USA > Maine > Kennebec County > West Gardiner > West Gardiner's hundred years, Centennial 1850-1950 > Part 4
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Even candy was bought in five-pound lots. Chocolate creams and French mixture were favorites and Canada peppermints helped ease the cough that sometimes came with the hay pressing.
"Papa" Hubbard Goldsmith and a neighbor, Joseph Trafton, operated a haypress together, once. It may have been an adaptation of the invention of a Pittston man, Moses B. Bliss, who invented a portable haypress in 1827 and thus helped the Kennebec farmers to reach out for larger markets. Anyway, the rig used in the Goldsmith-Trafton enterprise involved a big wheel and a drum and the horses pulled "straight out." The output was just about six tons of hay baled per day.
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While they were resting, the men cut small gray birches, split them, notched the ends, and used them to bind the bales of hay. A narrow board inserted under the hoops helped to stiffen the bale and was a handy place upon which to mark the weight, and maybe the name of the consignee, if the bales were to be shipped.
Sometimes a farmer would take a flyer in raising peas to sell. It was something scandalous, though, the way hiring help ate up the profits. Pickers expected to get as high as twenty cents per bushel, just for picking peas. A hired man demanded $10 per month, and board on top of that. And a good room to sleep in, too-as good as any the family had. An extra good hand would hire out for a year at $150 and board, but the family had better set a pretty good table or else they'd lose him. Top hands could always get a job -then as now-good times or bad.
You could hire a man to cut and pile hardwood at fifty cents per cord, then. And after you fitted it for the stove, and dried it, you could sell it to the School District or haul it to Gardiner and get $4.00 for it.
A first class carpenter made big money-a dollar and a quarter a day and his dinner. That was the going wage when so many of West Gardiner's homes were built, around 1870.
There was a shoemaker named Frank Bran at Spear's Corner who made knee-high cowhide boots, wooden-pegged, that wouldn't wet through all day. This shoemaker also made dress boots, called "thin boots," and sometimes he'd take his pay in eggs.
And so, with turning a hand to this and that, the men of "big papa" Hubbard Goldsmith's day-and "papa's," too-managed to pay for their farms, and raise their big families, and lay a little aside for a rainy day. There were twelve children in the house of this man and he saved enough to loan such of his sons as wanted to farm the money to get started. Every cent was repaid in full, without interest. There were several Goldsmith farms near where Herbert Goldsmith lives now.
By the time Mr. Goldsmith was big enough to work out there were more opportunities. A young fellow could get a job at $1.00 for a ten-hour day at Pope's canning factory over on High Street, for instance. Winters he could work on the Kennebec ice at the unheard of pay of $1.50 a day, and if he owned or could borrow a team of horses he could get another $1.50. That's one of the things that got West Gardiner folks into the habit of working out, they say-the big pay on the ice.
But the most that Herbert Goldsmith ever saw a man make in one day, away back there before the 1900's was $2.50. The man was Albion Small, and he made all that money because he was very quick with his hands and he was willing to work long hours, husking corn at five cents a basket, at Pope's Cannery. This was more money, even, than Mr. Small could make at carpentering, and he was one of the best.
The work that Herbert Goldsmith liked the best of all, though, was farming on the old place or working out some place with his team of horses. And that's what he's done, mostly, during the later years.
Fred P. Trafton, 85, was born in West Gardiner, grew up here, did busi- ness here, and has retired to live in Gardiner with his wife, who was Fannie
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Glidden. She was prominent in West Gardiner church and temperance work. They have three children living. A son, Lorimer, a former West Gardiner selectman, drowned at Grand Lake in the fall of 1947.
Trafton and Glidden both are old names in the town.
Mr. Trafton has heard his grandfather tell of bears damaging crops and killing sheep when West Gardiner was young.
Thomas Trafton, Fred Trafton's grandfather, came from Georgetown about 1831 and settled across the road from where Claribel Douglas lives now. Fred Trafton's father, Joseph, when a young man was so eager to get hold of a farm of his own that he borrowed money at nine percent interest to buy what was the Elbridge Whitten place, where Walter B. Mayo lives, now. He paid off the mortgage, too, outrageous interest and all.
Mostly he did it by farming, by getting out cordwood, and by engaging in such enterprises as the haypress, described above. In later years, when some of his strength had departed, he made butter and had a butter route, just to have "a little something coming in."
