USA > Maine > Lincoln County > Waldoboro > History of old Broad Bay and Waldoboro, Volume 2 > Part 53
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
In the investment field the local horizons were widened markedly, and a new generation received its lessons in finance. Approximately $700,000 in Government bonds were sold to the local folk by the bank and Post Office. This figure does not in- clude the payroll deduction plan of bond purchasing which was in vogue in the out-of-town yards and factories, in the Govern- ment services and military branches where so many Waldoboro people worked at the highest wage levels in the country's history. A conservative analysis of the entire investment of local people in this period reaches a figure substantially over $1,000,000, which the town added to its reserve wealth.
The effects of this world struggle on the life of the town reached far beyond its economy, for in a period of less than five years of war, 350 men and women answered the call to the colors in nine different branches of the military services. In a town with a listed population of 2,547 this meant that one of every seven persons saw service in the war, by all odds the largest par- ticipation of the town in any national emergency. The numbers of ten Waldoboro men were among the first 2,000 to be drawn from the Gold Fish Bowl in Washington. These were Ernest G. Castner, Carroll T. Cooney, Jr., Warren S. Colwell, Lowell B. Wallace, Ernest C. Eugley, David Oxton, Aubrey J. Palmer, Alton A. Prock, Murray O. Benner, and Joseph Tait. This chapter will not set forth the service records of the town's sons and daughters, for this task has already been done in a thorough and
475
The Decades of Rebirth
competent manner by Maynard D. Genthner and Carroll T. Cooney, Jr.1 One name not listed in this honor roll is that of Ann Wood Kelly, who was a ferry pilot across the Atlantic for the British Air Transport Auxiliary, and was stationed at Leicester, England, from 1942 to 1946. Of the 350 men and women in serv- ice there were twelve casualties. In order to honor their sacrifice by making it a matter of perpetuity the names of the Gold Star young of the town are here recorded: Elmer A. Achorn, Joel Anderson, Arthur Genthner, George W. Genthner, Paul Ilves, Howard C. Kaura, La Forest B. Mank, Allen Palmer, Frederick Scott, Ralph Skinner, Warren Vannah, and James P. Young. Those wounded in battle or decorated for good and valiant service are enduringly recorded in the Waldoboro Honor Roll.
The effect on the town of this wide participation in the war is simply incalculable. Its young men and women in these five years moved over the whole surface of the world, its civilized and uncivilized areas - Europe, Asia, Africa, and the islands of the North Atlantic and the South Pacific. As C. T. Cooney has phrased it in the Waldoboro Honor Roll:
Waldoboro was represented from the sands of Libya to the frozen wastes of Baffin Land, from Alaska to New Guinea. They, the former residents of a quiet, coastal community, flew 30,000 feet in the sky over Japan, trudged through the mud in Normandy, rolled and tossed on the North Atlantic, or slid slowly under the green Pacific.
They returned home changed and altered. They had seen the great world, its giant cities, foreign civilizations, civilized and barbarous peoples, luxury beyond belief, hardship, toil, dirt, and death unimaginable. They were no longer the same. Their erst- while narrowness had expanded into an understanding of many things, and an open-mindedness toward all things. These men and women brought back with them an end to the blind and confining sets of small-town life. They radiated a new point of view and infused a different and a larger outlook into the life of the town. With them the parochially-minded era receded. A great, new liberalizing force was released in the town. These "imponderables" constitute the slow ferment of history, and their ultimate effects are to be discerned only in the unfolding scroll of the decades to come. Through this chapter there are scattered only the merest hints of possible outcomes.
On August 16, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the town for a period of about five minutes. On this date I made the following entry in my notes:
Today President Roosevelt landed at Rockland from the yacht, Potomac, returning from his historic conference at sea with Prime Min-
1Waldoboro Honor Roll of World War II, Waldoboro 1948.
476
HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
ister Winston Churchill aboard H.M.S. Prince of Wales and the U.S.S. Augusta. The President's private train of seven cars with all curtains drawn passed very slowly through Waldoboro at 5:25 P.M. There were about fifty people assembled on the platform in the hope of catching a glimpse of the President through a car window.
