USA > Maine > Lincoln County > Waldoboro > History of old Broad Bay and Waldoboro, Volume 2 > Part 50
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This act made possible the organization of the Waldoboro Water Company on September 26, 1908, with the following offi- cers: president, Elmer E. Jameson, Sr .; secretary, Moses W. Leven- saler; treasurer, John T. Gay, Jr. These officers with the addition of Captain John B. Stahl constituted the board of directors. The reservoir was considerably enlarged and the mains laid in the streets, only to discover that the source was inadequate. In conse- quence, artesian wells were drilled to a depth of 225 feet on the present property of J. J. Stahl on Friendship Road, and thus a supply was tapped which proved adequate down to the year 1947. This data in itself is of somewhat minor historical moment, save for the fact that it does reveal the strength and duration of that underlying social force, back-district hostility, which has proved a crippling factor in the development of the town down into the present century.
In 1907 another abortive attempt was made to revive the shoe business in the town. Duncan C. Rood of Roxbury, Massa- chusetts, a superintendent in the factory of R. H. Long Company
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of South Framingham, in seeking terms asked for a loan of $20,000 from the people of Waldoboro, for which security was given and the interest fixed at five per cent. Mr. Rood was to provide $30,000 of his own capital to open and operate the factory. At a meeting held in Clark's Hall, sixty citizens subscribed $14,000, and Mr. Rood was invited to come to town and inspect. The factory again swung into operation and at a meeting of April 21, 1910, the town "voted to sell to D. C. Rood of Roxbury, Mass., the shoe factory, lot, engine, boilers, shaftings, pulleys, belts and all other appur- tenances ... and all rights in the shoe factory water system for $500, providing factory machinery, etc., shall not be torn down or removed from the town." It was also voted to exempt the factory from taxation for a period of ten years. Less than two years later, in March 1912, the town authorized its selectmen to resort to legal processes "to retake the factory from D. C. Rood." Two years after that action the factory was in the hands of a syndicate of the citizens of the town, and taxes were again being abated on the property. This was the last time the structure was ever used for the purpose for which it was originally constructed.
In the history of any community there are always those small developments and incidents which defy integration in the major trends of group life, but which withal remain matters of popular curiosity and interest. A few such are appended here. In February 1904 the Medomak River was frozen over from the village down beyond Bremen Long Island. Teams crossed at the Narrows and moved from Waldoboro to all points in Bremen on the ice. On February 18th this condition had continued for forty days.1 In March 1906 the town appropriated $800 for a steel bridge across the lower Medomak. The contract when issued in April provided for a main passage twenty-four feet wide and a four-foot foot- passage. In July 1907 a similar appropriation was made for a steel bridge to replace the old wooden Bulfinch bridge. In the warrant of the March 1907 meeting article 22 asked for the first budget committee, and article 24 sought street lighting in a modest way. Characteristically both articles were indefinitely postponed.
Almost without exception the town has been suspicious of all innovations when proffered and has invariably voted them down. An example may be found in hydrant service, first proposed in 1900 and first accepted in 1909, when the town agreed to ten hydrants at an annual cost of $50 each. In the same meeting the purchase of a few chemical fire extinguishers was proposed for the first time and defeated. Yet, given a few years and the town would not be without them. Seldom did the conservative spirit of the town crack, but crack it did in 1908 when it voted 396 to
1Lincoln County News, Sept. 5, 1907.
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124 to incorporate the principle of the Initiative and Referendum into the State Constitution, and to elect United States senators by direct vote of the people. About tobacco it was not so open- minded. Article 18 in the annual warrant for 1910 proposed that the town offer "an award of $25 to the farmer raising the best half acre of tobacco." Action: postponed, apparently in perpetuity. Articles for street lights, appearing annually in the warrant since 1907, secured their first appropriation of $300 in March 1913.
