How Things Used To Be - Life In Maine

beneath this old photograph lies the following inscription the final separation of rockport maine from its nearest neighbor camden maine took place on february 25th 1891. this picture was taken at a separation celebration that occurred that summer it was organized by the man in the balera hat oliver blood the building behind him is a quarry building on a road presently called the west street extension very fine white lime was quarried here burned barreled and shipped everywhere this is rockport maine in the summer of 1991 the 100th anniversary of the town the video you are about to see tells the story of rockport what it was like to live here why it's separated from camden and what it has become today the first settlers of rockport were native american people called wawi nox meaning brave people they built small communities fished hunted and lived peacefully for over a thousand years nobody knows which white men first saw the camden rockport area then called camden goose river it is believed that many explorers may have sailed along the main shore but it is known that in 1602 bartholomew gosnold sailed this coastal area and noted in his captain's log the quote sylvan beauty of what was to become rockport three years later on may 18 1605 at 12 o'clock noon explorer and captain george weymouth in his good ship archangel came to be the first white person to explore the knox county region he and his men quickly made contact with the huawei nox camden rockport was called meganticok by these first americans the indians and early settlers got along well tragically the introduction of smallpox by the explorers completely decimated this tribe by the end of the 1600s the first colonial settlements in maine were founded in 1719 but the goose river area was not settled until 1769 one winter evening in that year a miss lucy flucker a woman of sport and wild character was playing cards in boston massachusetts with one robert thorndike a hard-working tradesman she owned a large tract of land of what is today known as rockport which she had inherited from her grandfather samuel waldow a well-known general during the game at a particularly tense moment she bet and lost her part of rockport to thorndike an excited mr thorndyke his wife and seven children quickly came to rockport to see what he had won they loved the area and became rockport's first settlers by building a log home on 50 acres his land extended from goose river all the way to the lily pond and his home stood near where the rockport methodist church now stands soon others began settling around thorndike buying land from him at a dollar to three dollars an acre robert thorndike became rockport's first real estate developer during the revolutionary war camden goose river grew further because the mountains and protected harbor provided safety from the british new residents came in from union to belfast and by 1790 the population had grown to 331 rockport was becoming an economically stable part of camden and had a protected deep water harbor allowing large ships easy access there was a shipyard and an anchor factory trades needed for a busy marine supply depot rockport also contained lime deposits which were some of the richest in the world this small but growing industry would prove critical to rockport's future rockport was becoming a widely known place people wanted to live and work here a rockport resident said at the time owing to the large number who want to be engaged in agricultural and nautical pursuits here our limited space may compel us to omit them in the early 1800s camden rockport continued to grow but life was hard for these early residents summers were short the soil not particularly fertile and midcoast maine was a long way from portland and boston to get a sense of how hard life was consider the summer of 1821 when there was a frost on the ground every day no buds opened and nothing grew as far as the census and tax folks were concerned camden rockport was one town but to the residents of camden and rockport there were two distinctly different towns camden had a larger downtown area and more wealthy citizens while rockport had the lime industry and a profitable ice business which employed many more people camdenites looked down at rockport folks and rockporters thought camden folk were superior although there had been differences between the two towns for many years those differences became more serious by the late 1800s rockport boys would get over by the line and then we'd stop they used to say uh uh camden bombs live on rum and we'd say raw paddy whackers live on soda crackers they used to get out there but the quarries of the town line throw rocks to each other it was a pastime for the in the evening there was always a difference in the class of people on the in camden and rockport and when rockport needed help to restore a bridge to rebuild a bridge across goose river a camden did not want to help and there was i this think that sometimes rockport felt too that there was a sense of jealousy we never could figure out why hostility between the two towns exaggerated a dispute in 1884 over whether or not rockport should have a new iron bridge over goose river camden residents felt the old bridge was sufficient but rockport residents wanted a new bridge that would be safer camden residents didn't feel that they should pay for this luxury they insisted that the rockport part of camden separate and become its own town they decided that camden wanted to