Fred Trafton succeeded to the butter route but it wasn't quite enough to satisfy an ambitious young man and he quickly began to branch out into other things.
He was road commissioner in West Gardiner for three or four years near the turn of the century and he remembers that when the height of the dam at New Mills was raised it flooded the old Ware bog and made Horseshoe Pond. In high water in the spring the pond overflowed what is now the black road to Lewiston and Mr. Trafton was in charge of the work of raising the road about three feet at this point.
Mr. Trafton saw a colorful era come and go in West Gardiner-the days of the electric cars.
The car line began operating from Lewiston to Gardiner, via Spear's Corner, about 1908. Mr. Trafton thinks it was first known as the Lewiston, Auburn & Waterville Railroad. Later it was called the "A & K," which stood for Androscoggin and Kennebec. You could go clear to Boston on the elec- tric cars, once-and maybe to Bangor.
The electric railroad made some important changes in West Gardiner. West Gardinerites living on or near the line could work in Gardiner or Au- gusta and still get home every night, for one thing. And attendance at Gardiner High School became more convenient and the West Gardiner en- rollment at Litchfield Academy began to dwindle.
Horses, as if realizing that these monsters on rails were the beginning of the end for four-legged transportation, were afraid of the electric cars, or pretended to be. The motorman would stop the car when he saw that a horse along the road was frightened. Farmers along the route had to watch their pasture fences more closely, now. No stray cow ever won a dispute with an electric car over the right of way.
Riding to work or to school on the electric car was a lot of fun. Every- one knew everyone else and so did the conductor. More than one courtship began on the old A. & K. And more than one scandal, too. It cost twenty cents to ride to Gardiner, along toward the last of it. School children had special tickets, and rode for half fare.
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The old A & K made it possible for an ambitious young fellow like Mr. Trafton to do quite a business for himself in West Gardiner and Litchfield. He went into lumbering in a pretty big way, for these parts, cutting about 250,000 feet a year, in Litchfield, mostly. One year, he cut a million feet. The logs were sawed at Bartlett's Mill in Purgatory and loaded on a siding at True's Store and shipped to Lewiston or Augusta via the A & K. Some of the lumber was cut on the Pinkham Lot on the Neck. Mr. Trafton bought the timber standing and paid day's wages of $1.50 for men to cut and handle it.
The blizzards of 1920 shut the A & K down for three weeks during Feb- ruary and March. The plows simply couldn't keep ahead of the falling snow. Drifts were as high as the trolley wire, and some folks could walk right up and look down their chimneys-if they had snowshoes. There was only one way to get the A & K running again, short of waiting 'til summer, and that was for men along the right of way to pitch in and dig it out with shovels. And that's just what they did. Crews of volunteers came out from Gardiner to help. That's the way folks felt about the old A & K.
The A & K was good for farmers, too. Fred Babcock, who ran a big farm just across the Babcock Bridge in Litchfield started the bulk of his baled hay to the Boston market via the A & K, and so did others.
Mr. Trafton owned three or four farms in West Gardiner at one time and one year he wintered 52 head of cattle. Toward the end of World War I he sold 50 tons of hay to the Hollingsworth and Whitney paper mill in Gardiner at $35.00 per ton. They used it to feed their horses hauling wood.
Another of Mr. Trafton's sidelines was selling commercial fertilizer. The A & K put in a siding in front of his house, which is where David Allen lives now, and some twenty carloads a year were unloaded here and sold to West Gardiner farmers.
World War I presaged great changes in America. Everything speeded up. Women began docking their hair and skirts and smoking cigarettes in public and cutting up in scandalous fashion. The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution got on the law books and we had Prohibition. There was a decided moral let-down. The best selling novels were things like "Flaming Youth," "Three Weeks" and similar intimate tales of boudoir adventures.
West Gardiner changed greatly. Many of the men who did not go to war worked at high wages in Gardiner and in the Bath shipyards. They found the security of a weekly pay check more to their liking than the hard work and uncertainty of farming, and this was the time when West Gardiner started to become a suburb-the home of people who worked for wages out of town.
The first year in which an automobile was owned in West Gardiner, ac- cording to the tax assessment records, was 1911. Before the end of the war there were more than twenty of the go-devils pestering farmers to pull them out of the clay and mud.
