USA > Maine > Kennebec County > West Gardiner > West Gardiner's hundred years, Centennial 1850-1950 > Part 3
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WEST GARDINER'S HUNDRED YEARS
VEST CARDINER ZTOWN HALL
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WEST GARDINER TOWN HOUSE
It took a couple of town meetings to thrash out all of the details for the building of the town house in 1857 and the records indicate that there was considerable controversy over the location and size. March 18 the sum of $800 was appropriated for this purpose and before the year was out the building was up.
J. N. Fairbanks was paid $25 for the lot for the town house, which is one of the buildings in town which has remained solidly upon its original foundation.
J. Bachelder put in a bill for $757 for building the town house and Samuel Austin charged $7.86 for painting it. Incidentals totalled $37.13 which brought the cost to $26.99 more than the appropriation.
But the town had a brand new meeting place all of its own, and it was mighty proud of it.
For the first few years the town retailed liquor through a duly ap- pointed agent and received a goodly profit therefrom, much as the state does today. But in those days the product of fermentation was not a beverage. It was strictly limited to "medicinal and mechanical" uses. The law said so.
The good mesdames of West Gardiner have traditionally warred upon all pain-killers not labelled as patent medicines and their patient menfolk were wont, at times, to adjourn to the cellar, there to meditate upon the miracles old mother nature can work with a keg of cider.
Even today the bibbers of malt beverages have to scurry around like everything after voters when the biennial ballots are cast to determine whether a man must cross the town line to buy a bottle of beer. One elec-
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tion they bought their privilege dear, by the narrow margin of just one vote.
Aye, the old town books are full of facts and figures and stories which would take another hundred years to winnow. And a hundred works like this to set them down.
The old books are there for all who want to read. Meanwhile another hundred years is in the making. And certain living records will not be here when another Centennial rolls around.
THE LIVING RECORDS
Mrs. Florence Farr, widow, at ninety-and-one the oldest living native in the town, recalls how Christmas came to West Gardiner homes many years ago. Sometimes there was a fir tree, with popped corn strung for trim- ming. More often there was not even popped corn. Children hung their stockings before the fireplace "if," Mrs. Farr explained, "they had one that was whole."
For little girls, the gift, if any there was, was like to be a doll that mother had made of rags carefully saved and washed and folded and sewed just so. Sometimes, if mother was especially clever, and mothers were, in those days, there was colored yarn for hair. The mouth and eyes and nose were marked in ink, if there was any in the house. But charcoal could, and usually did, do just as well.
If there was an orange in the stocking, too, why that was a very great luxury, indeed it was.
For boys the gift was apt to be a cart that father had whittled out be- fore the kitchen fire, when all but he had gone to bed. Ocher and oil made a most Christmasy sort of paint-just the thing for a little red wagon. It matched the barn, too.
Mrs. Farr is one of eleven children of Joseph L. and Rebecca (Plummer) Spear, two of whom are living. Her husband was Elijah Farr, son of Noah, who settled at Cram's Mills in 1809 and then moved farther out upon the Neck and had a place called Farr's Cove named for him, and the Farrs were farmers and clearers of land upon the Neck.
Mrs. Farr, who remembers when families of a dozen children were the common thing, has had neither chick nor child, herself. Her health is good, her mind is keen, but she isn't quite so spry as when she used to hang her woolen stocking by the fire Christmas Eve, when she had one that was whole. She wishes she could get someone to stay with her and keep house in the old homestead that holds so many memories, down by the cove that's beyond the Quaker Meeting House, and then she wouldn't have to "sort of board around" in other people's homes, in the twilight years.
Richard Harry Spear lives not far away as crows reckon distance, on the Benson Road upon a farm that was not new even when he was born, which was eighty-four years ago. His wife, Mrs. Estella (Phillips) Spear, 83, lives
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with him on the farm, and so does a daughter, Olive. Another daughter liv- ing is Mrs. Esther Ware, wife of Joseph E. Ware, former West Gardiner first selectman.
The house where Harry Spear lives is built upon land which Jeremiah Mc- Causland bought from R. H. Gardiner. Folks liked to get things under cover when these buildings were built. The shed is 92 feet long, from house to barn, with timbers that were roughed out with an adze and pine boards that measure 23 inches wide. There is an old blacksmithed iron ring to tie horses to and once a Hallowell physician, one Dr. Nutting remarked, as he hitched his mare, "if the horse runs away, she'll leave her head."