This was the second occasion of his being in the town. In 1936 during his campaign for a second term he had passed through Waldoboro on his way to embark at Rockland for a cruise along the coast.
In 1942 the town reached what had heretofore been supposed to be the end of its second century of continuously settled life. As early as the summer of 1939 preparations were begun for a grand observance of this second century birthday, and on Sep- tember 1st of this year the selectmen, Fred L. Burns, Chester Light, and Alton Winchenbach - all descendants of early settlers - ap- pointed a Citizens' Planning Committee of forty members to plan and execute this second centennial observance. In the interim I had in the normal course of my research laid bare evidence in the Office of the York County Registry of Deeds which made it indubitably certain that the first continuous settlement on the Medomak had had its beginnings in the year 1736. The real bicentennial year had already slipped past, and the town never knew it. It was well on its way into the third century of its existence even while it was planning to celebrate the end of its second century.
During the years of war, while so many of the town's erst- while hunters were in service or working long and frequently irregular hours in industry, wild life in the adjacent forest lands had a long armistice and increased to a pestiferous degree. It was somewhat reminiscent of an older day when on June 11, 1945, Clifford Porter discovered a bear raiding one of his chicken coops just off Jefferson Street. The animal was shot by Mr. Porter and since its demise came at a time when meat was scarce and on the rationed list, the bear's meat was sold at Gay's Store on an un- rationed basis.
The old Waldoboro shipyard of Reed & Welt, which had been purchased in 1941 by a corporation headed by Scott Carter of Friendship, went into the hands of a receiver in 1947. In the interim years, over thirty craft of varying types had been built in this yard. The last flurry of building came in 1948, when Alton Prock rented the yard long enough to construct a cabin cruiser for himself. This craft was forty feet in length with a ten and a half foot beam. Irving Simmons of Waldoboro and Stewart Webster of Jefferson were the carpenters. The lines of the craft were laid down by Frank Day of Friendship, assisted by Mr. Prock. Two hundred horsepower General Motors Diesel engines
477
The Decades of Rebirth
were installed, designed to give the boat a speed of sixteen miles per hour. For normal cruising the craft easily accommodated twelve persons and provided cabin space for five. The launching took place in June 1948, and as the craft slid from her ways the history of shipbuilding in Waldoboro, begun 175 years before, came to what in all probability was its final close.
There are always those events in the life of a community which seem to lie somewhat outside the areas of causal sequence - chance projections, as it were, into its history from the larger areas beyond its own framework. The dredging of the Medomak River was one of these events and it seems to have been something of a political accident. It was started in November 1948, about six months after shipbuilding in the town had come to an end, prob- ably forever. Operations were carried on by the Bay State Dredg- ing Company of Boston, and were continued into the month of December, when the formation of ice in the river forced a sus- pension of activities. They were resumed again late in March and continued until the work was completed in June. At this time about 59,000 cubic yards of mud had been removed from the channel and dumped in a deep hole about four miles down the river south southwest of Hollis Point in about thirty feet of water. This operation left the Medomak, for a distance of two miles below the head of tide, with a channel of five feet at low tide with a one-foot allowance over depth - a channel seventy-five feet in width with a 150-foot width in the elbows or bends in the river. In addition it provided a turning basin 150 feet in width opposite "Fishermens' Wharf."
While the local folk were grateful for this service, they were also mildly amused, realizing that the operation served no neces- sary navigational aid. This fact was also recognized in Washing- ton and drew some caustic comment from Senator Paul H. Doug- las on the floor of the Senate. In a minor way, however, it does bring to the town a twofold advantage in that it enables an occa- sional small summer pleasure boat to cruise the river with greater ease, and an occasional yacht to reach the town at head of tide. A further possible gain is to be found in the general conviction that it will result in an increased run of fish, especially the smelt, and will make ice fishing in the winter a considerably more lucra- tive occupation.
