, but after all is said, hard cider and rum and molasses were the real Waldoboro staples. They were frequently drunk at funer- als and weddings and always at launchings, military musters, barn raisings, and chopping bees. Mulled cider at night was a univer- sally favorite drink. Older men began their day with a quart of hard cider or more before breakfast. In fact, a large part of the produce of local orchards was diverted to cider. This ancient prac- tice lingered on in Waldoboro, and it is related of the Honorable Isaac Reed that down close to the end of his years in the 1880's he had every night before retiring his popcorn, his apples, and his pitcher of cider.
In retrospect these old tavern days in the early town wear the filmy mantle of romance and charm, and indeed they did serve to soften the asperities of an existence wrung from a grudging soil with hoe and mattock served by manpower. But there were shad- ows, too, for the tavern was the primrose path to hopeless intem- perance, that Goliath among the vices of those days, which piti-
241
The Resurgence of Morals
lessly dragged its victims to degradation, poverty, and the ruin that ended behind the door of the village squire with the freshly penned mortgage deed on the table awaiting signature. Herein the tavern was not the sole sinner. It was amply aided and abetted by that almost equally old institution, the general store.
By 1800 there was a nucleus of a village at the head of tide with general stores kept by Payne Elwell, William Thompson, the Head brothers, and Captain George Smouse. These establish- ments were augmented by a few small stores in the more remote sections of the town. All of them were licensed to sell liquor and have it drunk on the premises. Such places were not merely sales centers, but also loafing and lounging centers on stormy days and in the evenings. Here the nail-keg and cracker-box politicians of the neighborhood gathered, swapped stories, passed on the gossip of the town, argued endlessly on politics, and consumed raven- ously the keeper's stock of cider, molasses, and rum. This was the beginning of a long Waldoboro tradition, and for over one hun- dred years and long after the sale of liquor in such places ceased, the stores were gathering places and miniature forums.
In my boyhood the whole of lower Friendship Road would trek to the village on Saturday nights and sometimes during the week. Each had his own favorite hangout where cronies would gather from other sections of the town and the evenings would be whiled away in old style. Such loafers did little more for the keeper than to smoke or chew his tobacco or munch his peanuts. They were none the less welcome. I remember the news and the talk gathered from around the paunch-bellied stoves in the stores of Tyler Gay or "Wash" Levensaler were always a pleasant diver- sion when my uncle or father returned from such scenes and nar- rated the evening's talk to the family just before the bed hour. This practice of using the store as the neighborhood gathering center has persisted down to the present day, not in the village where the stores began closing at 6:00 P.M. over twenty-five years ago, but certainly at Genthners and Kalers in West Waldoboro, at Scofields in South Waldoboro, and in other sections of the town.
But changes came. A bridge was built across the river at head of tide; a new county road was laid over Willett's Hill to Warren and over Benner's Hill to the westward. It became the main thor- oughfare of traffic. Travel over the old routes ceased, and the Sampson and McGuyer taverns were of the past. Charles Sampson turned to the tillage of his ample acres and became the village post- master, while Thomas McGuyer on September 9, 1809, sold to William McKean of Boston for the sum of $950.00 his farm and inn at the north corner of the Old County Road, and retired to the home of his second wife in Bristol. The old tavern days in Waldoboro were no more.
242
HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
Around the turn of the century the present-day village was in the course of becoming the center of population. In 1796 David Doane had sold the Ulmer holdings, which embraced a considerable portion of the present village site, to William Sproul and Ezekiel Barnard. When the new County Road had been completed, Barnard built a tavern on the hillside just north of the road, on the present site of the new parking area. This tavern was managed by Barnard's enterprising wife, Mary, until her death in 1852, and it became the main village hostelry. It was a more important mart of travel than the older taverns; through traffic was heavier than in the older tavern period, and as the town waxed in economic importance it became the headquarters of visiting businessmen. There was loung- ing and loafing as of yore, but this village inn was a gathering place for the local folk of degree and importance. To a greater extent the poor and unimportant folk took their blackstrap, flip, and rum at the village stores. There was, to be sure, no diminution in drink- ing at the tavern, but there the liquor consumed was largely by the gentry.