Many years ago West Gardiner folk depended upon work outside the town for their living, or a part of it-even as they do today. Mr. Spear worked on the Gardiner-Boston steamboat run fifty-and-four years ago. The rate of pay was $1.00 and 1 shilling per day, $35 per month and board.
Several of West Gardiner's elders remember when small sums were reckoned in shillings and pence, although the actual coins were not used. Nine pence was equivalent to 121/2 cents, and confused people until almost 1900, when the custom seems to have been dropped.
Mrs. Mary (Hopkins) Goodwin, 81, widow of Adelbert S. Goodwin, lives with her daughter, Mrs. Freda Nason, wife of Louis Nason, former sawmill operator and road commissioner, on the Collins' Mills Road. Harold C. Goodwin, her son, is first selectman of West Gardiner.
A gruesome era in medical history is recalled by a story told by Mrs. Goodwin-when body-snatchers robbed new-made graves to furnish corpses for the study of medical students.
Pamelia, daughter of Mr. Goodwin's grandfather, Joseph H. Towns, died in 1852 at the age of eighteen. The attending physician desired to perform an autopsy for the purpose of studying the effects of the illness which caused her death. Mr. Towns refused permission.
Autopsy studies, now quite common, at that time were considered by many to be a violation of the dead.
Evidently Mr. Towns had heard of the grisly business of grave-robbing which was practised in England and America by organized gangs of body- thieves and he refused to have his daughter buried in the local cemetery. Instead he caused a grave to be dug upon the lawn in front of his house and the bereaved father and mother watched the grave, day and night, to protect the body of their first born.
The unmarked grave is still there, in front of the house now occupied by Herbert Deans.
Mrs. Goodwin is another who believes the granite for Christ's Church was quarried on the Neck. She described the quarry on the old Pinkham place on the banks of the stream as being about three or four acres in ex- tent with a depth of cut of thirty or forty feet.
People worked hard in the old days, Mrs. Goodwin said. "It was common talk in the neighborhood that Elijah Farr and his brother used to hand-mow from two to four acres of hay, before breakfast."
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WEST GARDINER'S HUNDRED YEARS
WILL WENTWORTH
William H. Wentworth, 88, official holder of the gold-headed cane with which the Boston Post honors the eldest living men of New England towns, is the dean of West Gardiner blacksmiths. He learned his trade in Winthrop and came to this town as a young man. Now he lives alone on the Neck Road. His wife, deceased, was Lettie Philbrick. They had no children.
Mr. Wentworth remembers when West Gardiner had three or four blacksmith shops running at one time, and doing a land-office business. He ran a shop on the Indiana road and latterly operated the shop at French's Corner, in a building owned by Frank E. Towle. This old building still stands at the corner. It is said to be 150 years old and has been used as a blacksmith shop for most of that time until about two years ago, when it was closed.
"They don't shoe horses now, like they used to," the elderly smithy said. And very probably he is right, for very little today is done "like they used to."
Mr. Wentworth saw the decline of oxen as draft animals and their re- placement by horses, and then by trucks and tractors. "It took sixteen shoes to shoe a yoke of oxen, because of their split hooves. Oxen were better than horses, for their day. Everything moved slower, then. There weren't
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WEST GARDINER'S HUNDRED YEARS
the mowing machines and the improved roads to take advantage of the faster pace of horses.
"And besides, when an ox was all done hauling they could sell him for beef-and that's more than you can say for a horse." (It has been done, Mr. Wentworth.)
Mr. Wentworth said that mules were more common in these parts than most folks realize, today. They were the equal of horses, or better, for al- most any work, some thought. But somehow folks just didn't seem to cotton on to them. A teamster who hauled at Collins' Mill had a team comprised of one horse and one mule. When someone wanted to photograph his wagon with its load of tables from the furniture factory he turned the team around so the mule wouldn't show in the picture.
The blacksmith shop of the old days doubled as a sort of neighborhood club. Farmers, bringing their horses to be shod, sometimes brought their lunches and visited all day with other farmers, as they waited their turn.
Horses were easier to shoe than oxen, Mr. Wentworth recalled, because the cattle were "more uneasy." Usually it was necessary to raise an ox off the floor, with a sling, and tie his foot to a post, to fit and attach the shoes.
For the most part, horses didn't seem to mind being shod. But once in awhile a "kicker" would come in to the shop. Then there was some fun, with everyone pitching in to help or offer advice. Mr. Wentworth "never saw the hoss he couldn't handle," though. Sometimes recalcitrant horses would be slung off the floor, like oxen. Sometimes they would be roped and thrown to the floor, and their hooves tied to posts.