Automobiles changed not only the economic aspect of life in West Gard- iner but the social life as well. No longer did fifty or sixty neighbors con- gregate of an evening to have a "sing." No longer did a man and his wife dress in their Sunday best on sabbath afternoons and start out along the road making their "dooryard calls."
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For one thing, it wasn't safe at all with a buggy on the roads, any more. The dust from passing autos would choke you to death, sure. And anyway, there was no one to call on because everyone was out riding in his automo- bile. Sometimes people ventured as far as Belgrade Lakes and back, of a Sunday afternoon, patching tires all along the way.
And the automobile era ended the A & K.
The broad stream of freight which once had flowed from West Gardiner's fields and woods was dried to a trickle now. The cordwood and the lumber were gone and, anyway, city people were all burning coal. The hayfields lay, neglected and unplowed, growing up to hawkweed, with alders spreading from the brooks. And there was scarcely a field of grain in all the town. It was cheaper to buy it from the west than it was to raise it here, most folks thought.
And so, near the last of July, in 1932, the last of the trolleys made its final, lonesome run over the old right of way, and then the rails were taken up and sold and people dug out the ties and piled them in their yards to dry and burn for summer wood.
And these are some of the things that Mr. Trafton sees when he opens his book of memories of old West Gardiner.
George A. Hamlin, 85, was born on what is known as the Tim Campbell place on High Street, son of C. G. and Angela (Corwell) Hamlin. His wife is the former Nellie J. Douglass of Litchfield and they will celebrate their 64th Wedding Anniversary this coming Thanksgiving Day.
Mr. and Mrs. Hamlin were young folk back in the days when large fam- ilies helped to build this country. Ten of their fifteen sons and daughters are living. All have remained in Maine except one, who lives in New Jersey.
Four of their children live in West Gardiner: Walter and Phillip Hamlin and Mrs. Nellie Johnson and Mrs. Martha Loubier.
For the past twenty and seven years Mr. and Mrs. Hamlin have lived on the Pond Road.
Mrs. Adrian (Philbrick) Small, 77, widow of Albion Small, lives on the Pond Road with her daughter, Olive, and son-in-law, James E. Dunn. She was born in West Gardiner, one of fifteen children of Francis Tufts Phil- brick and Annabelle (Mclaughlin) Philbrick.
Mrs. Small's memory supplies many details of what life was like for women and children-and for men, too-back in what you may or may not choose to call the "good old days."
There were no telephones in 1870 when Mrs. Small's mother moved on to the Indiana Road with her husband and helped him clear a farm and raise a family there. And Mrs. Philbrick would not have had much time to visit over it, anyway; for she raised nineteen children (Mr. Philbrick had four by a previous wife).
One point that Mrs. Small brings out is that raising large families in those days was quite a different proposition from what it would be now. Children were an asset to a couple trying to clear a farm. They all worked, girls as well as boys, at something, and the older ones helped take care of the younger. So many sons growing up on the farm permitted Mr. Philbrick to work on the Kennebec ice harvest and to go to Bath at times and work at
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his trade as ship carpenter, "to get hold of a little cash money, though sometimes he thought he'd have been better off if he'd stayed at home and worked the farm."
The Philbrick family was very nearly self sustaining right on the land, even before the seventy-five acres were cleared and the crops began to come in. All of the vegetables, of course, were home grown. And so was the grain for flour and for livestock.
Wild berries were an important source of food and income, too. They were canned for winter use by the family. The younger children did the berry picking, mostly-and then they took the surplus to town and sold them, hulled, for sixteen cents a quart-nice, fresh field strawberries that would cost $1.25 today, if you could find them anywhere for sale. The chil- dren took their shoes and stockings with them to town. But they carried them until they reached the outskirts of Gardiner.
Everything saved, in those days, counted.
The Philbricks kept five cows and they were milked by the women folk, and they made the butter, too, that was a source of "cash money." Butter sold for fifteen cents per pound. There was a little milk for cooking and table use, but only the youngest child was given milk to drink. Milk fattened hogs and made calves grow. Hens didn't lay, winters, then, like they do now, and there wasn't much of a market for eggs, even if they did. Oh, the store- keepers would take a few eggs in trade if you were a regular customer. But they'd much rather have cash. Anyway, eggs brought only nine cents a dozen.