During the past few years there has developed in the town a wide and active interest in athletics. This interest has led directly to the construction of the finest outdoor athletic field in the county. The movement on behalf of the field started in 1947. Backed by businessmen and citizens a fund of about $1,500 was raised, and through 1948 work continued on the Philbrook Field
478
HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
adjacent to the Waldoboro High School. The work was, for pur- poses of use, complete in 1949, and a field came into being amply sizable for football, baseball, and track athletics. In addition it has provided a fine playing field for the summer baseball team of the Waldoboro Athletic Association, and as a further invaluable asset, a playing field for large numbers of hopeful young athletes, a far more constructive environment than that provided by the street. This field may be justly looked upon as an embodiment of the town's present-day vision and vitality in reference to its own needs and those of its growing youth. It is an outgrowth of in- telligent and determined community effort, sparked to a consider- able degree by the generous labor and contagious enthusiasm of Percy Moody.
In the year 1948 the community was intrigued and excited by what was probably the most notable wedding ever to take place in the town, that of Ann Carroll Hemingway, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Hemingway of Waldoboro and Syracuse, New York, to Arthur Kittredge Watson, son of Thomas J. Wat- son of New York, President of the International Business Ma- chine Corporation, one of the major units of world industry. The ceremony took place in the old Lutheran Church, at noon on July 10th. A pipe organ was installed temporarily in the church for the service. The officiating clergyman was the Rev- erend Colonel Clayton E. Wheat, U.S.A. (ret.), Chaplain of the Military Academy at West Point. The soloist on this occasion was the Metropolitan baritone, Laurence Tibbett.
The local folk were intrigued by the distinguished guests invited. These included the President's daughter, Margaret Tru- man, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, James Melton, Gladys Swarthout, Lilly Pons, Laurence Tibbett, and a host of other notables. Such names served to alert a normally curious public, and many were the rumors that swept over the town with the speed of the wind, such as the one that General Eisenhower had been seen at Stahl's Tavern. So piqued was the public interest that crowds of the uninvited gathered on the church grounds and in the adjoining streets to watch the guests pass and to listen to the singing of Laurence Tibbett. To be sure, such an event has small historical significance save for the fact that it did offer in local setting a brief but highly colorful scene from the social pageantry of a larger world almost mythical to many local folk, and hence to them an unforgettable experience - a sort of quick flight from their Cinderella kitchens to the Prince's ballroom.
During this period, as has been noted, the Isaac Reed Man- sion, the old town house, and other ancient landmarks disap- peared from the local scene. These form ofttimes a strong senti-
479
The Decades of Rebirth
mental attachment linking the present to the past. There was one other to which local ears had been attuned for over three quarters of a century. It is the multiplicity of little things which impart the poetic overtones to human experience, and this was a little thing - the whistle of a locomotive. All railroad systems use a uniform locomotive whistle, and in all systems the whistle is different, each characteristic of its own road. Since 1871 at least a half-dozen generations of Waldoboro folk have listened to and loved the rich alto notes of the Maine Central blowing in the distance, or in its rush down the valley - a link to a bigger world and so often the harbinger of joy, of reunion, or of grief. But to this too, as to all things, there came the beginnings of the end. On July 27, 1949, the first Diesel engine with its thin, pierc- ing, and discordant shriek drew its first passenger train over this division of the road. It will now be only a matter of time when some old, black, puffing and weary steam monster will sound its last melodious call down the valley.
Amid the swift shifting of the scenes in these recent decades not least important are the major developments in the town's political metamorphosis. The first and perhaps the change of most basic significance is to be found in the fact that in these decades Waldoboro became a Republican town. Such a shift was inevitable considering the town's unswerving allegiance to a basic political pattern. This fact requires some elaboration. In the first place, let us point out that in its local affairs the town is properly nonpartisan. Consistently it supports at the polls the men and women best qualified for a given office, erring on occasion, to be sure, by supporting the candidate who is most popular or most trusted, but irrespective of party. A few illustrations will make this fact clear. In the election of 1940, when Senator Owen Brew- ster, a Republican, polled 594 votes, and his oponent, Fulton J. Redman, a Democrat, received 356 votes, Dr. George H. Coombs, a local Democrat running for the Legislature, polled 595 votes. During the 1940's while the town was giving large majorities to Republican candidates for state and national offices, it was elect- ing and re-electing with the same consistency boards of select- men made up largely of Democrats. Illustrations might here be multiplied, but they would only reveal the same basic attitude and trend.