Around the year 1910 there was a new nuisance in the town. An automobile was seen occasionally in the village and on our country roads, to the great consternation of both man and beast. Our society was beginning to emerge from the horse and buggy era. Skittish and rearing horses, wrathy and cursing farmers, a deep sense of outrage in all parts of the town! Something had to be done, "Fast! Fast! Fast!," and done it was. A special Town Meeting was convened on May 10, 1911, and strict traffic ordinances regu- lating the speed of cars were laid down with a remarkable unanim- ity. A brief digest of these ordinances follows: When an auto- mobile on Friendship Road reached the residence of Foster Jame- son it was to slow down to a speed of eight miles per hour and proceed at that rate to the village; on the North Waldoboro Road the residence of Herbert L. Leavitt (now Walter Sukeforth's) was the place to reduce speed; on the Winslow's Mills Road the residence of Chester Light marked the point; on the Bremen Road it was the residence of Rodney Creamer, and other roads leading in and out of town were similarly restricted.
It is the irony of history that this "horseless wagon" which came as a curse, was in reality a disguised blessing in one respect at least, for more than any other single factor the automobile has dissipated the old back-district and village antagonism; it has made the back-district denizen a villager and the villager a frequent caller in the back-districts; it has brought the back-district chil- dren to the village for equal educational advantages and amal- gamated them with village children; it has made village industries accessible to the entire town; it has given to fire protection the same value in the back-districts as in the center of the town; it has fused the back-district and the village in a common social life. In short, it has unified the town so hopelessly and damagingly divided for two centuries.
During these years the wage rates in the community were largely determined by the rates paid for work on the highways. Here a man received twenty cents per hour for a nine-hour day, and a man with a double team received $4.00 for his services. In 1912 the channel of the Medomak River was dredged, it is be- lieved, for the first time in its history. The warrant of March 1913
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contained an article to raise $100 for the purpose of celebrating the dredging. The article in question was indefinitely postponed - perhaps to the second dredging in the years 1948-1949. With the slowing down and gradual closing of the quarry toward the end of the first decade of the century, Waldoboro entered on the slow- est and lowest period in its history. The main tide of the national economy was still setting away from the Maine coastal towns. In the period between 1900 and 1910 the town sustained its greatest loss of population of any period in its decline, the 1910 count of 2,656 registering a ten-year loss of 489.
Early in the century Waldoboro had become the scene of a considerable foreign colonization. Happily for the town, these colonists stemmed from one of the fine races of the world, the Finns. In their own overcrowded homeland they knew to the full- est degree the meaning of the economics of scarcity. As a conse- quence of their national tradition of hard labor for scant returns, they possessed virtues which, once American, had been lost in a large measure by our own people, long accustomed now to a life of less toil and much larger returns. Moreover these Finns were a hard-muscled people, thoroughly disciplined by centuries of the hardest sort of toil as the price of survival. They possessed the will to tackle any dismal economic project with unceasing toil, provided it furnished any promise of a simple and comfortable life.
The first Finn, in all probability, to come to Waldoboro was Oscar Ellison, who reached here in 1898, was naturalized in 1900, and worked in the quarry so long as it was in operation. In July 1904 he bought his farm near the Friendship line in the southeastern part of the town, where he was still living in 1950. In the year 1905, Joel Sutinen with his wife and daughter came and settled in the same section. Soon, however, he sold his farm and purchased the old Creamer farm and sawmill now owned by Herbert Tib- betts. He operated the mill until his death in 1937. His wife, Mary, and daughter, Mrs. Albert Mattson, are still living in Waldoboro. From the turn of the century down to the present a thin stream of Finns has kept dribbling into the town, the earlier ones acquiring farms and settling in that southeasterly section of the town known to the old-timers as Goshen and sometimes as Sodom, but now rather generally as Finntown.
A half-century ago this was generally regarded as the least desirable area of Waldoboro. Deep in the woods, it was isolated, lonely, far removed from the center of life; its terrain was rough, rocky, and uneven, and its soil poor. In former times it had offered little more than a scant subsistence. As the population of the town shrank, this area was the first to be drained free of its inhabitants, leaving an entire section of deserted farms. It was these farms that
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the first Finns took over. Since that time they have reoccupied them, restored their productivity by modern methods, and clung to them. I inspected this area in the summer of 1948 and found that a complete revolution had been effected. It was neat and or- derly, buildings had been restored and painted, lawns were well kept, and flowers bloomed in profusion; fields had been wrested back from the advancing forests, and an atmosphere of comfort and well-being was everywhere prevalent- a living testimonial to the zeal, industry, and determination of a good people.
