USA > Maine > Kennebec County > Waterville > The centennial history of Waterville, Kennebec County, Maine, including the oration, the historical address and the poem presented at the celebration of the centennial anniversary of the incorporation of the town, June 23d, 1902 > Part 10
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The business history of Waterville is important in its attain- ment but more in its prophecy. Even in the eighteenth century John McKechnie, who built the first dam on the Messalonskee and Redington & Getchell, who built on the Kennebec, saw that this was to be a manufacturing center. The early traders under- stood that this was to be the trade center of central Maine. With the passing of the old order of things and the extension of the railroads, it seemed for a while that Waterville was left behind. Had it not been for the public spirit and the business genius of George Alfred Phillips and the executive ability of R. B. Dunn, Waterville would not have been what it is to-day. Other men of means and public spirit and administrative capacity were found who brought in the new era.
As early as 1839 it had been pointed out that within a radius of five miles of Waterville were fifteen waterfalls, thus affording power for a manufacturing city of the first rank. Our great manufacturies, our pay rolls of $1,700,000 per year are a definite and well-established and incontrovertible prophecy of the greater things which are to be.
The past century has made Waterville a railroad center. The business of the Maine Central Railroad at the Waterville station has increased, since 1879, in ticket business, 400% and in freight
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business, 600%. The coming of the Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington road, for which Waterville citizens have worked so long, will mean much to the business of the city. The exten- sion of electric roads will write a new page in the prosperity of Waterville, And for larger things-study the map and your eyes may discern the laden trains of the Canadian Pacific Trans- Continental system rolling through Waterville to the nearest ever-open harbor of the Atlantic.
The conditions upon which our grandsires looked in 1802 should give inspiration and courage to us who look into the second century of Waterville's life. They are to us also a chal- lenge. If under those conditions they wrought so well and accomplished so much, what shall be required of us?
In order to this grander and larger future, certain things are essential. The intellectual, moral, religious and civic life of the community must be ever higher and nobler. The schools must be well supported and properly housed. The churches must carry forward their work of love which binds man to his brother man and both to God.
The laws of the State and the Nation must be kept. We record with gratitude and pride to-day, that only one murder stains Waterville's record for a hundred years and that was com- mitted by one who hardly had been here long enough to be called a citizen of Waterville. For the true prosperity of the city there must be respect for law and enforcement of law.
In material things much is yet desired. The old days when every man kept his own store and cried down his neighbor, are past. In order to large individual prosperity there must be gen- eral and corporate prosperity. The public spirit which unites the resource of all for the general good, alone can meet the needs of the new era. The Board of Trade has given example and suggestion in this regard. The prosperity of Waterville is not matter of accident or uncertainty. Let its citizens work together on rational lines and that prosperity is as certain as the laws of nature, which are the thoughts of God.
Let the things essential to the more great and glorious future of Waterville be supplied. The railroads needed, will be built, men who know an opportunity will utilize the power of our rivers for manufactures. Let the higher things of the city's
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life be regarded. The new library must have a fitting site, and is there no land except this sacred spot? The high school which has so well proved its efficiency should have a building worthy of its work. Other schools have like needs. Colby and Coburn should receive large increase in endowment that they may be leaders in the new era. The Fire Department which has had such an honorable past and has such present efficiency should have a suitable central station.
We are not discouraged by our needs, they are only proofs of the city's progress and growth by which they have been created. As to their supply : It seems strange that no prosper- ous son of the city, who in broader fields has gained wealth, has ever given anything to supply some of these needs in his native town. Such gifts would be alike honorable to the giver and to the recipient. But if they come not, then let the city in good, sturdy, self-respecting fashion out of its own increasing revenue supply its needs, and build even higher the enduring structure of its prosperity and its fame. The City Hall yonder, in its beauty, its convenience and its strength which will make memor- able the administration of Mayor Blaisdell, shows what the city can do. The needs of progress are better than the competence of stagnation.
