USA > Vermont > Windham County > Rockingham > History of the town of Rockingham, Vermont, including the villages of Bellows Falls, Saxtons River, Rockingham, Cambridgeport and Bartonsville, 1907-1957 with family genealogies > Part 26
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But the trolleys were never a remunerative business. Dur- ing the 1919 legislature, lawyer George A. Weston presented the case of the Railway. He said that it had never paid expenses and was, in fact, "the poor man's livery stable." There was hope that the state would, under provision of certain bills, give municipalities authority to assist street railways to the extent of ten percent of their grand list. Mr. Weston explained care- fully that if the road was thrown up, as it very well might be, that suburban homes would depreciate 50% in value. The bill was defeated but feeling was that had the railway not been included in the bill along with other roads whose owners had gas and electric plants, the local line might have received some help. So the B.F.&S.R. Street Railway struggled along against the odds.
In the winter of 1921 there was a lot of excitement on Pine Hill when a motor and freight car ran wild down the hill, loaded with 80,000 feet of pulpwood from Saxtons River. Something had happened to the power at the carbarn and the brakes gave way at the top of the hill. Things might have straightened out when the freight lost momentum on Henry Street if there had not been a snowplow and flat car in front of the E. P. Kidder home on Pine Street. The result was that all four cars were derailed and the snowplow tossed twenty feet into the air. The plow was trying to clear the ice from the tracks, formed by water used on the fire at the Shepardson house the day before. In 1908 an eleven year-old boy was killed by the cars on Atkinson Street.
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There were many brushes between the cars, autos and horses and on January 24, 1924, a fire started at the carbarn by a cross- circuit which burned up six cars, a snowplow and the carbarn. Two trolleys managed to carry on until more could be secured but in November of that year the road went into receivership having showed a deficit since it started and a quarter of a million dollars was owed to stock and bond holders and credi- tors. The day of the trolley in Rockingham was over as it was in most of New England. In 1924 the last car of the railway ran over the old rails which were taken up in the Square three years later but it was a number of years before the rest of the tracks were removed. Some of the old cars were sold to local people and the Chimes Cafe got its start in life in one of them, across the road from its present site. In October, 1955, a portrait of the late Calvin L. Barber was presented to the library in a brief ceremony by Miss Emily Brown, a niece of Mr. Barber's, from Elizabeth, N. J.
But the memory of the trolleys is still warm in the hearts of many people, in the days before it was possible to cover long distances for a day's outing instead of the few miles to the local recreation center. How the heavily loaded cars groaned and crashed up Pine Hill, spitting blue fire from the overhead wires, stopping to take on whole families along the way to the Park. The open summer cars picked up speed on the last stretch to the Park as ladies held on to their top-heavy hats anchored with foot-long hat pins and mothers clug tightly to babies. It was the most exciting thing in the world to sail through banging, rocketing space, trees racing past, and the mo- torman rocking with the energy of his car. Winters, the cars were close and smelly and not always warm. Passengers slid precariously on the slippery straw seats as the trolley swung around corners and winter or summer, there was a delightful frieze of posters above the windows, as interesting to scan as an art gallery, extolling the advantages of Carter's Liver Pills, Fairy Soap, Arrow collars and Bull Durham tobacco. Cigarettes had not yet become popular, and certainly not among the ladies!
The cars were a menace in winter to children who shot down every hill in town including busy streets for every street was hard and white and none were restricted for sliding. Delivery sleighs, emerging from side streets, had to take their chances with Flexible Flyers and traverses. Once a load of young people careened down Oak Hill on a traverse, only to meet, head-on, a northbound trolley on Atkinson Street and only the shout of "everybody lean" and the swift action of the steerer, saved the whole load from probable extinction as traverse and trolley rode neck and neck up the street. Boys were one of the main sore spots in the lives of the motormen, as they rode bicycles in their path or "hooked" rides. They also, along with small
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girls, laid crossed pins and nails on the tracks to have them flat- tened by the heavy wheels into what dimly resembled a pair of scissors.
