USA > Maine > Lincoln County > Waldoboro > History of old Broad Bay and Waldoboro, Volume 2 > Part 31
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were indisputably clippers. For example, the Waldoboro Wings of the Morning and the Boston Clipper, Southern Cross, were near sister ships. The latter vessel, built in Boston in 1851, had a tonnage of 938.48, a length of 168.6', a beam of 34.9', and a draft of 21'.
The Wings of the Morning was just a trifle smaller, with a tonnage of 915.64, a length of 166.10' and a beam of 34.6'. Allow- ing for a small difference in tonnage, the dimensions of the two ships offer a very close parallel. Or we may compare the Waldo- boro Woodcock with the Boston Northern Light, clearly a clip- per, whose run from San Francisco to Boston in seventy-six days and six hours set a record for sail between these two ports for all time. The Northern Light, built at South Boston in 1851, was of 1021 tons, with a length of 171.4', a breadth of 36', and a depth of 21.9'. The Waldoboro Woodcock built in 1853 was a trifle larger, with a tonnage of 1091.17, a length of 187.1', and a breadth of 35.4'. Thus the Waldoboro ship, larger by seventy tons, had a disproportionately greater length and a disproportionately lesser beam, from which may be inferred a sharper, more rakish type of ship conforming to the clipper structural characteristics. Or again, the Waldoboro Spark of the Ocean, forty-three tons smaller than the Southern Cross exceeded the latter's length by three feet and was less in breadth at the beam by more than a foot. Such com- parisons, of course, are not conclusive, but they do build up a strong presumption in favor of a Waldoboro claim to clipper ships.
These locally built clippers had varied careers. The Wings of the Morning was commanded by Captain Harvey A. Lovell of Waldoboro and owned by Talbot and Olyphant of New York. Immediately after her fitting for sea she was put into the Cali- fornia trade. On her maiden voyage she sailed from New York on January 21, 1853, and on March 18th put into Rio with a loss of topmasts, having apparently had her difficulties in the wintry Atlantic. She made San Francisco in one hundred and sixty-five days, a long passage for a clipper, but quite in line with the achieve- ments of many of them. In 1855 she made the same trip, clearing from Philadelphia, and reached the Golden Gate in one hundred and forty-six days, which was respectable sailing. The following year the ship was sold to the French and prior to her last listing in 1868 she made a record from San Francisco to Shanghai which has stood as an all-time record for sail. The other Waldoboro clippers had honorable but inconspicuous careers.
The largest and last of Edwin Achorn's clippers was launched at Waldoboro in 1854, the ship Achorn, of 1250 tons. She made but one short voyage. In order to get out of the Medomak before the river closed for the winter, she proceeded to Muscongus, there to complete her fitting out. But on the morning of January
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3, 1855, in some unaccountable manner the Achorn took fire and was entirely destroyed, an incident that was perhaps providen- tial for the major owners, for the days when such ships could make money on freights or cargoes were nearly over. The ma- terial in this ship and the excellence of her finish and equipment is attested to by the fact that she was valued at $85,000, a top figure in the clipper era for a ship of her size. Her main owners in New York had their shares insured for $65,000,21 and since she was about ready for sea, they in all probability recovered the full value of their investment, but it was different with the small owners. They were not insured, and one of them, her master builder, Alexander Young, was compelled to mortgage his fine brick home on Dog Lane to meet the loss he sustained in this ship.
By the year 1854 the glory of the clipper era was near its end. These stately greyhounds continued for a brief period their swift sweep of the seas, but after 1854 no more extreme clippers were built for the California trade.22 As the territory increased in population it turned to other pursuits as well as the mining of gold, and in consequence it became more self-sufficient, produc- ing the food and many other commodities needed for the support of its heterogeneous population. Its demand for eastern supplies tapered off, and speed in rushing goods there lost much of its old importance. In shipbuilding the medium clippers, costing less to build and less to operate, became the vogue in ship construction. The old Waldoboro mossbacks saw their conservatism being vin- dicated, when in a flash the bottom seemed to drop from every- thing, and one of the severest depressions in American history was on them. Shipping and shipbuilding were severely affected. Rates fell from sixty to ten dollars a ton, and ships lay at wharves for weeks and months awaiting cargoes. Builders everywhere ex- perienced the shock and proceeded by droves into bankruptucy.