This centennial celebration in which, led and marshalled by our efficient chairman, Dr. Frederick C. Thayer, we, as committees and citizens, have worked heartily together, should arouse a spirit which will make larger things possible. Let us go forward to that larger future. In it whatever may come, whatever danger befall our beloved country in this new century of her larger life, the men of Waterville will not be wanting. Her fair daughters still will adorn and make happy her homes, unless induced by men of the right sort to establish in larger but less favored cities, homes of the Waterville order. Our college still will send forth men and women who because they know, can teach, because of what they are, can lead, however rapidly the front line of the world's progress may advance.
Yet we pause a moment in our progress, to-day, to salute the men and women of the past from whom we have received our goodly heritage. Only a few of their names could be recorded in this brief sketch but their work abides, their descendents ful-
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fil well their part in the city of to-day and will cherish and honor their memory.
We salute Winslow, our mother, still fair in her ever renewed youth and comfortable in her ever increasing prosperity. (Even though she lost her covered bridge.) Sometimes this Mother Winslow, has been a bit cross and severe to her beautiful and somewhat headstrong daughter, Waterville, but on the whole she has been a good mother and has secured her daughter's fond approval.
We salute our own daughter, Oakland, regretful that family jars led to her setting up housekeeping for herself and rejoicing in all her new promise of prosperity. We are about building a new railroad in order to make it more convenient for mother and daughter to exchange calls and the light of Oakland shines in our streets by night.
Yea, more, as I study the record of the past, and regard the signs of the future there comes before me a vision of a city restored to the limits of the old town of 1771. Winslow, Water- ville, Oakland, together again, bound by the modern hooks of steel, the steam and electric roads, and by interests in common. That city will be strong and efficient in its great industries, rich in its commerce, grand in its educational institutions, happy in its homes, pure in its civil life and loyal to the brotherhood of man in the service of Almighty God. Of that city it matters little whether the name be Waterville or Winslow or Teconnet, it will be the fair city of our heart's love, of our faith and of our prayers. Meanwhile Waterville, city beloved and fair, in the words of the old Hebrew benediction "the Lord bless thee and keep thee, the Lord make His face to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee, the Lord lift up His countenance upon thee and give thee peace."
CHAPTER IV.
THE CENTENNIAL ORATION
By HON. WARREN COFFIN PHILBROOK, A. M., Lately Mayor of Waterville.
The first hundred years of the existence of our municipality is so nearly contemporaneous with the nineteenth calendar cen- tury that it may not be inappropriate, while we are celebrating our centennial, to glance over that most important period of the world's history and compare present with past conditions, for, though years glide by unheeded and centuries pass into eternity to be forgotten, yet men who filled those years with notable deeds of right or wrong, and events which illuminated the records of the centuries, or stained the pages of the book of Time, still hold their place in the halls of memory.
The most correct estimates are those formed by comparison and in order to judge of the conditions of our own national exis- tence a hundred years ago we should scan the conditions, at that time, of our neighbors beyond the sea. And first it should be remembered that monarchies, more or less absolute, then held sway throughout Europe and while some rulers were apparently attempting to ameliorate the conditions of their subjects yet, for the most part, kings and emperors sought wealth and power only for their own aggrandizement. But, as threatening an eclipse of all European government, written across the heavens from Gibraltar to the land of the midnight sun, was the name of Napoleon, whose ambitions were forcing Europe into a general war. The respite from continental struggles granted by the treaty of Amiens was so brief as to be hardly called a respite. The alliance of Paul of Russia with the First Consul had been
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abandoned by Alexander I, who succeeded the murdered Paul, and Russia, still exhausted by forty years of ceaseless strife, found herself allied to England, the bitterest enemy of France, under mutual vows to drive Bonaparte from northern Germany and to make Holland and Switzerland independent. Sweden entered the Anglo-Russian alliance and Prussia, with eighty thousand men, fought on the side of the lion and the bear. Austria had already begun war against the Corsican, while in Spain, Ferdinand VII, who had come to the throne on a wave of absolutism, who had publicly burned the constitution, who had declared the acts of the Cortes illegal and who had restored the inquisition, found himself and his country forced into a coali- tion with the man whose hand was against all Europe.