For many years, Mose Miller, an old and familiar resident of town, whose unkempt appearance and mode of life gave him the appellation of "miser," celebrated his birthday with a free ride on the trolley. He always brought along his lunch and rode happily all day, back and forth, visiting with old friends and making new, his special birthday party presented by the railroad. On holidays as many as 5,000 people went to and from the Park. Sunday School classes came into Bellows Falls on the steam cars and were transferred at the depot to the trolleys and carried to the Park. Before the era of trucks, carnivals always arrived by train and often the electric freight motor pulled 12 or 15 box or flat cars of equipment to the Park. Local ball teams including high school, practiced and played at the Park via the trolleys.
Among the motormen and conductors who served the road were Henry Bean, Archie Moore, O. M. Custer, George Alex- ander, David Cota, Charlie Nichols, Clarence Dowlin, Ed Foster, Oliver Frenette, Jim Houghton, Herbert Knight, Bert Stoodley, Roscoe Olmstead, Prosper Woolley, Harry Hartwell, Charlie Smith, George Holden, Lester Knapp, Alec Phelps and last but not least, Edward "Ned" Pierce who served in almost every capacity including superintendent of the Road and manager of the Park.
ROADS AND HIGHWAYS
There has been many an argument over the years, as to the relative values of cement versus black top roads but the majority seem to believe today that Vermont was wise not to have assumed a big bonded debt to build more cement highways as many thought advisable 25 years ago. In the early days of hard top roads, any road with a hard surface, was a good road no matter how many curves or steep grades it had. But our nation has changed in less than 50 years from a steel-rimmed to a rubber-tired method of progress. Today 50 million cars travel the arteries of the land. In 1915, the high year, we had 21,431,000 horses and mules which are now down to 4,760,000. And there isn't a blacksmith shop along a road of any kind today.
So with the advent of automobiles, began a new era in transportation and roads. Recently Senator George Aiken said that prosperity creates as many problems as adversity including those of transportation. Gradually there was developed the system of town and state roads with a third called the state aid system where important town roads are aided by the state. Vermont actually began its road improvement program as far back as 1892 when the legislators imposed a sales tax for this
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work. The system of town taxes, "worked out" by mending and building roads, was abolished the same year. In 1919 a Patrol Committee was formed in Vermont with the slogan "Good Roads for Vermont and for Vermonters."
But by 1906 the state was ready to do business with the county highway commissioners with an appropriation of $50,000 annually and by 1914, 200 miles of improved gravel roads had been built and by 1912 there was patrol maintenance on these roads. In 1917 federal aid was provided for the main routes and in 1921 a state highway board was appointed by the gov- ernor. Our present system of hard topped roads was on the way and Roy Murtha was the first patrolman on the state highway in Rockingham, living in Rockingham, Old Town.
Before 1920 a long distance automobile trip was something rather to be feared than enjoyed. When Mr. and Mrs. C. S. Albee of Bellows Falls took a five weeks' trip to Washington and "points in Ohio," one spring, they found the mud beyond Akron too deep to be negotiated. (In 1918 a steady rain soon brought a car down to its knees or at least its hubcaps, in mud.) The Albees said that the mud on the Lincoln Highway reached up to the runningboard. Vermont roads, they agreed when they wearily reached home, were, in spite of all the local wails, no worse and usually better, than western roads. In fact, in the winter of 1924, a salesman for road building products, in a letter to the TIMES, was loud in his praises for our town roads which were, he said, the only decent roads in Vermont on which it had been his misfortune to travel. In one December rain- storm the road from Brattleboro to Bellows Falls was indes- cribable and from Worcester, Vt. to Rutland was the same. Cavendish Gorge was impassable. The mired-down salesman was loud in his praises for Rockingham roads and its road com- missioner who happened then to be L. C. Lovell but, as the paper carefully pointed out, the present incumbent could not be credited solely with the town's good roads as his predecessor had laid the ground work before him. And the editor of the TIMES was even then advocating cement roads for Vermont!
A Good Roads Association was started early in Vermont with Fred Babbitt of Bellows Falls as president and in 1921 the New England Road Builders joined together in Boston. There were, at the time of the Good Roads Assn., 15,000 cars in Vermont or about one car per each 16.2 of population, ahead of all eastern states. No wonder that by 1912 Vermont decided that something must be done about its roads, with people wanting to travel twenty miles and more a day.
