USA > Maine > York County > York > New England miniature; a history of York, Maine > Part 11
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
The two rivers in York, with their harbors for the loading of vessels, lost their prominence as "York's front doors" and were superseded in importance by vistas of rocky headlands and sandy beaches. York now faced the open ocean. Land by the seashore, which if employed at all, had been barren, rocky pasture, was now prized for house lots, provided they afforded a distant view or maybe a juniper bush.
97
A History of York, Maine
Lower Town, renamed York Harbor, was for a time spoken of as the third most popular "watering place" along the Atlantic Coast, yielding precedence only to Newport and Bar Harbor. After the era of shipping this neighborhood had been looked down upon by the rest of York as a settlement of fishermen's shacks.
That early period of the Summer Invasion was filled with happy days, when the year-round dwellers singled out certain "summer people" as intimate friends worthy of special favors, and the visitors, for their part, chose certain families or special boys or girls and subsidized them with gifts ranging up to the point of establishing them in business or financing college educa- tions. Every family in service and every farmer or merchant who delivered his stock in trade to special back doors spoke of his cottage owners as "my people", and each took pride in a sort of social recognition among his fellow townsmen in accordance with the wealth or social position of his special customers. Certain favored personages, such as the real estate agent who rented large cottages, or the livery man who might be the first to be asked where to trade or whom to hire, were in a position to extort, as commissions, food and services in return for steering jobs or trade into certain channels.
Hotel proprietors built up their clientele of those who came back, summer after summer, to renew their association with fa- miliar surroundings and their friendships with other guests whose company they enjoyed. There grew up a sort of loyalty to the hotel which made its operation pleasurable as well as profitable. Entertaining the guests was a minor problem, for most of them were well acquainted and easily absorbed the few strangers each year who readily followed the traditions and customs of the place. The guests, almost in a body, bathed at the same hour, hiked in the same parties, planned the same outings, played tennis to- gether, and danced with each other at the hotels. One of the favorite excursions was to ride by "buckboard"-a long wagon with four seats, covered by a hard top fringed with a border of tassels-across Long Sands and on to Cape Neddick, over the Mountain Road and along the Chase's Pond Road, which was then arched cavernlike by the branches of sweet-smelling firs, to York Corner and so through the Village. William Dean Howells was one of those who expressed his enjoyment of the ride on the trolley cars across Brave Boat Harbor and the marshes. The young men, though in that day traditionally outnumbered by the other
98
NEW ENGLAND MINIATURE
sex, would band themselves in athletic teams to test the prowess of teams from other hotels, and at times the rivalry among the cheering sections was as keen as that upon the playing field.
During the daytime periods of porch sitting the fortune tellers, the basket makers, and the sellers of sweet grass and of bouquets of sweet peas had their innings. Indians from Orono spent their summers at York Beach and almost daily made their rounds of the hotel piazzas, and once or twice a summer York citizens from the Mount Agamenticus region would arrive in a cavalcade to sell their kind of basket, which was larger and sturdier than the sewing or table basket of the Indians. The "basket making" Moultons, Ramsdells, Welches, Lewises, or Fitzgeralds would find ready sale for their wares among the year- round dwellers as well as among the summer guests. At least two or three evenings a week, itinerant performers would be granted free permission to put on their acts and afterwards to pass the hat. Most of them were magicians with card tricks and feats of dex- terity, some "recited", and the few who sang or played musical instruments often found the talent in the audience superior to their own. Most of these strolling players would rank as amateurs, for their object usually was to finance summer tours or to earn money for college educations.
The coming of summer afforded employment for the young women and men of York families; the women as waitresses and maids in hotels, as clerks in stores, as servants in summer homes; the men as hostlers and delivery boys, as porters in hotels, as coachmen for visiting families.