The Barnard Tavern was the terminal of the Georges River Stage from the eastward. Here the passenger shifted to the local coach which continued the relay to Damariscotta, and there re- ceived passengers eastbound, which on its return trip it relayed to the waiting Georges River Line for continuation of the trip eastward. The Waldoboro mail driver was Eliphalet Hale, who had the mail contract as early as 1813, and drove it at this time over the Old County Road by McGuyer's Tavern. It was in this decade, however, that the new road was put through over Benner's Hill, and in 1813 Eliphalet Hale, "mail contractor," bought of Joseph Kidder, "joiner," a lot in the village on the north of the County Road, "it being the same land on which said Kidder built a house and barn, which he has agreed to convey to said Hale."5 Here in what was doubtless his livery stable, Hale kept four horses, using a fresh pair on his route every other day.
The early New England stage drivers were of an interesting and dignified class of men. Like the innholders they were people of importance, and this was clearly the role of Eliphalet Hale in Waldoboro. The mail was driven in all weathers. In winter there was the tall bearskin cap, the great coat of the driver, and in rainy weather the oil coat or the poncho. Eight mails came in each week.6 The arrival and departure of mail was usually an animated scene before the Barnard Tavern. The stage would come dashing down the hill from the eastward to where Hale's coach was waiting be- fore the tavern. There would be a quick transfer of mail and
5Lincoln Co. Deeds, Bk. 78, p. 221.
6Town Clerk's Record, Jan. 8, 1821.
243
The Resurgence of Morals
passengers. A little group of waiting people would be saying their good-byes to departing friends; there would also be those entrust- ing the driver with little commissions along the route, a message to be shouted or a package to be tossed to some friend living on the road. The drivers were usually kindly or beloved figures, who carried messages to all along their route and who grew to be on terms of helpful intimacy with all the people living along the road. On the outskirts and forming the framework of this scene would be the village loafers, whose lineal descendants still haunt the Four Corners down to the present day.
In the early nineteenth century there were two other taverns in Waldoboro of lesser note. The present Dyer house at Feyler's Corner stood at the junction of the roads leading to Washington and Union. In 1815 the road from this corner to Union had been laid out, a fact which made this point a logical location for a tav- ern. Since Charles Feyler owned and occupied the house at this time it would follow that he, too, was the innholder. By 1832 his son, Samuel, was running the inn. The selectmen's licensing rec- ords for that year contain the following entry: "Samuel Feyler was licensed as an Innholder with permission to sell wine, rum, and other spirituous liquors in his house." This was a neighbor- hood gathering center, where much liquor and gossip was dis- pensed, and it was a convenient overnight stopping place for the traveller proceeding on horseback or afoot to either Washington or Union.
The second tavern was "Aunt Lydia's" still standing and do- ing business. Its location was in East Waldoboro on the Post Road. John Trowbridge and his wife, Sarah, seem to have been the first of this well-known family in Waldoboro and to have settled in the Slaigo district on the farm now owned by Mrs. Russell Cooney. On August 8, 1816, John, Jr., and his brother, James, sons of John Senior, purchased of Matthias Waltz and Henry Burkett fifty- seven acres of land "in the eastwardly part of Waldoboro on the northwardly side of the County Road."" Here the tavern was built which was patronized by the people in that section and by the foot or horse travellers passing east and west. As in the village, the innkeeper was a woman, and it was Sarah's name which appeared on the license list of 1818. After her demise, her son, James, took over management. His name appears on the license list of 1832. After his death his wife, Lydia, ran the tavern. Without doubt she was a vigorous and picturesque personality, famed for her cook- ery, her gossip, and her mixed beverages. Otherwise this lonely outpost of hospitality would never have operated for so many years and the name would not have lingered as a town tradition.
"Lincoln Co. Deeds, Bk. 92, p. 83.
244
HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
Despite the allure of these old days with their romantic tavern atmosphere, the ugly fact remains that the misuse of strong liquors had become the most common vice in New England towns. Its human wastage had become generally and enormously ruinous, and as we have said, the general store and the tavern had in a large measure slowly developed this condition because of the large prof- its accruing from the traffic. By 1820 nearly everyone in Maine took his liquor, and as Neal Dow observed: "Many of them were regular attendants upon the ordinances of the church; some were foremost in good words and works. Elders, deacons, sabbath schoolteachers competed with each other for customers for liquor as for dry goods and other family supplies, and cheerfully donated generously of the profits thus obtained."8
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.