USA > Maine > Lincoln County > Waldoboro > History of old Broad Bay and Waldoboro, Volume 2 > Part 55
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Over in the deep, cool recesses of the Waldoboro Woods, on the down slope of the long hill, in a log cabin made with his own hands, lives picturesque Perry Greene, half Anglo-Saxon and half Mohawk, guide, woodsman, sled-driver, champion axe-man of the world, and sole owner of the noblest breed of dogs known to man, the imperial Chinooks. This breed originated in southern Maine with a dog named Kim, a biological sport (died in Little America, January 11, 1909), which was crossed in 1900 with a dog of a breed now known only to Perry himself. In 1920 the name of Admiral Bird's famous South Pole lead dog, Chinook, which died in Little America January 17, 1929, was applied to the cross breed. In 1940 Perry Greene purchased of the originator of the stock, the late Arthur T. Walden of Winalancet, New Hampshire, the entire breeding stock of twenty-two dogs. On January 5, 1947, he moved to his cabin in the Waldoboro Woods, and all the Chinooks were housed under one roof for the first time.
Let a man invent a new mousetrap or own a princely breed of dogs, and all the world will beat a track to his door. So it is
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with Perry Greene. Cars from all states in the Union park daily before his door. His dogs are distributed throughout the United States, and customers wait for dogs in every state in the Union. Only males and spayed females are sold, and in this way the breed remains a small monopoly. The dogs, full-grown, range in weight from ninety to one hundred and twenty pounds. They are trained by Greene and are sold from $250 upward depending on their individual intelligence. The whole setup of dog and man in these "woods" is one of the most unique establishments in the United States and one of the most lucrative small enterprises of the town.
There are a number of smaller enterprises in the town. Among them is the huge auto graveyard of Calvin L. Bragg & Sons, dealing in new and used car parts; The Mack Bottling Works; Alton L. Prock, contractor for grading, excavating, and heavy steel work; and Burkett's Mill in the old shipyard, the home of fine cabinet work where the tradition of Granville O. Waltz and Lewis Kaler - that the priceless quality in any work is the in- tegrity of its maker - is still carried on.
Another small but unique industry perpetuates in the town an art brought to this place by the earliest German settlers - the making of sauerkraut. At the very northern boundary next to the Washington line lies the farm of Virgil L. Morse. Here about three acres of land are set out yearly to cabbage plants, and yearly the harvest is converted to an output of twenty-five to forty tons of sauerkraut. From October to March it is made and shipped raw, carrying the name of this old sauerkraut town all over the east and to California on the Pacific coast. In this same area and utilizing the water power of the upper Medomak is the lumber mill of Ellard Mank - a mill site since the end of the French and Indian War. Here throughout the year a force ranging from ten to eighteen men processes lumber into barrel heads and staves, the greater part of which goes to The Consolidated Lobster Company of Gloucester, Massachusetts, where it is used for packing and shipping live lobsters. The annual output of this mill is about 65,000 casks.
The largest strictly industrial plant in the town is the Paragon Button Corporation,10 located in the Old Shoe Factory building, which was acquired in 1919 by interests represented by Paul Duscha. In May 1920 the Holub, Duscha Company began here the manufacture of button machine parts. This was shortly dis- continued and in the latter part of 1920 the whole plant was con- verted by the present company to the manufacture of pearl buttons. The shell material which is used is shipped in via California from
10 Since the preparation of this chapter in 1950, the Sylvania Electric Corporation has established a plant in the town and is its largest industrial unit.
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Australia, Manila, and the Fiji Islands. The plant when working to full capacity employs eighty-two hands and is a non-union shop. The finished product is shipped to a distributing center in New York City.
In the main, the economic agencies here sketched form the sources of the town's food, clothing, shelter and surplus wealth, and provide support for its education, luxuries, religious, social and cultural life. Certain important supplementary facts, a few of which are here set forth, provide a further index to the com- munity's material well-being. In the past ten years seventy new houses and three large garages have been constructed in the town. In the year 1950, 1,020 motor vehicles were here owned and oper- ated, 695 of which were pleasure vehicles. This is an impressive figure, for a pleasure car to every three and one half inhabitants is indicative of a high standard of living.
Of even greater importance is the question of economic leadership. At the present time the direction of such affairs is in the hands of a sizable group of men who possess financial means, business intelligence, resourcefulness, imagination, civic-minded- ness, courage, and initiative. It is rare to have such a combination in so large a group. Their influence and power are a major con- structive and regenerative force in the life of the town, perhaps its best asset, but these men are not infallible, and even now are committing a fatal blunder that has its parallels elsewhere in our history.