At the time this chapter was written (1950) there were well over a hundred people of Finnish blood in Waldoboro. They have long since spilled over the bounds of their original settlement and scattered over the whole eastern section of the town, picking up their farms here and there wherever such might come on to the market. About ninety of them speak the Finnish language. This includes those born in Finland, and children whose parents are both Finns, but even these are for the most part bilingual. In 1932 Arthur and Lydia Autio and their son, Aulis, were the first of their race to settle in North Waldoboro. Within sixteen years this area contained more than half the Finnish people of the town. Nearly all the Finns are American citizens. The second generation still speaks the native tongue, but not as well as English. After the first generation they all think of themselves as Americans and not Finns. Many of the younger generation have been satisfied with a grade-school education and have returned to the life of the farm. Many others are high-school graduates, and between ten and a dozen have gone on to Business College, North Eastern Univer- sity, Massachusetts Agricultural College, Simmons College and the University of Maine. Their record in peace and in war has been of the best, and in all ways they have proven themselves useful, cooperative, and welcome citizens.2
Since 1873 the Lincoln County News had been a welcome inmate in Waldoboro homes. It was an intimate, chatty organ with a thorough coverage of local and county news, and the little human details which gratify harmless curiosity and add savor to the unleavened sameness of country life. George A. Bliss had ac- quired ownership of the paper in 1898, and after an unsuccessful try at journalism by himself and his son, Edward, announcement was made in 1907 that the paper would be sold. It was acquired by William Murphy and Myrtie Knowlton of Damariscotta, and the publication of the paper was continued, but it was a failing venture, and around the middle of the second decade of the century the last issue rolled off the press and the equipment was sold for junk.
2Based on data made available through the courtesy of Frank Salmi, Esq.
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The last item that we have in our files from the old paper is the report of a big celebration in the town on July 4, 1912. This was the last of the old-time village jamborees, reminiscent of the old days of militia musters, wolf-hunts, the Conrad Heyer public funeral, and the centennial celebration of 1873. Throughout the morning of the Fourth, the long line of a parade rolled through the streets; the afternoon was taken up with competitive sports at the old Marble farm, and with boat races. Fireworks of intri- cate and lovely pattern blazed in and over the village during the evening, and a "Grand Ball" in Clark's Hall brought the great day to a climactic close. One detail from the morning parade is cited here as typical, in the words used by the News:
A float representing the News Agency of Clinton B. Stahl made one of the hits of the parade. It was decorated with bunting and in the shape of a throne, on which sat Clinton Burns of South Waldoboro, weighing 400 pounds. He was dressed like the "Boston Globe Man" with tall hat and a belt on which was inscribed "Largest Circulation in New England." This was a particularly bright idea as Mr. Stahl is a news dealer. On the back of the throne was a placard reading "Eat Stahl's Ice Cream and grow fat." This float brought rounds of applause from the on-lookers, which Mr. Burns received with his customary good nature and self- possession.
This little episode is furthermore a reflection of one of the town's beloved citizens of these days, C. B. Stahl, whose invari- able gayety, broad and spontaneous humor, and genial hospitality to hosts of people in eastern America was a fresh and endearing quality in village life down to his death in December 1948.
In the mid-period of the second decade dark clouds were beginning to lower over the European world. On June 28, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro- Hungarian monarchy, was assassinated by a Serbian at Sarajevo, Bosnia. This was the end of the fuse which reached down into the powder barrels of the world. The match had been applied. There were certainly few indeed among the simple folk of the little Medomak town who could sense the full implications of this far-away episode, and realize that the clouds would spread and spread until their own green, quiet valley would be a tiny part of a darkened world.