Either through accident or their conservatism the Waldoboro builders weathered the storm better than those in most building centers. Their capital was not tied up in expensive ships of heavy tonnage requiring a large force of officers and seamen to operate them. Consequently they were not affected so adversely by a smaller volume of freight and lower rates. But even Waldoboro felt the crash, for the County Map of 1857 showed only eight shipyards still operating in the town, but building did continue every year through the depression down to 1860. George Smouse, Augustus Welt, Isaac Reed, Joseph Clark, Charles Comery, Wil- liam F. Storer, Alfred Storer, Henry Kennedy, and Schwartz & Castner, either singly or as partners, continued to build and
21Contemporary newspaper report cited by George Rice, Shipping Days of Old Boothbay.
22 Arthur H. Clark, The Clipper Ship Era (New York: G. P. Putnam Sons, 1911).
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launch. The volume was not so great, but from three to six ships were launched yearly down to the end of the decade.
Edwin Achorn, who had built the most beautiful and famous ships of this era, fared not so well. His fortunes and his career seem to have been broken by the abrupt ending of the clipper era and the cataclysmic depression which followed. Not until 1870 was he able to return to shipbuilding. Between that year and 1874 he built four small schooners, the largest being the Tannhauser, of 279 tons. His greatest creation had been the stately clipper, Achorn, of 1250 tons; his last was the little schooner, Achorn, of 87 tons, owned at Waldoboro and commanded by Isaac W. Comery. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Noon had passed. The Great Days were over, but few in Waldoboro knew it. Shipbuilding continued seemingly on a major scale. The town had known prosperity so long; so much well- being had been achieved in the middle class, and so much wealth continued to accumulate in the hands of the few, that things did not seem different to a prosperous and complaisant citizenry, but they were different. Steam and steel had begun their slow con- spiracy, and the seal of doom was already on wooden ships. The Great Days were ending, and it was only a matter of time when everyone would know that things were different.
XL ANNALS OF THE GREAT DAYS
Get thee up into this mountain ... and behold the land of Canaan, which I give unto the children for a possession.
DEUT. 32:39
TH HE GREAT DAYS WERE THE YEARS of the most rapid growth in the town's history. Population leaped from 3661 in 1840 to its maxi- mum of 4569 in 1860. The list of qualified voters of the year 1843,1 "males of twenty-one years and upwards," furnishes some insight into the racial balance of the local society. In a population of more than 3600 there were one hundred and eighty-eight family names. Of these, one hundred and twenty-one were English and sixty-seven were of German origin. It did not follow, however, that the population had become predominantly English. To be sure, the number of German family names was only a third of what it had been seventy-five years before, but those remaining on the scene had maintained the Teutonic tradition of prodigious fertility, and in 1843 twenty-eight of these sixty-seven German families represented well over one half of the eight hundred and nine qualified voters in the town, or to draw the dividing line more sharply, the German stock cast six hundred and eighty- eight ballots and the Puritans one hundred and twenty-one.
To infer from such data that the Germans ran the town would have been wide of the truth, for aggressive leadership, social, economic, and political, was in the hands of the English, or of those of German descent who thought of themselves only as Americans. The great mass of German underdogs still carried on in the tradition of feudal docility, pretty much as they had a hundred years earlier. This was the unchanging factor in Waldo- boro Germanism. Its political and social overlords changed from time to time, but its feudal loyalty was always transferred to the next in line, and in these decades the mantle of overlordship, still continuing in the Reed family, had fallen on the shoulders of
1In my possession.
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the Honorable Isaac Reed, who maintained for decades a com- plete and tight control of the suburban vote on all matters except those affecting taxes, and here as ever, the Germans knew no control except that of their own poverty or thrift.
On the local scene, the Benner family still held numerical ascendancy, with a total of forty qualified voters. The Minks had stolen second place with twenty-nine family heads, and the Creamers and Kalers were close behind with twenty-seven and twenty-six family heads respectively. In order, there followed the Millers, with twenty family heads; the Storers, with nineteen; the Winchenbachs, with sixteen; the Achorns and Ludwigs, with fifteen; the Genthners, Hoffses, and Newberts, with fourteen; the Eugleys, Levensalers, and Shumans, with thirteen; the Grosses and Burketts, with eleven each, and the Welts, Seidlingers, Overlocks, Lashes, and Feylers, with ten each. Among the Puritans the Wallis family had twenty qualified voters, but the German Walch had already become corrupted to the English Wallis, later Wallace, and in this name the German and Puritan are no longer distinguish- able. The Simmons family mustered thirteen heads; the Pitchers, twelve; the Flanders, ten; the Nash family, nine; the Howards, seven, and the Sampsons and Soules, six each.