The keeping of horses, both saddle and driving, was neces- sary to service the daily requirements for living and to provide sport for the pleasure seekers. Every hotel and every store main- tained at least one horse and vehicle, and there were livery stables where the summer visitors could hire carriages and saddle horses. When the summer season came to an end at Labor Day, the dis- posal of the horses for the coming winter presented a problem that was met in one of many ways, varying from the outright sale down to boarding them out for the winter. The care or ownership of a horse for the winter was eagerly sought by the young bloods. Some of them saved cash from their summer earnings and bought their horses; a man who was known to be a good provider and "handy" with a horse might make a deal to buy his horse for ten dollars with the understanding that the seller would refund the ten dollars and take back his horse in the spring; a very good man
99
A History of York, Maine
might be entreated to take a horse for the winter and might receive some cash for board; a few would not be entrusted with a horse on any terms. Many were the sprints that took place on the high- ways when the gay blades met on the road to Portsmouth on frosty winter nights!
During the season, on hot summer nights, the main street in the Village and on down to the harbor would be lined with young men looking for excitement, and the young women would stroll by and each would find herself a beau. Sometimes they would board a streetcar between the Village and the Beach, per- haps just for the ride and a cool breeze, perhaps to see if another section showed more life than theirs.
There was no servant problem in those days. Indeed some cottages were built with nearly as many rooms for servants as for guests. Often part of the expedition from home to the summer cottage was a visit to the immigration station at Ellis Island in New York or at Castle Island in Boston to hire a staff of help right off the incoming liners from the British Isles. Many a girl found herself a York husband before a season was over.
During the fall or the winter, sooner or later, many York families would open charge accounts with the local merchants with the understanding that the first expenditure of the next season's earnings would pay off the winter's accumulation of debt. Often merchants would be obliged to borrow thousands of dollars in the spring of the year in order to restock their stores for the summer because the collections from the townspeople did not come in at the appropriate time to allow the storekeeper to get his "two per cent for cash" allowance on his purchases.
Farmers, ice dealers, coal and wood sellers, and others who employed seasonal labor would take up their indebtedness by labor in the fields, the woods, the ice ponds, or wherever there was out-of-vacation-season employment, and the tie thus bound between debtors and creditors sometimes resembled the relation between a feudal lord and his vassals in olden days in England. A new merchant would find it a most formidable barrier of competition.
But after the end of World War I chain stores were opened, and some townspeople, forgetting their fealty to the local mer- chants, spent their first spring earnings on the wares that were offered cheap for cash. This was a new form of competition which called for drastic reprisal and the first step taken was to abolish the well-established custom of long-term credit.
100
NEW ENGLAND MINIATURE
It was the automobile which brought about a new era in summer vacations, particularly when Henry Ford marketed his Model T for considerably less than a thousand dollars. This was an event which revolutionized the life of everyone in the largest cities and the smallest hamlets. At last the city dweller could seek out the country places that had seemed inaccessible, and the isolated countryman found it within his means to see for himself how others lived. At last the toilers on the Outer Commons up on Clay Hill and Mount Agamenticus were emancipated.
Such a popular desire to travel called for improved roads, and by the beginning of World War I, a concerted enterprise of road construction developed which outstripped all former proj- ects. "Hard roads"-roads topped with concrete or a tar composi- tion-were built; new roads were laid out and old roads were straightened and grades made less steep.
To those who had made a business of supplying the wants and needs of "the summer people", the automobile was a mixed blessing. Vacationists came to be known as "automobile tourists", for as the newer name denotes, they no longer came for extended stays but toured about, ever eager to see what lay over the next hill. Gone was all feeling of loyalty for one resort or one hotel; gone was the proprietor's complacency and his faith that his old clientele would, without special effort on his part, fill his hotel and his purse. Others saw profit in catering to the hordes that filled the roads bumper-to-bumper, and they specialized in one or another of the many trades or services which in former years had made up the business of a few. New styles in living quarters were conceived, until there were competitors ranging from those who offered a bare plot of land as space where a tent might be erected to those who offered colonies of multi-roomed cottages. Year by year the business has grown-in its first twenty-five years or less "the tourist business" achieved high rank among the nation's most profitable "industries". Keen competition made obsolete the rough construction and the use of discarded furniture which had been acceptable in earlier days.