When the Great Days came to an end in the sixties of the last century, and the local titans of those days laid down their business responsibilities and yielded up their virile leadership to the weight of years, there were literally no men of major stature to take over, and, in consequence, the town entered on a long period of decline. Against such a recurrence the part of wisdom for businessmen would be to select a couple of the more promising boys graduating each year from the Waldoboro High School, provide them with jobs in local business, and offer them the pros- pect of promotion on a basis of merit. As our history would show, no town can consistently export its best brains and character to other parts without paying dearly for its folly.
Another important feature in the economy of the present may be found in the large number of new people who have acquired homes and settled in the town. This has provided the community with a rich endowment; for many of them are people of means and quality. In many cases they have given generously and immeasurably of their business experience, their education, and their culture, but they are far from making the town entirely new, for the old persistent stock lingers on numerously. From the
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present voting list of 1,500 names those of many of the old pioneer families have disappeared forever. But the ubiquitous Winchen- baches, Creamers, Benners, Minks, Genthners, Eugleys, and Waltzes still maintain their statistical ascendancy. Names do not, however, tell the whole story, for of the old pioneer families nearly everybody's blood courses in nearly everybody else's veins. 'Tis all like a huge knitted coverlet, where every stitch is linked with every other stitch. Verily the old-timers come close to being a single family.
In the local economy there are shadows as well as lights which must do merely with a passing reference. In this area lies the fact that the town has not realized its potentials as a trading center, a condition which tends to drain off to a degree some of the life blood of its otherwise productive economy. This unfortu- nate state can be laid largely to the door of some of the town's own merchants; for less attractive stores, less rich and varied stocks of goods, higher price levels, and the abuse of monopolies have led local consumers to trade in other centers. Such a condition calls for a revaluation of existing outlooks and practices. A Chamber of Commerce would be a fitting agency for a restorative program, but here we are reliably informed that inertia and local jealousies raise a road-block to a concerted program of making the town an active trading center. It would seem, however, that self-interest could undo what it has so short-sightedly done, and that the merchants themselves through united and intelligent action could repair this damage to the structure of their economy.
Another unlovely aspect of the town's productive potential is the rapid rate at which cleared fields and meadows are reverting to baby brush. These fields so laboriously cleared over the decades of their rocks, boulders, and tree stumps are fast becoming unpro- ductive waste lands. They give to the community a shabby, unkempt, and abandoned appearance. There is much of this unused land which could provide pasturage for the fencing and hay for the cutting, great quantities of which are now given to farmers in Nobleboro, Jefferson, and Union, who know how to put it to profitable use. It needs only intelligent action to convert this area once more to productive purposes in the local economy. While this waste goes on, and fair meadows disappear under a ragged cover of alders and willows, the country continues its importation of wool from England and other lands, and its beef from the Argentine. Even in the face of the fact that there are a few farmers in the town who have been successful with beef and dairy herds, their example passes unnoticed.
A live, intelligent, and energetic Chamber of Commerce, were there such an organization, would certainly make as its first
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order of business a complete survey of the town's undeveloped potentials, and would foster and stimulate latent sources of wealth wherever such gave a certain or even a fair promise of added profit, strength, or well-being to the community's economic life. Assuredly, herds of cattle and sheep, grazing contentedly on green meadow lands and hillsides would lend an air of prosperity and beauty to our countryside and become a new source of profit to the husbandman.
Ofttimes in the course of human history what is not done is just as significant as what is. Here the reference is to long-range planning. In many towns and cities today such planning takes on a large importance in community life. Indeed, it has become a recog- nized branch of architecture, and courses are offered in universi- ties and technical schools in this special field. In progressive towns today plans are drawn up for community expansion, and some of them look as far as a century into the future. Were there a local Chamber of Commerce it would doubtless have such a program under consideration. This would be fitting, for in an atomic age with the national population increasing at the rate of 2,500,000 annually, expansion is inevitable, and it will not be in the larger cities.
There are two areas in Waldoboro which form a natural outlet for future growth. The first of these is the section west of the main business blocks on Friendship Road, which reaches down to the river side. This is the logical field for municipal expansion, since it would make for a more compact business district and check the present trend of the town to sprawl hideously and planlessly in all directions. In the second place, a planning pro- gram would aim to make of the village a more compact and cen- tralized residential area as the town grows with the years. Best adapted to this purpose is the large cleared area on the west side of the river known as "the old Smouse farm." Here a modern real-estate development would lay the area out in hard surfaced streets, install sewerage and water facilities, and sell lots for new homes. It is a picturesque location which would be easy of devel- opment, and it is by no means a dream that in the course of the next century this "farm" may be covered by streets and houses. Dreams far more fanciful than this have come to be realities in the fullness of time, and ofttimes such realities are not as remote as they seem.