The disastrous campaigns of Marengo and Hohenlinden soon compelled Francis, in behalf of Austria, and in the name of the German Empire, to sign the treaty of Luneville whereby Ger- many lost twenty-four thousand square miles of its best territory and three and a half millions of its people. Austerlitz was fol- lowed by Waterloo and the struggle of nation with nation for supremacy on the one hand and independence on the other absorbed the attention of a continent. Everywhere on that side of the Atlantic was heard the martial drum beat, the roar of cannon, and the moans of the dying, everywhere was the war cloud, everywhere was intrigue, plot and counterplot.
From this hasty view of that land where monarchies and wars to support monarchies held sway, we turn to the western world in which the youngest nation of the earth had begun the experi- ment of a government "of the people, by the people and for the people." Across our heavens, in letters of glorious light, was written the name of that great patriot who had just closed his eyes on scenes of earth, our own illustrious, incomparable Wash- ington. Upon our soil no king, no potentate, no emperor had set foot. Our institutions were dedicated to the immortal prin- ciple "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Than this no statement could have been framed more comprehensive, more significant, more prophetic, when viewed in the light of all that has happened during the century which has just closed. Have
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we had wars? They were not for the acquirement of territory, the subjugation of a nation, or the glory of a king, but rather in defence of the lives of American citizens, for the liberty of American subjects and the down trodden of other races. Have art, science, invention and philanthropy borne fruit? The golden harvest has not been gleaned by the favored few of rank and station but, in all its bounty, has been laid at the door of the rich and the poor, of the lofty and of the lowly, and herein has the pursuit of happiness been richly rewarded.
It is not my intention to dwell upon the wars through which we have been called to pass during the century. Every one was a necessity and unavoidable. But whether in our chastisement of the piratical Barbary states, our final war with the mother country, our occupation of the halls of the Montezumas, our domestic tragedy in the early sixties, or the latest conquest of the Spaniard, in every instance the stars and stripes were unfurled in a righteous cause, were defended by gallant soldiers It and sailors and were never lowered until the cause was won. is rather my purpose to emphasize the victories of peace, tne glorious achievements of invention, the splendid progress of art and science, and the holy conquests of philanthropy. In the development of this purpose I shall not invoke the graces of trope and metaphor, nor seek the aid of eloquence, but rather let the story be a plain, unvarnished tale, only pausing from time to time to emphasize the thought that these things are all the fruit of the century in which our fair city has grown from a struggling hamlet to its present beautiful proportions, a time almost covered by the memory of some who honor me with their attention at this hour.
First then let us consider those inventions which have anni- hilated time and space in the transportation of thought and arti- cles of commerce. One hundred years ago no swifter courier than the stage coach and the breeze driven ship brought tidings of life or death, communications as to the affairs of state, or the message of the merchant. The sail waited for the favoring wind and the slow moving wagon was at the mercy of the horse or the ox. when the storehouses of commerce were empty. To Ameri- can ingenuity we owe the first improvement in this condition when Robert Fulton began to navigate the Hudson river by
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steamboat in 1807, thereby preceding by five years like naviga- tion on the Clyde and by ten years that upon the Thames. If the nineteenth century had produced no other invention than the application of steam power to navigation it would still have easily held first place among the ages by reason of the material bene- fits which it has bestowed upon mankind. So familiar are we now with the steamboat from the tiny launch to the mammoth floating palaces costing fortunes, that it might seem to the younger generation a fable to say that when their grandfathers left the little hamlet of Waterville to fight the battles of 1812 there were but eleven steam driven vessels in the world, one in England and ten in America. At that time Dr. Lardner, the great English scientist, was reported to have declared that steam navigation could never be made practicable, on account of the great expense of operation, and that 110 ship could ever cross the Atlantic ocean by steam power alone because it would not be possible to carry coal sufficient for the voyage. And yet, thanks to Yankee ingenuity which our British cousins always reluc- tantly admit, so rapid and so successful was the development of steam navigation that the same learned gentleman, in less than three decades after the trial trip of Fulton's little craft was made, used the following gracious language ; "Among the various ways in which the steam engine has ministered to the social progress of our race none is more important and interesting than the aid it has afforded to steam navigation. Before it lent its giant power to that art, locomotion over the deep was attended with a degree of danger and uncertainty which seemed so necessary and so inevitable that, as a common proverb, it became the type and representative of everything else which was precarious and perilous." How great has been that social progress, and in what directions, every one may have some conception who will contemplate the amount of business now done daily by steam vessels, how safely and how swiftly it is done, and how its per- formance brings the markets of the world to our very doors. But we should not forget that steam navigation, grown from the little "Clermont" with a speed of less than five miles an hour to that great ocean greyhound which a short time ago crossed the broad Atlantic in a trifle over five days ; grown from the "Demo- logos" a steam propelled battery of two thousand four hundred
.