Even the steam trains and the electric cars have gone the way of the outmoded. Emergencies caused by floods and deep snows had been solved by the steam trains and their friendly crews, and the electric cars had carried many a York citizen to the outside world when streets were blocked with snow, and like the postman, had carried the mail in spite of all discouragements. The lines depended upon the chances for profit afforded by the
101
A History of York, Maine
needs of the summer people in order to endure the hardships and the slackening of business in the off-season months. But the private automobile and the taxi lured business away from the cars on rails at the time when these faithful servants needed a sus- taining harvest.
The final blow to the electric line was administered by one season's operation of what was popularly called the Jitney. Our five-cent coin was for a while called a jitney, and any trans- portation line which operated on a five-cent fare was distinguished by this new name, which soon disappeared from our slang for obvious reasons. The fare on the York line was five cents from York Beach through York Harbor to York Village, hence it came to be known as the Jitney. There were two vehicles or trains in operation, each composed of a car (which, like a locomotive, furnished the propulsion) fitted out like its trailers, which were two rubber-tired surreys with fringes on top. From early morning to about eleven at night, they shuttled without schedule and with- out pause from the Square at York Beach, across Long Sands, through the Harbor, to the Town Hall at York Village; then turned around and reversed the route back to York Beach, stopping only to take on or discharge passengers. Such competition hastened the electric car line to a premature death, and as the following winter was especially severe, the end was sudden, though not entirely unexpected.
As inventive minds are continually at work, novel accom- modations and styles in entertainment are offered every season so that no proprietor can foresee from year to year what changes he must accept in order to hold his share of the trade. The two World Wars have served to accelerate the inventions and to make the traveling public more unstable and restless.
Wider travel has accelerated the exchange of opinions and customs, until with the invention of the radio, by which news may in the same moment be heard at Bald Head Cliff as at Birming- ham, or at Clay Hill as quickly as in California, towns have be- come standardized throughout the nation, and one community now has little individuality to distinguish it from another.
Thus the little town of York in southern Maine has been fashioned in the American mold after having played a unique part in the civil war between an English king and his parliament. It was founded upon the abandoned site of an earlier civilization, and it was favored by a king to become the capital city of a new world. Events in the history of another continent shaped its future.
102
NEW ENGLAND MINIATURE
For a hundred years, it was the capital of all that was Maine. For eighty-five years, its inhabitants endured constant threat of inva- sion. After a decade of peace and prosperity new wars arose in close succession to impoverish the people and to transplant their industries to communities more favorably situated. New inven- tions and improvements in manufacturing processes threatened to complete the extinction of the town. The coming of summer visitors inaugurated a new industry which brought a new pros- perity and pointed York in the direction of its proper destiny. Inventions in transportation and communication and two world wars have made York one with the other communities in America, all facing a common future and striving for a common goal of peace and prosperity throughout the world.
Part II
It can do posterity no harm to be reminded that there were good men, though it may be irksome to imitate them.
From Dr. CALEB H. SNOW: History of Boston (1825)
EDWARD RISHWORTH
FROM THE TIME when the Massachusetts General Court usurped the government of Maine and changed the City of Gorge- ana to the Town of York, and all through the difficult days when the control of Maine was being disputed by the king, by the heirs of Gorges and Mason, and by the Bay Colony, and during King Philip's War, the Province of Maine, the Massachusetts Bay Col- ony, and indeed, the ruling powers in England, were obliged to rely upon the services of the man who wa's the recorder of both the Town and the County of York (which then included all that was Maine) to order the affairs of Maine. That this condition existed for thirty-five years was due to the skill and the tact of Edward Rishworth, who held that position for almost all of those years until his strength failed when he was nearly seventy. His predecessors had been limited to the duties of keeping the records, but his ability having been recognized and appreciated, Edward Rishworth raised his office to a rank second in importance only to that of the deputy-president. Though he made many enemies, especially in Massachusetts, and though on occasion another was appointed to his position, his successor was soon obliged to have him take back the duties, and finally the office. His knowledge of conditions in Maine affairs and his skill in clarifying and phrasing legal documents was such that he was called upon to act as coun- selor for governing boards, to preside as magistrate in the courts, to serve on the board of selectmen for the town, to be a representa- tive in the General Court, and in recognition of his executive ability, to serve on committees instructed to see that projects were completed. As his regular duties as county and town recorder included keeping the records, recording deeds, wills, and business transactions, publicizing court orders, and on certain occasions, collecting taxes and circulating petitions, he must have been known to every man in the Province.