There are other realities whose need is by no means remote in a growing town, and one of these is the advent of new indus- tries - industries that are sound, well managed, and backed by ample reserves of capital, rather than industries that are weak and faltering by reason of operating in a field in the American econ-
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omy characterized by over-production. One is a decided asset, the other an equally decisive liability in any community. An excel- lent example is the plant of the Sylvania Electric Corporation already established in the town. A better example, perhaps, is the Lawrence Portland Cement Plant in the town of Thomaston which pays an annual tax to that town of approximately $34,000 dollars. Every new industry in Waldoboro means an added increase in tax revenues, which would enable the town to make a beginning at least of a long-range planning program leading to an improved and larger community. The Waldoboro Industrial Realty Corpo- ration with its present energy and vision has a pregnant mission for the town's future.
II
The preceding outline has revealed a hopeful phase of our history, but a flourishing economy is not entirely an end in itself. Any economy has secondary as well as primary objectives. Its primary aims are to provide people with the basic needs of food, clothing, shelter, and simple comforts. Beyond this point wealth has no social significance unless it be translated into the higher human values, and the degree to which it provides and supports such values is the most meaningful fact in human history. For "the life is more than meat and the body more than raiment," and in fact they always have been, even though there are communities where this is not clearly understood.
Our own throughout a considerable period of its history has been one of them, and in consequence any surveys of its spiritual experience must still reveal the cultural, in all its aspects, as lagging behind the physical or economic phases of our community life. It is only recently that this trend has reversed itself and that in an ever increasing measure, the town's economic resources are being used to build and buttress its cultural life. Some decades still must pass before this cultural lag is overcome. Consequently the fol- lowing evaluation of the town's spiritual or cultural status must, perforce, carry in it the unpleasant revelation of ugly gaps and jarring facts. These will be noted along the entire spiritual front as we survey the social, educational, religious, and cultural life of our community in the year 1950.
The discussion of such abstractions will carry us over into the area of the intangibles and imponderables, in short, into the field of opinion where individual views will vary, sometimes radi- cally, from one another. From this fact, the inference that one man's evaluation would be as valid as that of another is unwar- ranted. For there are scholars, social scientists, educated and trained to observe, weigh, apply criteria, and evaluate social phenomena,
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whose judgments carry preponderant weight. The many are not so trained and hence lack the experience and the method to handle expertly the great masses of highly complex and bafflingly inter- related appearances, forces, and factors that are tightly and organ- ically integrated in all social phenomena. The evaluations set forth in the following pages are basically mine, but also to some degree those of other students of our local life, who in its different areas are qualified observers. The conclusions which follow have been discussed critically with keen and patient collaborators in the town. In many cases yielding to their insights, I have modified my own views and offer here in part a composite evaluation of local life in the year 1950.
The first estimate in this analysis should perhaps deal with the social, a term so comprehensive that it may be construed to embrace the whole of man's relationships to his fellow men. But here the term will be limited largely to the life of the town in its leisure hours, to cooperation for common social gains, to polite and pleasant talk, which may be profitable beyond measure in man's experience, or a tragic misuse of his time. There was a period of twenty years in the life of Dr. Samuel Johnson when he made little use of the written and much use of the spoken word. His conversation alone would have been enough to make him one of the central figures in English literature, and it places the man who recorded much of it in the "greatest biography in the English language" among the immortals. To be sure, such a fact represents a peak rarely reached in man's social life; it also provides us with a criterion by which to measure the values which we can develop in our own social experience.
As I look back to the year 1900 and survey the last half century, it becomes clear that there have been many changes and shifts of emphasis in our social growth. Gone is the old neighbor- hood unit, a social scheme based on propinquity, on mutual aid, on frequent association, and long evenings passed together by friendly firesides. Gone are the cracker-barrel gatherings and the nail-keg symposia of evenings around the pot-bellied stoves in the village stores, but still a social vogue at those of Genthner, Kaler, Scofield, and other suburban stores. Gone the old days of inde- pendence and proud self-sufficiency, when no shame attached to poverty, but when a person seeking town aid felt himself stigma- tized forever.
Changes due to rapidity of communication have modified re- lations of men and nations throughout the earth. In our own area the narrower groups of family and neighborhood have been dis- solved. For the life of the small group is substituted that of the herd. Now the social unit is the town, the county, the state, or
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even New England. But our survey is limited to the town, and here there has developed a new concept, replacing neighborhood consciousness with a suburban or community consciousness.
On the Dutch Neck, in West Waldoboro, South Waldoboro, Orffs Corner, Feyler's Corner, larger social units have banded together and developed a strong local loyalty. This has institu- tionalized itself in each area in a community house - an active center of social life fostering that area's interests and needs, good roads, care of cemeteries, support of a little chapel or church, and cooperating from time to time in support of the larger social interests of the town. This is on the whole a new, unique, and highly admirable development. So long as it abstains from placing a greater emphasis on the part than on the whole, it represents a forward step in the evolution of a social and civic-mindedness which is a sizable asset in the life of the town.