But roads, good, bad and indifferent, did not prevent people from buying cars for while in 1915 few farmers came to town without a horse, village folks were growing rapidly car- conscious and they insisted upon roads which did not mire you in a thunder storm or let you down out of sight from March to
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May. And New Hampshire was "getting on the ball" and attracting tourists away from Vermont! As cars left Vermont by way of the Arch Bridge and other bridges up and down the state, in order to travel over the "stone roads" across the river, she became worried. Her sister state had "three great high- ways running the length of the state" and most of Vermont's roads were less ridable than those of Rockingham which, in turn, could not approach those of New Hampshire. And yet Vermont, the Bennington Banner said, "furnishes the most natural and attractive routes from New York through the Berkshires to the White Mountains and Canada."
But still the legislature had firmly voted down a series of trunk lines up and down and across Vermont while Vermonters began to realize that their roads were becoming like the old "shunpikes," those early toll roads in Massachusetts once shunned by thrifty travelers. And about this time the New England Hotel Association, together with the automobile Blue Book whose devious directions referred you to the road "past the white church on the corner" or advised " a turn left by the brick schoolhouse," laid out three tours through New England called A, B and C, two of which went through Bellows Falls. In 1927 the Automobile Green Book of the Automobile Legal Association, routed all cars across the river here to North Wal- pole as was done until U. S. 5, on this side of the river, was im- proved with the rebuilding of the so-called Missing Link Road, a section of narrow road covering several miles from the junc- tion of U. S. 103 and 5 to Black River. Part of this was done when the new bridge was built to replace the old covered bridge taken out in the '27 flood. The rest of the work was started in 1932 with Sidney L. Ruggles, former town manager, as en- gineer. In 1942 it was continued from the junction to the village corporation line and called the Coolidge Highway. Since U. S. 5 was built, the traffic has been many times greater than on the New Hampshire side.
In 1918 the back roads were still impassable for cars in winter. One irate citizen of Saxtons River complained that the road commissioner left the snow roller in the shed while he attended to his own business of getting his logs out of the woods. Complaints to the selectmen resulted in "passing the buck," they said with no result except that people got hot under the collar-even in March. But in 1921 the state took over. Little by little the roads were hard surfaced and widened. The first black top in Rockingham was a half mile strip on the Saxtons River Road just north of the Webb Hall bridge. The first in the village was in the Square. In 1931 Westminster held a special town meeting to see about building a road from that town to Bellows Falls for which Rockingham had already voted $20,000. This included the new cement bridge in Westminster to replace the old covered bridge always called Sabins' Bridge.
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In 1936 town meetings all over Vermont voted in the re- ferendum of the proposed Green Mountain Parkway, a highway which should practically ride the mountain tops from end to end of the state. It was voted down. But today President Eisen- hower is planning a vast network of super highways in the next 20 years with one passing through Vermont starting from the Massachusetts line, going through Brattleboro and Bellows Falls and White River Jct. to Burlington and Canada. Also three miles of U. S. 103 will be rerouted through Rockingham, Old Town, as soon as satisfactory agreements are made with landowners. This will pass behind the Meetinghouse, elimi- nating several sharp curves, joining the old road again above the Country Club, according to plans in 1956. This new road eliminates the old tool shed near Old Town village for which the state paid the town of Rockingham $5,000 and a new one is being built on the site of the former Whitcomb Sand and Gravel business. The new shed will also replace the one at Saxtons River recently burned.
In the early days of road work, the horse did the heavy labor for patrol work, drew light road machines and hand laborers loaded wagon boxes. In Rutland patrolmen earned three dollars a day, laborers $2.50 and you got five dollars a day for your team. Among the first attempts to improve the dirt roads was the chloride spread on to lay the dust in summer, the work of the patrols who by that time, were using trucks with a spreader behind. The first hard roads were a marvel but doubtless there were farmers who complained since they had added to their pocket money by pulling mired cars out with a team of horses or oxen
The necessity of better roads brought about the first one- cent gasoline tax which people were sure would take care of all future road building. In 1927 the state provided funds for winter maintenance and the old snow rollers went into the limbo of forgotten things. According to Earl Welch, district commis- sioner for Rutland for 31 years who retired in 1954, the 1927 flood was a God-send to the state. Its silver lining, while not at first apparent, was the resultant better roads and bridges replacing the old ones washed away. It also resulted in better equipment to build them with. In 1931, the legislature estab- blished the present highway system with 1,014 lines of main highway and in 1935, 735 more. The 1936 flood could not do the damage of its predecessor-the custom of naming them like today's hurricanes had not occurred to anyone yet-because the hard surfaced roads and steel and cement bridges were more durable.