Events followed one another in swift succession. Austria declared war on Serbia; Russia mobilized to defend the Slavs of the Balkans; on a fateful August 1st, Germany declared war on Russia; France, Russia's ally, mobilized, and Germany swept through Belgium to deliver a knock-out blow to France before Russia could bring her unwieldy mass into action. England, a guarantor of Belgium's neutrality, entered the struggle on August 4th, and the First World War was under way. President Woodrow
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Wilson at once proclaimed the United States a neutral, but neu- trality could not keep the war of propaganda away from Amer- ica's shores. The land was literally deluged with it; the inevitable horror stories and atrocity tales gradually became fixed convictions in the mind of credulous America. The German violation of Bel- gium neutrality had slanted opinion strongly against her case, which was in part counteracted by British insistence on the search of American ships. Then came unrestricted submarine warfare, and on May 7, 1915, the torpedoing of the big British liner Lusi- tania in the Irish Sea, with a loss of 1,200 lives including Ameri- cans, some of whom were prominent citizens. The reaction was instantaneous and the sense of outrage well-nigh universal. Presi- dent Wilson kept his head and in a series of brilliant and vigorous notes to Germany effected a degree of respect for neutral cargoes on the high seas, but, stalemated on the French front, Germany announced her resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare on February 1, 1917. American ships were sunk and American lives lost. This was the last straw. On April 6, 1917, the United States entered the war and within a year 2,000,000 American soldiers were on the battlefields and in the trenches of France, and this force included over one hundred young men from this town. The struggle that started at Sarajevo in Bosnia had reached Waldoboro in Maine.
This was the first major war involving the United States in over half a century. Since it had started in Europe in 1914, a clear pattern of conflict had developed, and America knew from the beginning the exact type of warfare for which she must prepare. In every state, city, and town, big and little, the procedure was well-nigh identical. France and England in three years had been bled white, and need was for American manpower on a large scale to administer the final, crushing blows to the Germans. This need was met by the draft, a system of selective service, whereunder all males in 1917 between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one, and in 1918 between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, were reg- istered. A man's call to service was determined by Newton D. Baker, Secretary of War, who, with a blindfold over his eyes, drew numbers from a "fish bowl."
This time there was no escape from the draft by the hiring of substitutes. Fair and impartial though the method was, no Ameri- can liked such compulsion, and in Waldoboro, as throughout the country, there were plenty of soreheads and gripes. Mothers ob- jected to their sons being called, but once a son was called his parents showed small sympathy to their neighbors who protested their sons being called. "Your Jim is no better than my John," was the unanswerable argument. It was much like a swimmer hesi-
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tating on the brink of a cold pool. Once he was in with other neighbors' sons, peace and harmony were restored. There was no open protest in the town, only private sputtering. The local board of the draft was headed by Fred Scott, and Dr. G. H. Coombs was the examiner; draftees were inducted at Wiscasset, the shire town of the county. The first enlistment from the town was Roland L. Black (April 10, 1917); the first inductees under the draft (September 18, 1917) were Frank L. Duffy, Linwood V. Castner, and Astor J. Winchenbach.3 Under this method an army of 3,500,000 men was trained, and 2,000,000 of these saw service in Europe.
It was in this struggle that Waldoboro first learned the mean- ing of total war. Everyone was called on to contribute through the armed services, industrial jobs, Liberty Bonds, Liberty Gar- dens, or Red Cross. There were few indeed in the town, who, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, were not veterans of this struggle. Liberty Loan Drives came in swift succession - six in all, and in the first drive there were definite difficulties and prejudices to overcome, for to the mass of people in Waldoboro the whole question of investing in "securities" was a book with seven seals. When my uncle, Captain J. Astor Keene of Bremen, appeared voluntarily at the Waldoboro Bank at the beginning of the first drive and purchased $5,000 in bonds, it created something of a sensation in the town, and many held him to be of dubious sanity, for by and large the town in these days knew of but two savings institutions, the savings banks and the old straw or corn- husk mattress.