Of social life at its higest level there is too little in the com- munity; for there are few places or homes where men and women gather who share a common interest in the sciences, art, letters, history, politics, and philosophy. Hence there is little opportunity to spend an evening in an atmosphere of ideas, enjoying a vivid exchange of views, where the give and take of logical and experi- enced thinking is carried on with vigor, pleasure, and profit.
Man develops best when constantly functioning at his best in ever widening areas of human experience. In fact, it is probable that there is nothing in the whole gamut of human living that enables a human being to continue his growth and to approach so rapidly and pleasurable the optimum of his personal develop- ment, as social life of this character. It is in itself symptomatic of a high cultural level, and one which should to a far greater degree than in the present be set as a goal in our social life. The fact that there is so little such life at its optimum arises in some degree from inertia and weariness.
An active and demanding economic life impinges too deeply in this area of higher values, and in consequence experience loses much of its beauty, variety, and excellence because it courses too exclusively in a restricted channel. Bread, meat, animal comforts, provision for old age, are in the category of survival values and hence assume a necessary priority, but after this preamble has been accorded its full weight, the fact remains that the rarest and most exquisite flower in human civilization is the fully developed personality. A society that does not stimulate and foster such a growth remains shoddy and drab, and its individual members come to the end of their days with the finest essence of life having escaped them. This is true of the whole American scene, for most
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surely ours is a civilization that prostitutes itself to getting and spending with a ruinous exclusiveness.
There is an ancient Chinese adage to the effect that great men talk about ideas, lesser folk about things, and common folk about people. Probably most of our social life locally rests on the middle ground of this proverb, as it does at the bourgeois level in many other of our Maine towns. Our discourse stumbles and fumbles over things. On occasion we may toy rather awkwardly and inex- pertly with abstractions, but this is an area in which too few of our people feel entirely willing to enter. We have not accepted the challenge of continuous growth and the discipline pertaining thereto. Even on this middle social level life at its best is a by- product of education, and education is a continuous process from the cradle to the grave. The great curse here as elsewhere is that it stops when school stops, at the sixth or eighth-grade levels, or on graduation from high school.
This is the point at which it should really start as a matter of individual initiative. From here on it becomes a project of keen, studied, and constant observation and of the judicious reading of the better books, for as Francis Bacon has observed, "reading maketh a full man." Herein is to be found the reason that life fails to become what it should be - an ever growing realization, understanding, and appreciation of the endless wealth and values inherent in nature and civilization, values that man, by the exercise of diligence and wisdom, can appropriate to his own uses and translate into an ever expanding personality. Herein it is that our local social life falls short of its destiny - a failure that has a crip- pling effect on every phase of our common life wherever higher human values are involved.
It is clear that we find our social life in the town a satisfying one. Even though it fails signally to meet the criteria of any ulti- mate standard of man's social potential, it does possess the redeem- ing quality of warmth, kindliness, good will, humility, simple charm, and a respect for what it cannot itself achieve. Amid such virtues one should give merely a passing mention to the little evils of smugness and complacency which the old-timers would be slow to recognize and admit, but which the newcomers have at times sensed all too keenly and quickly. They complain that it takes long to secure acceptance and to effect a pleasant integration with the life of the community. Such an attitude tends to engender within them feelings of disappointment, frustration, loneliness, and a sense of not belonging and not being wanted. Such an attitude on the part of the local folk now seems largely to be a thing of the past. Today it lingers most strongly, perhaps, in the area of the town's political life.
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Near the bottom of our Chinese foot rule we find the limited class of those who are overfond and overfree in making talk about their fellows the central theme of their social life. But they are everywhere in this universe, and the local scene in all probability is blessed with no less and cursed with no more of them than the pecentage allotted by the normal probability curve. That they produce some social wreckage is true, but on the other hand, they are known, and their reputation immunizes their victims against all but limited damage.
No survey of our social life would be complete without reference to a small but unique group to be found in every com- munity - the social parasites or neutrals. This is not a reference to the poor who are compelled to draw their sustenance from the bounty of others, but rather to a limited number of people in comfortable, often well-to-do circumstances, who live exclusively to and for themselves; who derive their wealth from the existing social order; who live selfishly and colorlessly a life that is peculiar to themselves alone, and who support none of those good causes which in this world make for a richer common life.
The poet, Dante, has given an evaluation of this type of social aberration which has become in the course of centuries the classic one. In the third Canto of his Inferno he pictures them vividly in an upper circle of Hell, endlessly and eternally chasing a flag around the confines of a dark plain. Very justly the poet conceives of their penance in Hell as a vain and eternal pursuit of those values, symbolized by the flag, which they failed to realize in life. To Dante the guide, Vergil, observes: "These are the unhappy people who never were alive, never awakened . .. to care for anything but themselves." Then he adds in sadness and contempt:
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