Midcoast Region 2014

Inside This Edition

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Midcoast Region

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It Makes No Never Mind James Nalley

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Summer Days After a rough winter, what a blessing Leon Anderson

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Nathaniel Blanchard Of The P.N. Blanchard Yarmouth captain’s career ended in the Falklands Charles Francis

12 Harpswell’s Elijah Kellogg Congregationalist sued his father-in-law Charles Francis 16 Phippsburg and Georgetown’s Sawfly Infestation State fought 1948 infestation of spruce from the air Brian Swartz 22 A Rose Family History Two centuries of a Maine family Martha E. Rea 27 Bowdoinham’s Osborne Russell Mountain man from the Kennebec Charles Francis 35 A Letter From The Year 1858 Inspired a life-long love of history Karen E. Holmes 38 An Island At Rest Stays At Rest Newton’s First Law of Motion proven in Maine’s capital Erick T. Gatcomb 43 High Diving Bee Kyle From Washington’s Medomak Brook to 100-foot dives Charles Francis 52 50th Anniversary Of Freeport Station Moving To Boothbay Margaret Hoffman - Boothbay Railway Village 58 Black Mainers From Warren Fought To Preserve The Union Adapted from Mainers At War Brian Swartz 62 Arkansas Collides With Maine Battleship no match for Maine coast’s granite ledge Brian Swartz 66 Belfast’s Last Surviving Civil War Veteran Finally Returns Home Civil War quilt makes its return home Brian Swartz 72 Maine’s First Automobile Augusta judge had quite a ride Richard Fraser 78 The South Bristol Gut Bridge A colorful past Caroline B. Norwood 82 Rockland’s Leo Connellan Common man, uncommon poet Charles Francis 86 A Maine Summer In 1923 Midcoast region a destination of the rich and famous Brian Swartz 90 The War Bride An Albion / Unity love story Charles Francis

Maine’s History Magazine

Greater Kennebec Valley Region

Publisher & Editor Jim Burch

Design & Layout Liana Merdan

Advertising & Sales Manager Tim Maxfield

Advertising & Sales Dennis Burch Chris Girouard Tim Maxfield Zack Rouda

Office Manager

Liana Merdan

Field Representatives George Tatro Andrew Burch

Contributing Writers

Leon Anderson Charles Francis | fundy67@yahoo.ca Richard Fraser Erick T. Gatcomb Margaret Hoffman Karen E. Holmes James Nalley Caroline B. Norwood Martha E. Rea Brian Swartz

Published Annually by CreMark, Inc. 10 Exchange Street, Suite 208 Portland, Maine 04101 Ph (207) 874-7720 info@discovermainemagazine.com www.discovermainemagazine.com Discover Maine Magazine is distributed to town offices, chambers of commerce, fraternal organizations, barber shops, beauty salons, newsstands, grocery and convenience stores, hardware stores, lumber companies, motels, restaurants and other locations throughout this part of Maine.

NO PART of this publication may be reproduced without written permission from CreMark, Inc. | Copyright © 2014, CreMark, Inc.

SUBSCRIPTION FORM ON PAGE 94

Front Cover Photo: Lobster Shanty in Boothbay Harbor, item #72179 from the Atlantic Fisherman Collection and www.PenobscotMarineMuseum.org All photos in Discover Maine’s Midcoast region edition show Maine as it used to be, and many are from local citizens who love this part of Maine.

Photos are also provided from our collaboration with the Maine Historical Society and the Penobscot Marine Museum.

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had better be ready to have some other, equally smart person, destroy his definition. Some things are beyond parsing.

Take apart my sentences here if you like, but God, if He is worth anything at all, is beyond human understanding.

So is a summer day.

I like walking in those gentle summer rains. I got to know my wife on just such a summer afternoon. My friend, her brother, had introduced us a few days earlier. We shared a small umbrella and walked slowly around the campus of our college. By the end of the walk we were holding hands. Summer rains will do that to you. That’s why we have God. He provides the means by which we find love. He helps us to appreciate beauty.

On those occasions when you have to look critically at the world it helps to have had some summer experiences behind you. My neighbor had the most beautiful tomatoes in his garden last

year. Burpee’s Early Girls, they were.

I couldn’t help myself. I stole one and ate it there in the garden with the juices dribbling down my chin. Temptation is not only real, it’s powerful. I think summer teaches us tolerance. We learn not to judge our fellows so harshly for missing the chance to be perfect citizens. Mr. Hardesty, my neighbor, forgave my theft. He even smiled when I told him about it.

My dog, Annie, a black Lab mix, loves the summer. She seems to seek out the fleas and ticks as if they were her right. When I let her run loose in the woods she heads for the nearest patch of skunk cabbage and rolls in it as if it might never grow again next summer.

She’s a pure hedonist. She revels in a life of sensual pleasure. She must know that she’s going to get a bath when we get home, but she’ll find a way to enjoy that as well.

Summer does that to us. It simpli-

fies. We shed clothes. We shed cares.

We begin to take life a day at a time.

It’s best not to analyze summer. My wife thinks I make the best potato salad she’s ever had, and it’s my job all summer to keep up the supply. Of course, my mother taught me how to make it, and her mother taught her. That’s the way it goes. In summer, we never measure. I put in a little salt, some green pepper, some of this, some of that. In the end, if you don’t mess with it too much, it’s great.