In view of this attitude there was plenty of work for "the Four Minute Men." These, led by Dr. George H. Coombs, car- ried the campaign of education to all households in the outer areas of the town. At a later date Dr. Coombs expressed his amazement at the amount of money that came forth reluctantly from mat- tresses to be exchanged for Liberty Bonds. In each drive the town was able to meet its allotment, for behind each drive there was a good angel in the person of John Jacob Cooney, who gave the quiet assurance that he would buy any unsold portion of any allotment. These drives were further facilitated by a certain un- easiness. There were a goodly number in the town overcome by the certainty that sooner or later the Germans would appear and take over everything. In fact, it required a good deal of patience on the part of the cashier of the local bank to make clear to anxious depositors that monies on deposit there faced no risk in this regard.
3Letter Adjutant General of Maine to me (March 4, 1949).
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On the local front the drive for cooperation was vigorous and constant. When it became necessary to divert great quantities of food to England and France, the people promptly met the deficit in their own fare, caused by this drain of foodstuffs, by raising their own food. Nearly everyone locally turned a hand to a Liberty Garden, and while some of these truck patches pro- duced more weeds than vegetables at harvest time, the most of them were faithfully serviced during the growing season, and vast quantities of food were canned and stored in the cellars, along with roots of every description. There was, indeed, little waste. I can recall among other things that my own father was one of those who planted wheat, and in one season harvested about twenty bushels for family use. This was done to meet the shortage of flour, for under the existing rationing system each family was compelled to purchase a pound of substitute for every pound of flour bought. In all ways people sought to produce those items representing a shortage in the national economy, and so it came to pass that most of the rock maples in the town were compelled "to do their bit," and many a family sweetened its tea or coffee with maple sugar or syrup.
Mr. Van Buren Hagerman devoted full time to these multi- farious activities, but the real spark plug was Dr. G. H. Coombs. He was everywhere heading nearly every movement, in a word, the commander in chief of the home front. Under his direction the local Red Cross Chapter was a veritable beehive. Here Dr. Coombs was assisted by Maude C. Gay as secretary and Hadley H. Kuhn as treasurer. The M. M. Richards' Pants Factory was the headquarters, and from this tiny center bandages, ditty bags, serv- ice kits, socks, sweaters, mittens, knitted helmets, in short, every- thing needed to minister to the men in the field, in life, in sickness and in death, was dispatched profusely to a thousand points of need. Pageants and plays were put on to provide funds, and in one of the war years the local chapter raised $1,500 in money alone. In the homes everybody who could knit knitted, and those who could not learned how. The yarn was issued by Dr. and Mrs. Coombs. Even the schools were organized for service, and this Junior Red Cross was an active and productive adjunct to the main Chapter.
There was, of course, a rise in living costs, but nothing comparable to that of the Second World War. Commodities that could be purchased with one dollar in 1914 cost $1.57 in 1918. This was the high point of inflation. A few scarce commodities such as sugar were somewhat higher, and local farmers sold their eggs as high as $1.20 a dozen. Wages rose to 192 over the 1914 figure of 100, and labor was conspicuous in its customary wartime
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fashion, there being 4,000 strikes in the year 1917. The restrictions on individual liberty in the community were cheerfully accepted, and the meatless and wheatless days were generally and faithfully observed by families throughout the town. This was, in fact, the first of America's major wars in which there was no sizable group of dissidents in the area.
The total casualties coming out of America's participation in the conflict were 111,422, or about one casualty for every thirty-one men in service. The loss of life among Waldoboro youth was just about average for any American town of this size. The local service flag crossed Friendship Road between the Sproul Block and S. H. Weston's Hardware Store, and in its field gold stars commemorated the town's honored dead. This gold star honor roll was made up of the following:
Ernest B. Deymore. Enrolled: U.S.N.R.F., Bath, October 31, 1917. Sea- man. Served as Section Commander, Bath, October 31, 1917 to January 24, 1918; U.S.S. Cobra, Bath Section January 24, to March 31, 1918. Sec- tion Commander, Boothbay Harbor, March 31 to June 12, 1918. Died Naval Hospital, Chelsea, Mass., September 18, 1918.
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