At the state and national level the town is rock-fast Repub- lican. This is no unusual phenomenon, for from its beginning the town has adhered strictly to a characteristic pattern in its political life, that of an extreme conservatism. For over two centuries now it has thrown its support to that party which was most con- servative in character. In the beginning it was overwhelmingly
480
HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
Federalist, the most reactionary party in American history. It hewed to this line until the last vestige of Federalism had dis- appeared in the nation. Following the Federalists the Whigs became the party of conservatism, carrying on in part the Federalist con- ception of political control. Waldoboro promptly turned Whig. It was in the latter days of the Whig Party that the political genius of Isaac Reed became dominant in the town, and from the time when the slavery issue first became acute the Democratic Party began to veer in the direction of conservatism more especially on this issue, and Waldoboro veered with it. On this conservative foundation Mr. Reed built his machine and with such stability that over the years a block of 900 votes came under his complete and unquestioned control - a strength that made him a power to be reckoned with and placated in state politics. As the War between the States drew on the Democratic Party became more and more conservative on all fundamental issues, and Waldoboro became more and more Democratic. The Copperhead sentiment in the town developed strength and only became partially latent with the outbreak of war.
The Republican Party when it came into being in 1854 was essentially liberal in its philosophy and outlook. Waldoboro, true to its ancient tradition, would have none of it, and since the Democratic Party represented the strongly conservative element in national life in the 60's and 70's, the town continued to build its Democratic strength. When in the 1870's Isaac Reed's political ambitions had tapered to their end, and after he had paid off po- litical debts and settled long-standing scores with his foes, his interest waned and his mantle fell on the shoulders of some of his pro-consuls who were not magnetic leaders. Under their headship this powerful machine carried on. It had become a tra- dition destined to maintain its rigid cohesion until its framework was shaken and loosened by radical political changes and inno- vations in our national life. In the 90's and early 1900's lethargy and indifference began to register their effects on this old struc- ture and to sap its vitality.
In the interim the Republican Party, once young, vigorous, and liberal, slowly underwent changes. During its long period of national ascendancy special privilege and moneyed interests kept boring toward the center of its controls. It was becoming more conservative. At the same time radical forces - so they were called - personalized in a series of great dynamic figures began their bid for control of the Democratic Party on the national level. The first of such men was William Jennings Bryan, under whose leadership the party started moving in the direction of Liberalism, a movement which probably reached its peak at the mid-century.
481
The Decades of Rebirth
Waldoboro reacted in terms of its characteristic pattern. It began to veer toward the conservative Republicans, and its once great margin of victorious votes began narrowing down to slimmer majorities. The liberalism of Woodrow Wilson hastened the trend, and in 1920 at the end of Wilson's second term, the Republicans in the September election outvoted the Democratic Party 501 to 376. For a number of years following, down to 1928, success in elections seesawed between the two parties. In this year the Catholi- cism of Alfred E. Smith was a dose that the Democrats would not swallow. The vote? Hoover and Curtis 505, Smith and Robin- son 157. The result was to widen the seams in the frail bark of the Democratic Party in the town.
From this time on the Democrats rallied only rarely. Despite the great distress of the Hoover administration, the President, in his campaign for re-election in 1932, carried the town by a slight margin over Roosevelt, an election in which the nation broke loose from its Republican moorings. In succeeding years, while the whole nation was moving vigorously in one direction, the little town on the Medomak vehemently countered the trend and moved in an opposite direction. The local Republican majorities in state and national elections grew wider and wider, a trend clearly manifested in the following campaigns: in 1936, Landon 639 votes to 293 for Roosevelt; in 1940, Wilkie 596 votes to 388 for Roosevelt; in 1944, Dewey 561 votes to 287 for Roosevelt, and in 1948, Dewey 529 votes to 149 for Truman, and it may be added that in state elections the town's vote had been Republican with an equal decisiveness. From 1896 to 1948 the Democratic Party underwent a political metamorphosis under the impact of a sequence of great popular leaders: Bryan, Wilson, Smith, and the second Roosevelt. While this party was emerging as the lib- eral force in American life, the people of Waldoboro, as they had ever done throughout their history, re-aligned themselves with the conservative party - the Republican, which since the days of the first Roosevelt had openly faced the nation as the frank exponent of conservatism. Waldoboro, too, was conserva- tive, had always been conservative, and that is why it became Republican when that party turned conservative. Actually there was nowhere else to go.