Arthur Durgin, 53, is a blacksmith of the modern era-when the shop is brought to the horse instead of the horse going to the blacksmith. For seventeen years Mr. Durgin has been operating a blacksmith shop on wheels. He covers a circle about fifty miles wide, with West Gardiner as the hub. He has a shop rigged up on his place on the Manchester Road, too. His wife is the former Gladys Rogers, of South Gardiner. They have eleven living children.
Mr. Durgin learned the blacksmith trade from his father, Clarence, who was a carriage maker and a blacksmith at Cedar Grove, back in the days of the big ice industry. "A man had to know something more than just how to drive a nail to be a blacksmith in those days," Mr. Durgin said. "I ap- prenticed for three years before father would let me go on my own."
School was a pretty dull affair compared with blacksmithing and so young Arthur, a good blacksmith, ran away from home when he was six- teen and went to Norridgewock and got a job on a farm. There were four horses there and he liked it. The pay was $30 per month and found-which was good pay for a full-grown man, in those days.
"But I left that place. I hired out with the farmer and when his wife tried to boss me around, too, why I figured two bosses was one too many."
Mr. Durgin came to West Gardiner about 28 years ago and began to practise his trade in the old building owned by the late Frank E. Towle- the same that Will Wentworth had operated.
But after World War One horses were very rapidly replaced by trucks and tractors and soon there weren't enough animals right around here to
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WEST GARDINER'S HUNDRED YEARS
keep a blacksmith busy. It was then that Mr. Durgin bought a ton and one- half truck, rigged a body containing a forge, anvil and vise on it, and began taking the blacksmith shop to the horse.
Now, he seldom has to take the truck out. "I only go out on call, now," he explained. "I know just what size of shoe all of my customers take, and when they want a team shod they just call me and I fit the shoes in the shop at home and jump in the car and drive over and put them on."
Standardization of shoe sizes and types has helped to make this method of operation possible. It is one of the things Will Wentworth complained of as being "not like it used to be."
"Sure, times have changed," Mr. Durgin agreed, "but there's still only one way to shoe a hoss, and that's so his foot'll be level and go right. I've saved many a hoss from the slaughter house that went lame because some- body that didn't know what they were doin' thought it was all right to just nail a shoe on any old way."
Asked whether he thought horses were on the way to extinction, he shook his head emphatically. "Hosses were good for the land, and they al- ways will be. You can't use a tractor in the mud. And hosses are better for some types of woods operations than tractors will ever be. A lot of my cus- tomers are woods hosses.
"There seem to be more ridin' hosses than there used to be. The kids see so many automobiles now that hosses are a novelty. In my day it was the other way around. It seems like a lot of folks are buying saddle hosses for their kids, these days."
Prices for shoeing horses have risen just as have prices for shoeing children. Thirty-five years ago the price was from fifty cents to one dollar a foot, according to the size of the shoe that went on the foot. That would be eight dollars to shoe a big-footed team. Today's price averages two dol- lars per foot, or sixteen dollars for a team.
One of Mr. Durgin's customers is Carroll Lanpher, son of Levi Lanpher, who was a resident of West Gardiner for many years. Carroll Lanpher now farms in South China.
Ervin Horne, 72, carpenter, lives on the Collins' Mills Road. He is Measurer of Wood and Bark for West Gardiner and a member of the family so prominently associated with the tanning industry here, in early days. His wife, deceased, was Lottie Small.
In addition to information included in the section devoted to Collins' Mill industries Mr. Horne furnished some observations on West Gardiner wildlife.
Mr. Horne bears out the general complaint that over-fishing has all but ruined the fishing in Cobbossee Stream. And he deplores the over-trapping and poaching of muskrats. Last year he caught ten rats, trapping part time, as a sideline. Twenty-five years ago he averaged about fifty, on the same basis. He has known of trappers in the region of Collins' Mills to get as high as 200 muskrats in a season.
Deer first came to this area in any quantity about fifty years ago, he said. Moose once were so numerous on the Kennebec there was a regular industry in moosehide. Wholesale slaughtering almost extinguished the
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specie and resulted in Maine's first game conservation law. The first Maine game wardens were "moose wardens." The first moose seen in West Gard- iner when they began to reappear here a few years ago were mistaken for mules, Mr. Horne said.
Bobcats are increasing in West Gardiner, as the deer herd increases. Bears, which haven't been seen here for many years, are reappearing.