withdraw and wanted to go on their own and so i think rockport said good enough go that was just about the idea of the thing you know they just felt that well we can do it alone in 1891 the tension between the residents of camden and the rockport part of camden reached a fever pitch as the newspapers reported it today february 25th 1891 rockport maine and camden maine have finally decided to separate the two communities have little socially and economically in common rockport is the more rural in character while camden has established itself as a center of trade in a recent meeting a climax was reached several brawls have been reported in recent days camden sent a petition to the state capitol requesting they be allowed to split from rockport the fight was thus carried to the state house and finally the day came each town has gone their separate way after the separation rockport residents established a town office with a town manager selectmen a fire department a road building officer a health commissioner and its own school system by this time there were two thousand three hundred fourteen residents in rockport as the 20th century began affluent residents from places like new york philadelphia washington and boston began coming to rockport to build majestic summer homes these residents whose children and grandchildren are still part of rockport life contributed greatly to the town by making large grants to social services and public works rockport was more than just its thriving village in fact most of the town of rockport was inhabited by vegetable fruit and dairy farmers and most rockport residents townies and country folks shared in common that their life was hard and that they were poor you had to save and skimp and tried shovel snow whatever you can find all the kids shovel snow ice shovel snow cost 25 cents an hour with shoveled snow we shoveled the sidewalks and shoveled across the bridge and all the sidewalks were shoveled in those days and the kids did it and there's all handwork actually you know you hired a neighbor to have that team of horse's plow and ariel garden from there on it was hoe in hand and weeding my father used to use his team his horse and wagon and every saturday would go to rockport to peddle uh eggs and butter and there's a little girl i used to go with him and that's when i went and how i learned to make change businesses flourished rockport ice company the story shirt factory the cooperage and gristmill of sc and hl shepherd company not to mention the carpenters masons boat builders sail makers and granite workers most important economically rockport was to become the center of one of the greatest lime producing regions in america rockport's lime industry the largest employer in the area the quaint charming and quiet rockport of today was around 1900 an industrial noisy smoky place the lime kill dominated the town freshly cut lime rock was brought from several local quarries to the kills for processing the kills were huge pressurized ovens that baked the lime which was then bagged and used for cement mortar they would go out on it on a platform with cables coming down to four corners of the platform with no sides on it at all and just stand on that platform and go down hundreds of feet down into that quarry the jacob quarry that's right beside the union street is the deepest one and i remember looking down in there they look like flies down there and down in there they were drilling and blasting and lots and lots of injuries and the same thing down at the kills uh where they brought the limestone over and put it into the tops of the kills and down below where the live live lime came out the uh if any water touched there and they would spark up and the men were burned very often sometimes lost a hand or something lost eye things like that because it was really really hard work and the hours were long because those kills had to be going 24 hours a day they smoked up the whole town sometimes the smoke literally obscured the sunlight from the rockport skyline we had the best lime in the world in rockport camden best lime in the world and the reason we lost it because china had good lime and they could produce it for one third of what we were doing that's the reason we lost it today down in rockport harbor the rockport lime kill historical society has restored the old kills and you can get a feel of what they were like when they were operating you could come into rockport harbor and they were the place was so full of boats that you could walk right from one short or the other boat to boat because there were boats in there bringing in wood you know to burn the lime kills boats and they're loading for lime and then boats in their loading for ice for the rockport ice lily pond not only famous for its beauty but for the purity of its water and its ice which was sold all over the world you didn't make ice in them there's no one know how you didn't have a machine that made ice there was no the only ice there was anywhere in the world is what was cut off from lily pond or some other pond the rockport ice company provided work for the men who cut it and summer worked for the men who stored it and shipped it the ice was cut by hand and uh it had big saws and you'd only have one man using those saws because he couldn't get on the other end it was in the water down below and then they were put on two sleds with horses that are called jiggers they were hauled over to the ice houses across the harbor below mechanic street and that had about three