The womenfolk made the soap for everyday family use, of grease- savings and potash made from wood ashes right on the farm. For washday, though, there was a cake of the old American Family yellow soap from the store. It must have been a very long rope that held the Philbrick's Monday wash!
In the fall the mother and her daughters made three or four ten-quart pails of mincemeat, of neck of beef and trimmings of the hog that had been raised and slaughtered on the place. The Philbrick's planned to keep their hog about a year and a half, so he'd be good and big, and produce enough lard to last a year, besides fresh pork and hams and bacon, home-cured, and salt pork that would last the winter through.
Stockings were of wool and they were knit at home. Farm people, in those days, didn't wear cotton stockings in the summer. Usually, they didn't wear any stockings at all in the summer, the girls and women didn't. Eve- nings, or when she sat down to rest a minute, if she did, mother or daughter would be expected to knit on woolen stockings. They knit the year 'round, those women did.
Mrs. Small said "we got so sick of the sight of a pair of long, woolen stockings that we were glad to go barefoot in the summer. The boys felt the same way about them. I've seen my brothers heat chips in the oven to stand on, barefoot, when the ground was frozen, and they split the winter's wood in the yard."
Among the social statistics compiled with the census every ten years is an item "value of home manufactures" which tells how much the women of those days contributed to the cash income of the farm. It's a right respect-
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able proportion of the total income, when you stop to think of all the cook- ing, clothes-making and child rearing they did besides.
Mrs. Small's mother added to the family income with a loom upon which she wove rag carpets, to order, when she was resting. She could weave about a square yard in half a day, and got "sixpence" for her work. The patron furnished the warp and the rags.
Mrs. Small bears out Mrs. Farr's story of early Christmases, when a "dinah doll" was just about the only present a little girl could expect to find in her stocking. Sometimes, though, when her father wasn't working on the ice or in Bath he found time to make a doll's cradle out of a salt- box, with runners fashioned from a barrel head.
Not far from Philbrick's, over on the Pond Road, lived the Hildreth family, descendants of Paul Hildreth, said to be the first white settler of Lewiston, progenitor of former Maine Governor Horace A. Hildreth. This progressive family was the first on the Pond Road to have a kerosene lamp and the whole neighborhood flocked to the Hildreth house to see it work, the first night. It was a great improvement over candles, but Mr. Hildreth turned it up so high it smoked.
Life was not all dull work in the old days, though. Mrs. Small re- members well the dances at the Town House, with music by a fiddler. Her father would hitch up a team and take the whole family to the fair that used to be held on High Street, at the Town House.
And there were mighty kind neighbors. One of them, a Miss Augusta Fairbanks, who lived on the Spear's Corner Road, was a nurse-one of the old-time "practical" nurses that would pitch right in and wash the floor, or do anything that needed doing.
When she died in 1928 at the age of 69 the Kennebec Journal had this to say : " 'Aunt Gustie,' as she was lovingly called, helped to marshal into the world our young and present generation, and with thoughtfulness and kindly deeds stood by in the passing of the older ones. She has in truth mothered us all."
Away back in the early 1800's "Aunt Gustie's" parents, Joseph and Lydia Fairbanks built a small house near where the Fairbanks Cemetery is now, but they were blessed with a large family and pretty soon "the old house was all wore out" and so they built a new one, in which Kendall Merrill lives now. When the Fairbankses first came there they could hear the wolves howl down by the frozen meadow, of winter nights, "Aunt Gustie" used to say.
One of Joseph and Lydia's sons, Charles, grew up to be a veterinarian and stayed on the old place with his sister and administered to the needs of sick critters all over the neighborhood, just as "Aunt Gustie" did for humans. He was hale and hearty just before he died in 1939, at 90 years of age, as the result of an automobile accident. He'd always said he'd live to be a hundred.
Mrs. Small doesn't blame the young ones for escaping from the farm and seeking work in the city as soon as they were able-which is just what most of them did. And she is not the only one who suggests that the hard work which children did on farms, usually without much in return, was one of the reasons for the exodus to the city.
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One could forgive Mrs. Small if she just sat a while, now. But the working habit is too deeply ingrained. "I wouldn't be happy, just sitting and doing nothing," she declares. And so she braids rugs to sell, "while she's resting."
Wendell C. Small, 42, is the son of the late Albion Small and the above- quoted Mrs. Adria Small. He lives on the farm that was cleared by his grandfather and farms it and three other places on the Indiana Road, as well. His wife is the former Helen Stephenson of Portland. They have no children.