Raising the height of the dam at New Mills in Gardiner flooded meadows so that farmers could no longer cut bog hay or harvest cranberries. Mr. Horne told of an island in the stream above the Oxbow where he had cut hay with his father. When the water level was raised, about 1900, "ice froze to that island lifted it up and turned it completely around, and now there is no more island, just a muddy place in the stream," he said.
Mr. Horne summed up the departure of industry from Collins' Mills: "Years ago there was plenty of work. This was quite a place, once."
Mrs. Alice (Trafton) Ware, 83, widow of Irving L. Ware, lives on the Ware farm on the Spear's Corner Road. Six of her eight children are liv- ing,-two in West Gardiner. Three generations of Wares were West Gard- iner first selectmen: Ezekial, Irving and Joseph E., who lives with his family on the Ware farm. Another son, Paul C. Ware, lives on the same road. He is a trustee of the West Gardiner School District.
Mrs. Ware's account of the activities of her husband's father, Ezekial, is a story of early West Gardiner days. Ezekial was present at the first town meeting and was elected as a fence viewer.
Ezekial Ware was a successful farmer in addition to being action in town government. He "specialized in diversification" and at one time or another raised pretty nearly every kind of a crop indigenous to this region.
In Ezekial Ware's farming days there was no Horseshoe Pond-just a meadow or bogland where two brooks met and flowed into Cobbossee Stream. Cranberries grew on the bog and Ezekial harvested and sold them. He also cut bog hay and shipped it to Boston, baled, where it was used in packing dishes for shipment.
There was but little nourishment for livestock in bog hay but it was used locally to feed young stock and for bedding. To say that a farmer's critters were "fattened on bog hay" was to say that they were very thin indeed.
However, farmers desired to own bog land because of the cranberries and the rank growth of bog hay which could be had without plowing or seeding. Ezekial bought, sold and dickered in bog land until pretty nearly every farm around Spear's Corner owned a piece of the bog. A horse collar and a broken-down buggy were once dickered for a small slice of bog land.
Bog hay was mowed by hand and raked by hand. Even after such new-fangled contraptions as mowing machines were invented, they couldn't be used on the bog. Oxen could work on the bog but horses required special shoes, on the principle of snowshoes, to prevent their miring. The hay was hauled off the bog on poles. Carts would sink to the hubs.
Both Ezekial and his son Irving, who succeeded him on the farm, raised greenstuff for the Boston market, at times. They shipped it on the boat to Boston, which left Gardiner every evening. Many West Gardiner
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products found their way to the Boston market via the old steamboats, in- cluding baled hay. Competition for passengers on the steamboats once be- came so keen that the fare was reduced to twenty-five cents per passenger- Gardiner to Boston.
Oldest known living native of West Gardiner is Mrs. Martha (Ware) Campion, daughter of Ezekial and Jane (Smith) Ware who was born at the Ware Farm in 1852, when West Gardiner was only two years old. She taught school in West Gardiner, Litchfield, Hallowell, Maine and in Massa- chusetts, and married James E. Campion of Boston in 1903. She now lives with her nephew, Alton Ware, in Dorchester, Mass.
ARCHIE D. COLE
Archie D. Cole, proprietor of Cole's Grocery at Spear's Corner, holds what must be some sort of a record for laboring in the vineyard of town affairs. Over a period of forty-one years he has held seven different town offices and he has been a representative to the Maine Legislature from this town for three consecutive terms.
Mr. Cole is the grandson of Daniel and Hannah (Edwards) Cole who came here from Monmouth more than 100 years ago, bought land from R. H. Gardiner on the Horseshoe Pond Road, and built the house where Vernon Beckwith now lives. His parents were Arthur S. and Margaret (Mckinnon) Cole. His wife is the former Mary Peacock and they have three children, Mrs. Margaret (Cole) Runnels, of Gardiner, Melvin C. Cole of this town and Wallace Cole of Massachusetts.
Mr. Cole bought a grocery store situated on the north side of the Gar- diner Road, near the corner, from Henry Powers about 1909 and ran it for
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fifteen years. The grocery store he now owns was built by Levi Lanpher about 1926, operated by Jack Trethewey and later by his widow for about eleven years, and has been run by Mr. Cole for the past fifteen years.
He was born at the Cole homestead in 1882.
Sometimes Mr. Cole has held more than one town office at a time. He became Town Clerk in 1909 and held the office through 1925. He was a member of the School Committee in 1914-15 and chairman in 1916. In 1918 he became a selectman and he was Chairman of the Board of Select- men for the years 1919-20-21. He was Town Auditor in 1928 and from 1931 to 1936 inclusive. He was Moderator in 1928-29-30, was chosen again in 1933, and has held that office for the past seventeen consecutive years, and holds it now. He has been Tax Collector for the past eight years, and is now. During the years 1938-39-40-41 he was Election and Ballot Clerk, and for one year, 1943, he was Dog Officer and Constable. He was Chair- man of the Republican Town Committee from 1946 through 1949.