English was the language of the village, even though many villagers still understood German and others spoke it - Mr. Star- man to perfection. In the back-districts German was common, for there were those still alive, including Charles Razor and Con- rad Heyer, who in childhood had known no other tongue. German culture was in retreat, but had not disappeared. In the village as well as in the back-districts old Teuton folkways and supersti- tions were still strongly entrenched, for the educational setup was just not strong enough to modify markedly or to eradicate what was handed down in the home from generation to generation.
A few new German families had filtered in, in these later decades - the Pfotzers, known only from a few letters in Ger- man script; the Schweier family, made up of Christian and his two sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, who came from Germany, first to Canada then to Waldoboro and settled on the Athearn Dag- gett place. Elizabeth married a Turner and her daughter married into the Weaver family, while Christian married Lucy Borne- mann (Pub. May 10, 1823). There was also Meier Untermeyer, a German Jew, who located in Waldoboro and carried on a butcher business. From him is descended the well-known con- temporary American poet, Louis Untermeyer, who remarks of his ancestor: "My paternal grandfather, who proudly bore the re- dundant name of Meyer Untermeyer, had emigrated from Bavaria
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
and had been a butcher in the town of Waldoboro, Maine, before he bought out a larger Market in Boston."2
The infiltration of English stock during these decades was a steady one. The Tarrs, Abraham, born in Whitefield, Maine, with his two children, Edward, born April 6, 1839, and Elizabeth, born February 25, 1841, occupied the old Waterman Thomas mansion in lower Slaigo. The brook running by the house is sometimes referred to, to this day, as Tarr's Brook. The Phil- brook was a new village family and became an honored one. Its founder in America was Thomas who came from England in 1630 and by 1636 was settled in Watertown, Massachusetts. The first in Waldoboro was Ezekiel Virgil of Brunswick, Maine. He was born November 11, 1824. His second wife was Sarah H., daughter of John Tibbetts of Lisbon, Maine, born June 26, 1827.3 In Waldoboro Mr. Philbrook engaged in the shoe and leather trade. He built the block on Friendship Road now owned by Elsie Mank. His home on School Street is now owned by Ethel Ludwig.
The ranks of the village squires were augmented by the coming of Samuel Jackson, who moved into town from Jefferson in 1853 to take over the collectorship of customs, a post which he held for eight years. Following his removal from the custom- house by President Lincoln he became president of the Medomak Bank in 1864, served in the Legislature, also in various town offices, and was active in the investment field. For many years he resided in the house now occupied by Ralph Glidden, where he died in 1896. His one daughter, Ellen, became the wife of George Sproul, Jr.
Among other perpetuators of the great citizen tradition who came to the town in these years was Alden Jackson. Active in town affairs, he served his community as assessor and as superin- tendent of schools. He also served as Secretary of State in Augusta in 1854, 1855, and 1857, and was Secretary of the Electoral Col- lege of Maine in 1856 and 1872. He married Caroline, the oldest daughter of Joseph Clark, and died in Waldoboro in 1877, at the age of sixty-seven.
Albion P. Oakes was a native of Sangerville, Maine, and a graduate of Colby College. He came to Waldoboro in 1847, and became a leader in the town's educational and business life. He married Ella A., daughter of Joseph Clark, in 1853, and for some time prior to his death in 1859 he was the law partner in town of the Honorable S. S. Marble.
In the Great Days two of the future governors of Maine resided in Waldoboro. The first of these was Dr. Frederick Robie,
2Louis Untermeyer, From Another World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), Preface.
3Reverend Jacob Chapman, Genealogy of the Philbrick and Philbrook Family (Ex- eter, N. H., 1886).
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who after his graduation from Bowdoin in 1841 and the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, resided and practiced medicine in Waldoboro for three years in the 1840's. In the Civil War he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and later in the politics of the state was Speaker of the House in 1872 and 1876, a member of the Executive Council, and governor in 1882.