Mr. Small thinks there are still opportunities to farm in West Gar- diner. He has earned the right to express his opinion.
Mr. Small now specializes in feeding beef for the Brighton Market. He buys calves and yearlings, stokes them with good hay and grain grown on his 315 acres, and then sells them as quality beef, which they are. He handles about 60 head a year.
Grandfather Philbrick wouldn't believe it if he saw with his own eyes the changes that eighty years have wrought in the way of doing business on his old farm.
There isn't a yoke of oxen nor a team of horses on the place. Every- thing is done by machinery. And the fields that were run out before Mr. Small took them over have been fertilized and worked over until they pro- duce more than they ever did.
One hired man and Mr. Small do more work on the three farms than Grandfather Philbrick and all his nineteen children did on the one farm, back a few years. Of course, they have extra help for the harvest.
Last year Mr. Small harvested 180 tons of hay, 1,320 bushels of oats, 1,000 bushels of corn on the cob, 500 bushels of barley.
One thing Grandfather Philbrick would recognize, though, and that is that hard work and a "good head" are responsible for the farm's success now, just as they were back there in that other century.
Lloyd Jones, 42, is another man who makes a good living running the farm his grandfather ran before him, and another one to go with it.
Mr. Jones' grandfather, Sewall Jones, bought the 100-acre farm on High Street in 1871. His son, Sewall, Jr., ran the farm until his death. The widow, Mrs. Mary (Howes) Jones, 71, lives on the place, which is now operated by her son, Lloyd, as a dairy farm.
Lloyd Jones bought the Thomas DeFratus farm of sixty acres, nearby, and lives there with his wife, the former Georgie McGinnis, who has three children by a former marriage.
On the two places Mr. Jones keeps 15 cows and he runs a milk route of 75 customers. He raises about fifty tons of hay, which is sufficient to winter his cattle. He buys his grain, hasn't a horse on the place, and hires help only in haying time. He uses a tractor.
"Of course a man can still make a living farming in West Gardiner, if he's willing to get up early in the morning," is Mr. Jones' opinion.
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JOHN FRANK STEVENS
John Frank Stevens probably would echo this opinion if he could be interviewed today, for he was a man who believed that almost anything was possible of a West Gardiner son-and he went out into the world and proved it.
And to prove that he proved it there's a bronze figure of Mr. Stevens in the Maine State Library in Augusta which is a copy of a ten-foot bronze statue that gazes out across the Rocky Mountains at Marias Pass, Summit, Montana. This is in token of his having discovered the best way over the Rocky Mountains while he was one of the chief construction engineers of the Great Northern Railroad.
Mr. Stevens was born on the Herbert Mosher farm on the Hallowell Road, now owned by Norris Bowie. The date was April 25, 1853. His parents were John and Harriet (French) Stevens. He died at his home in Southern Pines, North Carolina, June 2, 1940, at the age of 90.
Mr. Stevens attended the old red schoolhouse on the Hallowell Road which preceded the white schoolhouse that bore his name. He was one of the world's famous civil engineers; one of the chief engineers of the Panama Canal, and a builder of railroads all over the world.
In spite of his success Mr. Stevens never forgot West Gardiner.
And West Gardiner never will forget him.
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R- Have
CLARENCE GETCHELL'S TANNERY
INDUSTRY
North, past the Grange Hall at French's Corner, a dusty road wanders by old elms and houses that are resting. It is the road to Collins' Mills of old, and to a vigorous yesterday whose sun, somehow, failed to rise upon the promise of its tomorrow.
You wouldn't know it, now, but once this road was a heavy-trafficked way, when oxen hauled their patient, heavy loads of local manufacture. Many a thousand feet of logs have gone down over that old hill, and cords of hemlock bark, and grain for milling. And up the hill came boards and beds and furniture and flour and bundles of leather that had been tanned in liquor made of Cobbossee's good, soft water.
Steady wages, then, bought food and heat and light for the little homes that workmen built nearby the corner, and profits filled the cellars and the woodsheds of the owners against the winter's cold.
Outsiders came and looked upon this busy place of local industry, and talked of railroads coming here, and great textile manufactories with, per- haps, someday, a new city to rise in the hollow and populate the hill.
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