or four big ice houses and they went on a conveyor belt uh and hoisted up on a conveyor belt so there was stacks and stacks of chunks of square ice and those were put onto big badges and shipped down all through the south because there was no refrigeration in those days the blocks of ice slid from lily pond to the harbor where large ships packed with sawdust carried the ice to the southern united states the caribbean and south america they used to call it the rockwork blue ice because it was so clear that you could put a dime down set a cake of ice on it and look down through the cake and read the date on the dime another major rockport industry was ship building together rockport and camden shipbuilders constructed almost 100 major trading and military vessels between 1850 and 1904 and rockport produced the frederick billings the largest sailing ship ever built by any town on penobscot bay although the waterfront was noisy and smoky life at this time was pleasant in rockport village it was a town that had its own trolley the camden and rockport street railroad company which was a real treat for the residents of knox county set up by the local electric company it took people from warren through thomaston and rockland to rockport and camden its primary purpose was to carry people to and from work and to take residence to oakland park an amusement park owned by the power company it was a beautiful trolley and in downtown rockport the trolley tracks crossed into the town on the very bridge that it split rockport from camden 1904 a year for endings that was the year the last commercial ship was built in rockport and also the last year for the ice industry which came to an end with the introduction of refrigeration today the lilies still grow in lily pond but the water though not as bad as it was six years ago is not good enough to drink and in 1907 a great fire destroyed the rockport lime kill although farming worked heroically the fire could not be put out because water cannot extinguish burning lime that fire marked the end of rockport's last major industry america entered the 1920s filled with hope and optimism and the gay feeling that the future was bright and rockport residents with their industrial base gone became a closely knit caring community with extended families where grandchildren and grandparents lived in the same home and took care of each other and the community itself was like one big extended family it was common for a businessman to share a meal with a poor farmer on a cold winter night in the 1923 tax report there is a listing for care of the poor and the sum of three thousand three hundred forty nine dollars set aside so that rockport could take care of its less fortunate nobody ever thought about somebody else's property i mean they knew it was their property but there was no law against walking across it or going freely on the on the beach and on the uh the shipyards and so forth like that it seemed to be common ground really they'd come with farming time time we should have a garden plant some grain and stuff i came home from the milk out one day and the field is full of neighbors plowing and putting our garden in they they did such things as that all the time my father every spring he would take his tractor and he'd ride down the road and he'd stop at these different places plow up the gardens and then go back so many days later and hair them so they'd have a garden that's just one example my mother didn't get a driver's license till she was about 50 but she used to pick up neighbors who needed rides to go grocery shopping rockport residents not only cared about each other's well-being but they also cared about the land many farmers town residents and summer people saw themselves as stewards of their land replenishing the soil planting trees keeping the land beautiful and healthy the results of that effort are evident all around rockport today to properly educate its children rockport built its own school and it was proud of it all the students sat in one large room and yet it provided a first-rate education i went there in what we called the sub-primary now they call it kindergarten through the sixth grade my class was in there was class of two of us carolyn andrews pendleton and i were the only two in the class for several years we were the first class to go to rockport as a junior high in the seventh what a transition to go from a class of two to a class of 30 or 32. yes but we were well prepared we we did fine they did well in part because they received a solid schooling not only encompassing latin french domestic science but u.s history bookkeeping ancient history english mechanical drawing chemistry in contemporary terms it was a complete education the whole high school was in one big room and uh you know what class you were in just the same even if you were wondering room and they did have a lab and they had some other things like that on the second and third floor and uh they had some other classrooms on the side but the seventh and eighth grade were together and the sixth and fifth and sixth and like that and uh i think that it was pretty darn good education really and even if there was you know such a big storm that there was no school we always got there just the same there was no no stopping us from getting to school that was priority in our family nobody thought of ever leaving school school was something you had to do and enjoy when school let out and summer came it was a wonderful time in rockport there were swim meets