The class town of West Gardiner is entitled to send a representative to the legislature once every ten years. Mr. Cole has been elected to this office for the past three consecutive class terms, 1925-35-45.
No one, including Mr. Cole himself, can reckon how many extraneous boards, committees, sub committees and the like he has served as member or chairman.
Irwin L. McCaslin lives in one of the old houses of West Gardiner, built by his grandfather, Henry Hinton, who came from England in the early 1800's to Halifax, N. S., worked in Aroostook County for a time and then walked to West Gardiner, so it is said.
The old Hinton house is situated on the south side of the Horseshoe Pond Road on what is known as Hinton Hill, about one mile beyond Spear's Corner, toward Gardiner. An elm stands across the road which Henry Hinton planted 125 years ago.
Mr. McCaslin's mother, Mrs. Carrie (Hinton) McCaslin, was born in the old house in 1861 and died last year at the age of 88. She taught school in Litchfield before marrying his father, Harvey McCaslin. Henry Hinton, her father, was 92 when he died, about 1908. Mr. McCaslin lives alone in the old house where he was born in 1893. He runs the old farm.
Herbert Goldsmith, 75, lives a little further along the road toward Gardiner in an old, white farmhouse on the banks of Cold Stream. His unusual memory for facts and figures has contributed much to the material in this magnum opus. He was born in the old white farmhouse which be- longed to his father and mother, Hubbard, Jr. and Elizabeth (Hildreth) Goldsmith. His daughter, Grace, a teacher in Gardiner High School, lives with him. Another daughter, Mrs. Frances Matthews, lives in Gardiner. His late wife was the former Cynthia Sears.
The farm was purchased by Mr. Goldsmith's father from Eleazer Douglass in 1869. His grandfather, Hubbard Goldsmith, lived where George Moreshed lives now, and was one of the prominent farmers of the older days.
While just about everything in the shape of a vegetable has been raised in West Gardiner at one time or another the principal crop, in the pros- perous days of farming here, was hay. And for hay there was a good
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market when the street cars of Boston were powered by horses and when the breweries advertised their prosperity by the size and number of well- fed percherons that hauled their red-wheeled wagons. In those days horse- power moved on four legs and its fuel was hay.
Mr. Goldsmith's grandfather Hubbard whom the children called "big papa" to distinguish him from his son, Hubbard, Jr., whom they called just "papa," raised and marketed hay in just about all of its forms. At times he hauled his hay to Richmond, starting out while the stars still shone in the morning and returning when they were out again at night, the richer by one dollar the ton.
A more satisfactory market, though, was Gardiner.
Commercial Street was known as Back Street, then, and it was apt to be lined with wagons from West Gardiner farms, laden with hay or stove- wood. Purchasers made their dickers with the farmers, paid them on the spot, and the farmers delivered the hay or wood to the buyer's home. Even though the farmer had to haul his load home again, sometimes, he'd had a chance to cuss and discuss the weather and to exchange opinions with other farmers as to whether bringing the silver dollar back would quiet the fi- nancial panic of 1873 and maybe ease up on the number of West Gardiner farms that were being foreclosed on and sold for taxes.
In the winter, to vary the diet and monotony of winter chores, the West Gardiner farmers of "big papa" Hubbard Goldsmith's day would some- times hitch up the sled and drive down to the Kennebec and buy a load of tomcod for two or three dollars. When the family had eaten its fill the hens could have the rest. They kept well all winter, frozen, in the shed. There was always a salt cod tacked up on the cellar door, and it almost covered the door. A boy who was hungry could whittle off a chunk with his jackknife and sustain life until mealtime.
Folks in those days raised most of their food on the farm but when they did buy something, it wasn't any nickels-worth that could be lugged home in a paper bag. Two barrels of flour didn't have time to spoil before a big, hungry family could make it disappear in the form of homemade bread and biscuits. A whole round cheese was usually in the cool cellar and when it was gone, why there was nothing for it but to get another one, and a bar- rel of crackers to go with it. They bought molasses by the barrel and tea by the chest. If a man was seen coming out of a store with a bag of flour un- der his arm it was all over town in no time at all that he was on his uppers and no doubt would be calling on the town, soon.
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