Edward Rishworth was born in Lincolnshire, England, about 1618, son of the Reverend Thomas Rishworth, an Oxford
105
106
NEW ENGLAND MINIATURE
graduate. His mother was Hester Hutchinson, of that family which built up extensive trade in New England products- principally lumber, livestock, and food-in the West Indies and in England. In Rishworth's time, the Hutchinsons owned extensive holdings in timberland in the Piscataqua River area, and many acres of farmland in Narragansett Valley in Rhode Island. In 1639 Rishworth came to New England to live in the new settle- ment of Exeter founded by his uncle, the Reverend John Wheel- wright, whose daughter Susanna he had married, and promptly he was elected recorder for the town. Alliance with Reverend John Wheelwright, who had been banished from Massachusetts because he had expressed disagreement with the religious tenets of the Puritans in his sermons, automatically placed Rishworth in disfavor with the General Court. The expelled minister had bought land of the Indians in 1638 when the New Hampshire colony was independent, but after the colony was annexed to Massachusetts, the Wheelwright congregation was again obliged to flee from the persecution of the Bay Colony. In 1641, Rish- worth was living in Maine as one of Wheelwright's followers, where they founded the town of Wells under a grant from Gorges. When Basil Parker, the recorder of the Province, died in 1651, Rishworth accepted an offer to be his successor and became a citizen of the city of Gorgeana.
Hardly had Rishworth moved to Gorgeana before he under- took to further a project to create milling facilities there. The first tidal mill in America, on Old Mill Creek, had been abandoned for want of repairs, and there was no corn mill. While still a citizen of Wells, he had been granted, by the Province Court, milling privileges on Cape Neddick River, but after moving to Gorgeana, he postponed the development of his grant till some years later. In June 1652, still under the laws of the independent Province of Maine, Governor Edward Godfrey contracted with William Ellingham and Hugh Gale for the erection and operation of one or more mills on New Mill Creek, across York River from Old Mill Creek, and Edward Rishworth appears to have been in charge of the completion of the contract and the guardianship of the interests of the Province. By 1653 there were two sawmills and a gristmill on that stream. Boston men connected with the Hutchinson interests soon bought out Ellingham and Gale, and Rishworth owned shares and became the local agent for the business.
107
Edward Rishworth
Soon after Godfrey left York for England in 1655 the General Court, wishing to have the inhabitants of Maine express their approval of the manner in which they were being governed by Massachusetts, ordered Rishworth to circulate petitions to that effect. Since, under Godfrey, he was supposed to favor Gorges, such a task naturally brought him disfavor among his fellow citizens, but there was no way of avoiding it. With every change in political control during the remainder of his active life, his duties made him new enemies. In the histories he has been labeled a "trimmer" who pledged allegiance to whatever side was currently in power just to protect his job as a scribe. In 1660 he made new enemies, as his position was reversed when even the General Court submitted to the king on the occasion of his restora- tion to power.
Always active as agent for the Hutchinson interests, Rish- worth induced Henry Sayward, the most popular builder in New Hampshire, to come to York in 1658 and set up mills.