The second governor was Sebastian S. Marble. Born in Dix- field in 1817, Mr. Marble came to Waldoboro in 1851 and estab- lished a law practice. He was Collector of the Port, 1863-1866; United States Marshal for Maine, 1870-1878; a member of the Maine Senate in 1882, 1884, and 1886, and as President of the Senate succeeded to the governorship on the death of Governor Bodwell. This brief comment on a few personalities who settled in Waldoboro in the Great Days does not exhaust the steady accre- tion to the English stock in the town. It merely places in the records a few new names which carried on the great tradition in the town, and in some cases in the state.
In these great years it was the local political tradition to place control of affairs in the hands of the ablest citizens. Among these Jacob Ludwig, Jr., Captain James Cook, Charles Miller, James R. Groton, Alfred Storer, and Augustus Welt each served two terms as first selectman, while Isaac Reed, the dominating figure politically, served seven terms. Representing the town in the Legislature were such prominent men as John Balch, Isaac Reed, Charles Miller, John H. Kennedy, and General William S. Coch- ran. Politically such figures measured up in all respects to the businessmen who handled affairs in the town as well as in the state and nation.
Local affairs in these days often represented a curious inter- mingling of progress and superstition. This is illustrated in the vacillating stand taken by the town on the old question of vac- cination. Late in 1839, smallpox broke out in a neighboring town and its terror spread through the county. At a Town Meeting in October 1839, an article to have the citizens vaccinated was dis- missed from the warrant. In March 1840 the town reversed itself and voted to have the inhabitants vaccinated, and "the vaccination to be sold to the lowest bidder among the doctors." Within a month the town voted a reconsideration of this question.
The old tradition of electing all newlyweds to the office of hog reeve was still a theme of civic humor in Town Meetings. Only in these days the function of the reeves had broadened, and they were known as "field drivers" and were elected en masse. At the meeting of April 28, 1845, it was voted that "all persons married in town last year be field drivers." There were twenty- eight in all, and among them were some of the town's leading citi- zens including the prominent shipbuilder, Alfred Storer. In the
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
meeting of March 15, 1846, among those thus honored were Miles T. Castner, Meaubec M. Rawson, Gorham P. Castner, Hiram Brown, and James A. Sampson. This office was discontinued in 1856.
In its period of greatest prosperity the town still had the ever-pressing problem of the paupers, and over these years the question of a poor farm was repeatedly before the voters. On this issue the great mass of poor folk in the town rebelled and voted the article down again and again. Haunted as so many of them were by the fear of becoming some day public charges, they clearly preferred being "boarded out," as for example in 1839, when it was voted "to sell the paupers separately," which meant that they were cared for as individuals in separate homes and treated in a manner similar to the town's more respected poor, such as Mrs. Ritz who in this same year was provided with "par- tial support," or the Reverend Mr. Starman who received a gift of $50.00 from the town. Such a practice, however, was not always followed. In some years one citizen would contract to handle all the poor, as in 1841, when Ezekiel Winslow took all the paupers for one year for $560.00, "covering all expenses." It was also in 1839 that the town authorized the last indenture of children by authorizing the selectmen "to bind Joseph Flanders to Christian Wallice until he be 21 years of age and give said Wallice $10.00 per year for the first three years."
In these years military musters still furnished some of the most colorful episodes in the life of the town. Waldoboro was invariably the rallying place for such gatherings, probably with some justice, since the town mustered three companies of infantry. The first of these, Company A, was recruited from the citizenry on the west side of the river; Company F was drawn from the area beginning at the lower bridge on the east side and running north to the Washington and Union line "and then south to the County Road by William Fish's"; the third, Company G, was drawn from the east side south of the County Road.
To the lasting chagrin of those in the regiment from neigh- boring towns, the top posts always went to Waldoboro men among whom were two who were elevated to the rank of General, Henry Kennedy, a name still familiar in the town, and William S. Coch- ran, a prosperous sailmaker in the village. Little is known of General Cochran's origin, but he was very prominent in the town in its great period, serving as its representative in the legislature for five terms between 1847 and 1856. He lived on Main Street in the house now occupied by Leroy Miller. At the beginning of his political career he was a "regular," but amid the changing alignments of the 50's he broke with the local junta, and his career ended in a bitter controversy with the local political overlord.