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and seventy-five tons to the magnificent ships of the "California" class with a record of thirteen thousand six hundred eighty tons, is a gift of the century whose close we celebrate today.
Made first by our English cousins, this same century has also seen the experiment with steam locomotion for railway purposes pass into the realms of established necessities and today we whirl across a continent in less time than one might go from here to New York when Waterville asked incorporation from the hands of the Legislature of Massachusetts.
The transmission of thought by telegraph and telephone has now become so common as to excite no comment but it remained for Americans in the nineteenth century, to perfect telegraphy so as to make it practical, and to invent the telephone which was an absolutely unknown factor in the world's progress a little more than twenty-five years ago. None can tell what the future may have in store for those who have abandoned the wire for the transmission of messages and are teaching the whispering airs of heaven to tell the story of Marconi, but we may well be proud of the fact that American enterprise and American capital have not been sought in vain with which to test the practical value of this latest gift of invention.
Descending to what might be called a humbler line I borrow for a moment the words of a noted author who says: "The comforts of life have been immeasurably increased by the uni- versal adoption of things now termed common and indispensable, such as friction matches, gas lighting, electric light and appli- ances, or steel pens as well as modern methods of heating, plumb- ing and construction." But human life, as it now exists among civilized communities, owes still more, perhaps, to our new labor saving machines. Should we attempt to enumerate the inven- tions of the century in this class time would fail and patience be exhausted with the telling. Machines for the working of wood and iron, machines for the spinning and weaving of wool and cotton, machines for the manufacture of hats and machines for the manufacture of shoes, that most marvellous product of American brain, the sewing machine, which one enthusiastic writer declared was the greatest blessing, save alone the Christian religion, ever bestowed on civilized woman ; machines, in short, to do almost everything which was necessarily done by human
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ton a hundred years ago, are the fruits of a century at whose close we stand.
As a natural sequence to the application of steam to trans- . portation by sea and land, the last hundred years has seen an enormous expansion of business in which our country has greatly shared. This is neither the time or the place to give extended statistics relating to the commerce of our country, either foreign or domestic, but a few figures may be used to indicate the enor- mous amount of our sales to foreign nations and their increase during the memory of this generation. In many other avenues of industry might the illustration be found but it now suffices the purpose to speak of some exported products.
Exports
1885
1900
Machinery, agricultural implements, instruments and apparatus,
$14,893,000
$74,681,000
Other manufactured metals,
5,950,000
41,891,000
Crude iron and steel, (in tons)
13,000
747,095
1897
1900
Copper,
$31,075,636
$55,772,166
1898
1900
Refined petroleum,
$51,242,933
$67,740,106
Such figures as these, to the thoughtless mind, are as empty sounds, meaning nothing, but to the student of events, to the intelligent business man they speak volumes. They represent thousands upon thousands of men employed at honest, profitable labor, they represent hundreds upon hundreds of happy homes on which there is no mortgage and for the occupation of which no rent falls due, they represent cities and towns newly sprung into existence and the life of many municipalities which celebrate an anniversary, they mean education and refinement for the masses, luxuries for those who are possessed only of moderate means, enlarged fortunes for the wealthy and in short every material blessing to which man is heir.