For the next six years the Gorges heirs pressed their claims before the courts in England and among the citizens in York, and endeavored, with growing success, to set up their form of govern- ment according to the powers which had been given to the elder Gorges by King Charles I before the Civil War in England broke out many years earlier. Peter Weare was the most outspoken pro- ponent for the Massachusetts cause, making violent charges and circulating petitions; and in so doing became a bitter rival to Rishworth. On at least one occasion, Rishworth, as magistrate, had Weare thrown into the gaol on the charge of sedition. The Province of Maine was therefore governed by a choice of two separate sets of laws, and subject to taxation by both. Citizens in choosing to abide by one code thus became unruly lawbreakers under the other.
Edward Rishworth, his first allegiance having been to the Gorges interests, sided with the king's commissioners when they were sent over to New England in 1664, and was appointed by them a justice of the peace as well as recorder. Hearing that Massachusetts justices were to hold quarterly sessions in York, the commissioners in 1665 were on hand with troops to greet them. The justices, with their military escort, took a good look at the king's forces and went back to Boston without holding court. In 1667 York was in need of a new church and courthouse, and Edward Rishworth was voted to serve with the selectmen as a
108
NEW ENGLAND MINIATURE
committee to contract with Henry Sayward to build a new church on the bank of the creek known thereafter as Meeting House Creek. By this time Sayward had a mill or mills on Cape Neddick River, by right of the grant given to Rishworth in 1651, besides his two sawmills and a gristmill on New Mill Creek. Rishworth probably owned shares in all of these enterprises.
In 1668 the General Court sent magistrates to hold court and to set up its choice of officials to carry out Massachusetts laws as the true and only government for Maine, and this time a troop of horsemen came with them to oppose any opposition. There being no force of arms representing the royal commissioners on hand, the Massachusetts delegation was unopposed. Edward Rish- worth was on the wrong side again. A new election of town officials was held and the voters chose Edward Rishworth for recorder, but the General Court refused to let him serve. Peter Weare received the office instead, but soon Rishworth, as his deputy, was again doing the work.
Again in 1670, when the town elected Rishworth to be its representative in the General Court, that body refused to seat him until he wrote an apology to the Court, admitting that he had done wrong by serving the commissioners in years past, and saying that he would not do such a thing again since he was now con- vinced that his proper allegiance was to the General Court. He was re-elected to that office annually for thirteen years.
King Philip's War broke out in 1675, and with Abraham Preble, son of his old friend Abraham, Rishworth wrote a solemn letter to the General Court warning that body never to under- estimate the strength of Indian attack in Maine. Had the Court heeded that advice there would have been less blood shed in this and succeeding Indian wars.
Massachusetts, in 1677, having bought the title held by the heirs of Gorges, appointed Thomas Danforth to be the presi- dent of the Province. Rarely coming to York, Danforth left the executive power to be exercised by a deputy president, Major John Davis, York's first merchant, whose home and warehouse were located at the Market Place. Edward Rishworth was ap- pointed recorder, as usual, and also one of the trustees instructed to collect such rents as were prescribed in the leases given under the powers formerly given in the Gorges patent. The trustees were also justices of a supreme court. Again Rishworth was in a fair way to make enemies.
109
Edward Rishworth
From this time on, Rishworth's financial affairs went from bad to worse. By now the growing hostility he met with in the conduct of his political duties became a burden, while at the same time his services as agent for the Hutchinson interests, in the Piscataqua Valley as well as in York, demanded increasing attention. At some time around 1677, his wife died and he may have lost enthusiasm. By 1679 there were mortgages on much of his real estate held in the names of individual members of the Hutchinson family. In 1682 he deeded his property, subject to payment of his indebtedness and to care and support in his de- clining years, to John Sayward, who had married his only child, Mary.
In 1683 he signed documents as Secretary of the General Assembly of the Province of Maine, and was still holding court as a justice of the peace. During the next few years his signature appeared less frequently.
He apparently died in 1689, when he was about seventy years of age, for in that year an inventory of his estate was re- corded. He was fortunate to die in peaceful times before the terrible Massacre of 1692 when his daughter and two of his grandchildren were marched as prisoners to Canada, and his house burned. His end would certainly have been violent on that day.
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.