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Due to the rapid population growth in the mid decades the town found itself outgrowing some of its old clothes. The old town house was a case in question. Since the beginning of the century it had served as a town house and long prior to that as a courthouse on "Kinsell's Hill." The old Coolidge slogan of: "Use it up! Wear it out!" was a basic article of faith with the Waldo- boro Germans from their very beginning, and their town house was the long-standing exemplar of this creed. Nearly half a century had passed and they had not laid out a penny on it in repairs, thanks to the black ash and pumpkin pine of their once virgin forests. But at last the fateful hour came, and on June 1, 1844, sheer necessity compelled them to vote: "to repair or rebuild the townhouse." A committee of five was elected to investigate and report. The report came four days later, and its promptness was most revealing. In a word it stated that the building was "defective in some respects and in an unfit state to repair. ... We therefore recommend that the town build a new house 40' x 45' on the same ground .. . to be completed on the 1st day of August 1845."
As usual the building was awarded to the lowest bidder and "the same was awarded to Gardner Feyler, he being the lowest bidder, for $533.00." William Cole, Edward Benner, and George Kaler were chosen "to superintend the building." Thus it was that the new town house came into being, and it remained in service for nearly one hundred years. Beginning in 1938 it was used as a garage by Merton Winchenbach until its destruction by fire in the late 1940's. One of its very earliest services after completion was to house the small Methodist congregation in the village in its Sunday worship.
It is both interesting and amazing to compare the town's finances in its period of greatest prosperity with its expenditures in the present day. In the 1840's the town allowed about $1.00 per capita for the education of its children. The selectmen re- ceived $25.00 for their services; support of the poor averaged $400.00, while from $4,000 to $6,000 dollars was laid out annually on roads, the largest item in the budget, for the town had not yet entirely recovered from the spree of building new roads upon which it started immediately after the Revolution. In 1849 the town had a debt of $949.66 and a total expenditure that year of $9383.40. In 1856 the tax bills totalled $11370.00, and at no time in the 1850's did the expenditures exceed this figure. The contrast of such figures with those of over $100,000 in the present day is an illuminating index to the change in social conditions as well as the standard of living then and now. In those times the wealth of the town was concentrated in the hands of a score of old vil- lage dons, and to a much lesser degree, in those of a larger class of artisans who provided the skilled labor in the shipbuilding
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
industry, and in the hands of the captains who sailed the ships. The great mass of the population was poor to a degree that is utterly foreign to social conditions in the present day, where the total wealth is far greater and more widely diffused.
On July 2, 1849, the town organized its first Board of Health, a decidedly forward step considering the incidence of deadly con- tagions. Prior to this time the citizens always assembled in Town Meetings and collectively formulated their programs for handling epidemics. Due to the dominance of superstition their methods were ofttimes humorously grotesque, and their shift to a new procedure was not made voluntarily in any sense, but the in- evitable was accepted and it was voted to comply with state law and organize such a board. It was made up of John Sides, "Mo- bick" M. Rawson and the three physicians, William Ludwig, Hiram Bliss, and Elijah Daggett.
By the mid 1850's the last of the religious sects had firmly established itself in the village, and all citizens were now wor- shipping in their own parish churches. Jealousies were still marked, but the sects now were on speaking terms, and each had its own sizable group of partisans among the voters, so that at the polls no one group was powerful enough to secure any advantage for itself alone. With this balance of power whatever one got could be had only in case equal preference was accorded all. Thus it came to pass on April 13, 1857, that the several parish houses in the town occupied by the ministers of the Gospel were exempted from taxation.
In these decades, however, all was not serene among the sects. They were plagued by heresies from within. Spiritualism was a cult commonly practiced within the Waldoboro churches, and the strange doctrines of the end-of-the-world Adventists was a potent heresy. In fact, the year 1843 or 1844 witnessed one of the strangest religious phenomenon in the history of the United States. For a number of years Advent doctrine had been making a strong appeal to the more imaginative, devout, and credulous be- lievers within the Evangelical Churches of the northeastern United States. Several of its leaders came from Maine and great excite- ment reigned when William Miller, a Vermont pastor, arrived at the year, based on biblical interpretations, when the end of the world would come, and the faithful would not taste of death, but be caught directly up in the sky from their earthly home. The time fixed was "the tenth day of the seventh month of the year Jubilee." This was sometime in late March of the year 1843 or 1844.
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