Creat as the advance has been in the realm of invention and commerce, yet an equal forward movement has been made along the lines of science. Only the most passing allusion can be given to this advance, nor indeed is there great need of particu- larizing in the presence of an audience composed of those who
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are so well versed, as this one is, in the development of the times. Some reference is due however, to the great strides taken in the science and practice of medicine and surgery. Imagine, if you please, a patient in the full possession of his senses and with every nerve of feeling alert, bound firmly to an operating table, about to feel the knife and the saw, follow his agony through the necessary amputation of a limb or the opening of a cavity, watch the life blood follow the scalpel, listen to his cries of anguish, see him swoon with pain, and then say how great a blessing the nineteenth century conferred on humanity when an American doctor, either Morton, Jackson or Wells, in 1846, dis- covered that by the mere inhalation of pure sulphuric ether the most dreaded of surgical operations may be performed during the happy unconsciousness of the patient. For screaming and struggles and intense suffering under the surgeon's knife, etheri- zation substituted complete exemption from pain, associated in some with the quietude, mental and bodily, of deep sleep; in others, with pleasing dreams, imaginary scenes and sweet music. And for this great boon the modest physician who first made it possible asked of the world no recompense, no reward. It was simply a gift to mankind, a trophy which science laid at the feet of the nineteenth century, a garland whose perfume filled the air with sweetness for the comfort of all men. In like manner, and with equal largess, have the members of that splendid profession given ungrudgingly the beneficial results arising from the dis- covery of the functions of the blood corpuscles, the germ theory of disease and the use of the Roentgen rays. Boldly let it be said that the century's achievements in invention, commerce and science outnumber like results of all previous centuries within historic time.
But when all is said neither the achievements of invention, the growth of commerce, nor the progress of science is at all com- parable with these deeds of philanthropy which the sons of Columbia have made the crowning glory of the century. Their altruism has not been confined to the household of their own faith, nor even to the stranger within their gates, but has been extended to those beyond seas ; has blessed not only the Anglo- Saxon but has thrown its arm about the starving dwellers on the Emerald soil, the dusky sons of Africa and those who live upon
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the islands of the tropics. In 1846 Ireland was afflicted with one of the most dreadful famines known to modern times. Destitution, pestilence and death were seen on every hand. No tongue could tell the sad stories of the time, no pen could chron- icle the awful record of the hour. Then it was that America won her first great victory of peace and challenged the admira- tion of the world. Scarce thirty years had passed since the smoking guns of our warships had humbled the proud flag of George III, and yet the same generation which manned those guns now sailed toward England in one of those same warships laden with food for the starving subjects of the British King. It was not an event of passing importance but was the forerunner of the policy of our country through the years which were to follow. Two decades passed by and we were able to show the world the proud record at home of a race of slaves made free from bondage, even at the cost of hundreds of thousands of human lives and thousands of millions of dollars. To be sure the question of the stability of the Union is said to have been the cause of the Civil War but that stability was threatened on the one hand by southern tyranny and on the other by northern phil- anthropy. In the end the latter came off victor and added another star to America's crown of glory. But it remained for these latest days to witness a spectacle never before beheld by the people of any age, race or clime. In the midst of unequalled material prosperity at home, at a time when peace and harmony cemented the hearts of all the American people as never before, at a time when strife was farthest from our minds, the breeze from off the ocean brought a cry for help. It came not from territory which we had peopled, in the veins of its dwellers ran no drop of our blood, their traditions were not ours, their man- ners and customs were not ours, their ancestors were not ours; no obligation bound us to them, no claim had they upon us save alone the moral claim to protect the weak, to succor the afflicted and to raise up those who were bowed down by the burden of an unequal and an unjust foe. At the sound of that cry America arose in her majestic strength. Calmly, without passion and without fear she drew around her more closely the white robes of justice, on her fair brow she placed the blazing helmet of love, in her right hand she took the sword of freedom and, calling
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