In 1926 appeared what the Vermont Chamber of Com- merce called The Vermont Boom with hotels turning tourists away nightly. There were not motels or even cabins, just hotels and tourist homes, the private homes along the road which
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first opened their doors to travelers. The great "summer home in the country" was booming, too, with 1700 inquiries that year and the summer camp business, no newcomer to the field, was rising fast and called "schools" for boys and girls.
"Winter maintenance" are words which came into being about 30 years ago. Right up to 1925, when Rockingham, with much temerity, voted to buy a five-ton tractor for $5,500 with which to scrape the snow from the main roads instead of rolling it down, the old snow roller had held its own for four months of the year. The selectmen and many others were definitely dubious about this new fangled idea of running cars all winter. The road commissioner pushed the idea hard perhaps because he drove his own car all winter and knew that it could be done.
Snow had never been scraped but rolled with the great wooden two-drum roller like a couple of barrels fastened in the middle to turn either way. Hayden Pearson calls them "slatted hogsheads" and says that rocks were piled in a box behind to give more weight. Sometimes farmers brought out their own horses to make up the four or six-horse hitch besides the town horses. On Saturdays there was always a bevy of boys to help shovel the worst places and knock the balls of snow from the horses' feet in heavy, wet going. Often the roller turned out to roll down a dooryard and hot coffee and doughnuts appeared from the farm kitchen. Everyone watched anxiously for the great clumsy roller and waved and shouted when it came in sight for there was little traveling after a storm until the roller had come by. Then once more sleigh bells rang on the cold air as cutters and pungs, spilling buffalo robes, spun over the new whiteness.
For many years James "Jim" Woolley of Rockingham, Old Town, drove one roller, perched high in the air in his Buffalo coat, icicles fringing his mustache like glass beads, king of the road for until he has passed, there was no travel. Once, in 1920, after a big storm nothing but a rabbit broke the smooth whiteness of U. S. 103 for twenty-four hours until the roller came down the hill. But no one worried. You did not run to the store for your bread or ice cream in those days. Every farmer's wife made her own bread and ice cream was turned by a crank or made in a tin pail buried in a snow bank and was called mousse. Jim was also road commissioner for many years, in the Old Town district. He died in 1949.
Main roads were broken out first. Side roads, with two or three farms, were usually cleared by hitching garden plows on each side of a wood sled which threw the snow up in white geysers much as the big plows do today, an inventive system not unlike the pioneer days when someone-probably the heaviest member of the family-sat in the big iron kettle attached to the horse. The wood sled plow was in use still in 1924. And before the iron kettle days, Tory prisoners were once marched through a
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pass in the Green Mountains, "to tread the snow a suitable depth for the passage of sleighs." The Rockingham roller was kept for many years in the tool shed at Brockways Mills. Saxtons River had its own roller for that part of town.
Summer roads were scraped for years before the hard top appeared, to remove the washboards caused by cars which created much distress among road men. Today the modern black tops still raise a dust along their shoulders, as thick as that which settled on the daisies and goldenrod forty years ago. Perhaps the "rubber roads" of Masschausetts, the rubber as- phalt in which that state leads the country, will solve even that problem. Scenic spots along the road were once advertised by the familiar sign "Kodak as You Go." Today there are more Kodakers-more likely a Kodachrome camera-and less scenic spots as billboards usurp the right of way. In 1929 Vermont passed a Billboard law forcing all advertising signs to be set back from the highway 35 to 300 feet depending on the size unless the goods advertised are made or sold within 500 feet of the sign. Challenged by the Billboard industry which still lobbies industriously against it, it was upheld by the Supreme Court. The late Horace Brown of Springfield, Vt. was a dili- gent worker for billboard restrictions. The town of Rocking- ham voted to uphold this law in 1945 to help keep the natural beauty of Vermont roads for residents and tourists.