Whether you like wonder and mystery, or prefer cold science, in the end summer makes everything better. It’s good to be alive in summer.

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Midcoast Region

At Brunswick’s Casco Bay Trading Post, an engine from Stonington’s Crotch Island quarry, last used in 1965. Item #22292 from the Boutilier Collection and www.PenobscotMarineMuseum.org

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MEET THE LAURA B.!

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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com mistake. Capt. Bob Fish takes his party boat, the Goodtime (17 feet wide) through the Gut 12 times a week during the 16-week summer season. “It’s one of my most popular trips,” he said, adding, “The tourists think it is most picturesque.”

The bridge also provides an attraction for land-based tourists. This scene took place last summer. A lobster boat was heading toward the Gut and the bridge tender came out of his little white house. He closed the gates on either side of the bridge. A couple and their two young sons stepped from a station wagon.

Quickly they walked to the bridge and stood expectantly on the pedestrian walkway. Another visitor cautioned them about a sign on the bridge which states it is forbidden to stand or walk on the bridge when it is moving.

“Oh, that’s all right, it doesn’t mean anything. We’ve been riding the bridge for generations,” came the reply. “We

came down here just to ride the bridge,” her husband sniffed. So if there is absolutely nothing else to do in South Bristol, you can always go down and ride the bridge or watch it open and shut.

“The kids dive off it during the summer,” bridge tender W. Herbert Kelsey adds. He has been tending the bridge for the past 15 years. His father had the same job before him. There were only two regular bridge tenders when he first began working. Now there are three regular attendants and a spare man who takes over during vacations and days off. The other attendants are Daniel Seiders and Kenneth Farrin. The earliest bridge remembered by 82-year old Austin Sproul was a “solid bridge, straight timbers planked over.”

About 1904, when he was 12, everyone in town turned out for a 4th of July celebration. “One of the floor timbers broke on the bridge. People were standing on it watching something, and one side went down. Some held on to

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the railing and didn’t go into the water and saved themselves that way.”

Shortly after this mishap, the solid bridge was replaced by the first drawbridge, a wooden one which opened out to one side. Herbert Thompson, a former selectman and a lifelong resident here, remembers watching the bridge tender push a bar which turned a cog wheel, which in turn made the bridge open. “He went round and round pushing that bar to open the bridge,” Thompson said.

Several people remember the next bridge. It didn’t work too well. It had big chains and massive concrete weights which raised the center span “just like a big cover,” Mrs. Annie Mae Farrin recalled. Mrs. Farrin was living in her present home on a hill overlooking the bridge the day one of the chains broke and the weight came tumbling down. “We heard this awful bang and crash,” she said. End of bridge. (continued on page 80)

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Rockport Harbor ca. 1900. Item #20439 from the collections of the Maine Historical Society and www.VintageMaineImages.com The season nestled between mud season & deer season is the sweet season

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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com 1923 return to Camden.

Across West Penobscot Bay at Dark Harbor on Islesboro, “Mrs. William Astor Chanler of New York, who bought the summer home on Seven Hundred Acre Island of the late Miss Rose Cleveland, a sister of the ex-president, has been at her island home for some time and this week was joined by her young sons, students at Grotton,” the reporter breathlessly intoned in a long-winded opening sentence.

Like so many women mentioned in the newspaper article, Mrs. Chanler evidently lacked a given name. However, she was Beatrice Minerva Ashley, an actress, and the unidentified sons were William Jr. and Sidney.

Not far away, “Mrs. Richard S. Russell of Boston and North Andover has leased the Rice cottage owned by Mrs. Robert Herrick and with her sons and young daughter will spend eight weeks at Dark Harbor in order that they may enjoy the sailing for which the island

is famous,” the report announced. Mrs. Russell originally was Mary Gertrude Sutton before she married Richard S., and she could claim financial independence in her own right; Mary owned the family’s home at 119 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, and her husband managed the Sutton Woolen Mills owned by her father.

The Bangor Daily News reporter lamented the absence of one couple, “the Cyrus H.K. Curtisses of Philadelphia, who have a picturesque place in Rockport.” They “have been abroad but are expected later.

“Mrs. Curtis was recently presented at court (presumably in Britain), wearing a gown of mauve, gold and silver woven brocade,” etc., etc., the reporter wrote descriptively for another 100 or so words without mentioning that Mrs. Curtis was Louise Knapp before she married Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis. Nor did the reporter mention that in 1883, Louise had collaborated

with Cyrus to launch the extremely successful Ladies’ Home Journal.

Would not such facts, even if a bit trivial, have turned the summer folk of 1923 into real flesh-and-blood characters?

Oh, the reporter did toss a few tidbits to his (or her) readers. Up in Belfast, “Misses Mabel and Flora Jepson of Cambridge” ― understood to be Cambridge, Mass., not Cambridge, Maine ― “were guests during the week of Mrs. Fred T. Chase, formerly Miss Lydia Marshall of Boston.” In Northport, “Mrs. Amy Rideout” was a guest of “the Philo C. Blaisdells of Bradford, Pa,” who were “at their cottage on Bay View Park for the season.”

At least Mrs. Chase and Mrs. Rideout had first names; Mrs. Blaisdell did not. But her name was Sarah, and she and Mr. Blaisdell had a son, George G., who would invent the Zippo lighter in 1933. He would also establish the Blaisdell Foundation in 1950 in memo(continued on page 88)

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~ 2014 Midcoast Region ~

Midcoast Region