Since Maine became a state in 1820, Lincoln County had furnished four of the fifty-six governors. The first of these was Samuel E. Smith of Wiscasset, elected in 1831. Then followed Edward Kavanagh of Newcastle who was governor from March 7, 1843, to January 1, 1844, succeeding to the governorship as Presi- dent of the Senate, following the death of Governor John Fair- field. Similarly in December 1887, Sebastian S. Marble of Waldo-
482
HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
boro became governor on the death while in office of Joseph R. Bodwell. Prior to this time Frederick R. Robie had been a prac- ticing physician in Waldoboro for a number of years. Later he moved to Gorham and was elected governor from that town in 1882. Since 1889, the expiration of Mr. Marble's term, there had been no governor from Lincoln County until the election of Frederick G. Payne of Waldoboro in 1940, as the fifty-sixth gov- ernor of the state.
Frederick G. Payne on entering the state field in 1948 was no political novice. It was his war experience that gave the initial impetus to his campaign in 1948, for toward the end of 1947 a group of veterans initiated a state-wide movement to draft Colonel Payne for the office of governor. This movement, the veterans alleged, was entirely spontaneous and represented their own views. It placed the Colonel in a position where he was compelled to accept or refuse, and at the end of 1947 he announced his candi- dacy on a platform which was based on the problems faced by the people of his state at the close of the war. There were five candidates in the field, and the Colonel was by no means the favorite of the Machine. With the financial support of loyal friends he literally toured the state from end to end and single-handed, as it were, built up a large reserve of support and good will against primary day.
In June the Colonel won the nomination against the field. His majority over his nearest competitor, George D. Varney of Berwick, President of the State Senate, was between seven and eight thousand votes. He carried fourteen of the twenty-one Maine cities, and in his home county of Lincoln he polled 2,919 votes against a total of 1,906 polled by the other four candidates. The state election in November was now a foregone conclusion. On election night some 1,500 people from all parts of the state gathered at the Waldoboro Garage on Route 1, for election returns. Re- freshments were served and joy in all its varying degrees of exu- berance was the prevailing tone. By the time the last returns were reported Colonel Payne had rolled up a total vote of 145,274 against 76,310 for his opponent, Louis Lausier, the many times Mayor of Biddeford. In Waldoboro, party lines had broken down and the governor-elect polled a total of 774 votes. Only eighty ballots were cast against him. On January 1, 1949, Colonel Payne was inaugurated as the fifty-sixth governor of Maine and the first governor from Waldoboro and Lincoln County in sixty years.
In the year 1949 the town witnessed in its midst something that was little short of a political revolution. After one hundred and seventy-six years of civic control under the ancient and ven- erable institution of a board of selectmen, it voted to place the
483
The Decades of Rebirth
administration of its affairs in the hands of a town manager. The movement leading to this change had started two years before in the March meeting of 1947, when a committee had been ap- pointed and instructed to investigate the feasibility of the manager form of government, and to report in the March meeting of 1948. At that time the committee failed to report, due perhaps to the fact that some of its members were opposed to the town manager system. Thereupon the meeting discharged its committee and named a new one made up of Gardiner Mank, Leslie Borne- mann, Willard Fowler, Roland Genthner, and Kenneth K. Weston. This latter committee was most active, and after diligent research it reported its findings on November 12, 1948. It found that the town manager plan was first adopted in Sumpter, South Carolina, in 1912, and since that time it had spread to over 800 cities and towns in the United States; that the plan conceived the affairs of a town as big business (which it is), and control is accordingly centered in the hands of an expert who administers affairs on a strictly business basis, and that ninety-two towns in Maine, many of them the size of Waldoboro, were operating successfully under the manager plan. The report concluded by advising a trial in Waldoboro under the so-called Enabling Act.
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.