From time to time over the years, the dragon's head of Rockingham Street as it enters the Square, has lifted itself menacingly and has been properly squelched. The town fathers were talking about its bottleneck condition back in 1892 when ox carts and buckboards got it snarled up. Again in 1930- and doubtless many times in between-the town was urged to widen this congested spot but thriftily turned it down. They didn't like the idea of going into debt as much as $50,000. The problem was still there in 1955 with cars and trucks replacing horses and buggies. That year the town voted to buy for $10,000 land bordering this street, from members of the Edward C. Fleming family. This included the Yates laundry and two small houses north of the American Legion building. The laundry was torn down and removed by a couple of enterprising youths who wanted the lumber for their own use. The houses were sold for a dollar apiece, to be removed before July first of that year. This would make room for 24 additional parking spaces-but not widening the street. However, the next year, the voters refused to sanction further work on the area although considerable progress had already been made. At present the only free parking space is the Hetty Green Parking Lot on the site of the Green homestead, which was opened in 1941. 14
Westminster street received its first coat of tar, sand and gravel in 1919 and the same year in Gageville, men putting in a new road for the state, suspended operations in July and left 14 See Addendum
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the new road to take care of itself while they went home and got their hay into the barns. First things first! But good roads or bad, they consistently continued to carry more traffic each year and in 1928 Ralph Wright of Rockingham bought and ran the bus line between Rutland and Bellows Falls until the Vermont Transit Co. bought him out in 1940 which still owns the franchise.
On October 19, 1929 was the biggest celebration ever staged in town or village when the new King's Highway was officially opened with Governor Weeks and Judge Warner Graham speak- ing and Jack Hennessey acting as official greeter of distinguished guests of which there were many. The new highway was a 14- mile stretch of cement from the Putney town line up to the Monument in Bellows Falls, the same road first laid out in 1737 as a military training ground. On that autumn day in 1929 it wore an international aspect with President Hoover, King George of England, Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald send- ing greetings and Congressman Ernest Gibson of Brattleboro on hand as well as John Barrett of Grafton, U. S. Minister to Argentina, Panama and Columbia, Minister to Siam in 1894 and press correspondent on Admiral Dewey's flagship when the American fleet captured Manila. Representatives from state highway and other boards had places of honor, probably as great a roster of the famous as this town may ever see at one time. The shops, under the co-operation of the merchants, were dressed in old exhibits of their particular line and a confetti dance was held in the Square that evening. So the old road became a new one and was opened with a parade and oratory to do the town proud. Today cars stream along the river road where once the King's soldiers marched. And, appropriately enough, it threads the town of Westminster where it is claimed the first battle against those King's men was fought in the Revolution.
BRIDGES
The great flood of 1927 washed away many bridges and roads in the town and state including old covered bridges which were never replaced and today steel and cement structures rise above landmarks of another era. In that year Vermont built 107 new bridges and the next year 1329 more and 201 the next although, oddly enough, many old wooden bridges withstood the onslaught of the flood waters better than some later ones. Where the covered bridges of Bartonsville and Cambridgeport stanchly bucked the deluge, the Golden Hill Bridge, on the same river, went downstream.
There were, at one time in Rockingham ten covered bridges and some say eleven. Five of these were on the Williams River, Golden Hill, Brockways Mills, Depot Hill or Abbott Bridge in
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Old Town and two in Bartonsville. Saxtons River had two bridges, one at the entrance to the village one in the center, much photographed and painted. On the Saxtons River Road from Bellows Falls was the Osgood Bridge, now called the Hall Bridge and in Cambridgeport, the Jones Bridge. That and the famous Tucker Toll Bridge, across the Connecticut, made up the list of covered bridges in Rockingham. The Golden Hill Bridge, lost in '27, was rebuilt the next year with the present 180-ft. structure on the "Missing Link" Road at a cost of $2,500. Two modern bridges have replaced the covered bridge at Brock- ways Mills, the last one built in 1954 as was the iron bridge in Saxtons River, also the same year. The lovely old bridge near Christ Church was replaced in 1949. The iron bridge on West- minster Street in Bellows Falls, while in the town of Westmin- ster, is interesting, as when it was replaced in 1925 at a cost of $54,000, it was the longest cement bridge in Vermont-and until 1957 probably one of the narrowest and most dangerous.
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