held in the harbor camping and hiking in the hills a carnival and oakland park a fabulous amusement area the teenagers loved it all they had a pavilion a big dance hall a dining room ice cream parlors a ferry boat and all families and all school children and sunday school children all went there for picnics and they had ball games baseball games at least two a week and then sometimes they had dances three times a week it was really something in the summertime and it was beautiful you ever saw the moon coming up out of the bay and on a nice waltz with a nice guy you know it was beautiful and i loved it i think he came from freeport and they were up there and i think his father was a minister and so we were about 14 i guess or something like that and so he wanted to take me to the movies in camden and so i was allowed to go and after the movies we went into the arico spa which is about where the um um well it's just below the verdi is in one of those little buildings now you know they have a little lunch room there well he took me in there and we sat up at the counters marble counters and we had a banana split we didn't just have one banana split we had two banana splits you imagine the harbor was very active all summer long as fishermen mixed with pleasure boats while the high school students held wonderful regattas life in rockport during the summer was quite wonderful and many older residents today still remember one extraordinary summer resident donald d dodge an engineer he saw a house he loved in phippsburg 50 miles to the south and in an inspired moment he conceived the plan to put this house on railroad barges and tow it to the tip of beauchamp point in rockport where he and his rockport workers using horses would pull it onto high ground it came up on a barge a big barge from pittsburgh down near bath and uh he wanted to prove his ingenuity and his engineering skills in bringing this up on a barge with all the chimneys intact and everything as it was and they bring it up over those ledges with quite a feat the floating of the dodge house was a strange sight to see but older rockport residents say that it was not as strange as the story of the donut down to gregory's in in glen cove he was in the navy the boy he came home and they made donuts all in no hole in them and and uh and he said you know what they do in the navy he said they put a hole in them donuts and she said what phone he said i know they cook better or something so she made the first in this area the first hole in the donut that's great yeah mrs gregory the donut was invented in the sailing ship time so the sail on a helm helmet on a spoke he'd put a donut there so he could eat it and he'd stare in his hip you know probably had two three donuts on that as far as i know my mother invented him she always had a jar of donuts under the cupboard every kid in the neighborhood stopped our house to get the school bus and a lot of them was looking for donuts while it seems true that the donut was invented by a rockport resident as of the making of this program it appears that no one in rockport profited from this brilliant discovery everything changed for rockport citizens and for the rest of america after october 1929 the great depression hit rockport hard but because of the rural farming communities and their ability to grow food rockport residents did not starve but they had no money to improve their homes and their industries if we had a depression now a lot people in the cities and in any congested area will be hurting but as far as out here where we were i mean it wasn't too bad the depression is supposed to be hard times but you had more free time and you had to make your own way and like if we played ball we had to get off field and fix it up and somebody had a bat somebody had a ball if we went skiing we had our homemade skis we had to make our own ski trails our own jumps and i think it was good for you there was a woman a wealthy summer long time resident who loved rockport and its people she was a member of the well-known bach family and her name was mary louise bach mrs bach was a perfectly lovely person and a tall stately looking lady and she treated everybody just the same uh there wasn't a feeling between these people to the other people but i think that the a lot of the natives uh felt uh you know lower by themselves you know but she really felt the need for help here and she did so much my oldest brother got a loan from cyrus curtis mary mary louise mark curtis's father because my father was working for him at this time and he got a 500 loan and so when he went back to pay it he says no we just pass it on to the next brother and so he did and they passed it on all the way down through the family mary bach contributed to individuals in the town by rebuilding their houses loaning the money for school expenses and for their businesses and by rebuilding the decaying harbor she saw to it that the harbor area had ample places for boating bathing and housing and rockport's harbor began to attract ever larger numbers of tourists mary louise bach was an extraordinary woman she established the curtis institute a summer music school and performing arts center famous musicians came for the summer to delight the ears of locals and tourists within a few short years rockport came to be known as the summer music capital of america musicians who came and brought their families included fritz reiner eugene ormandy samuel barber and jean carlo manati the summer music festival the harbor the beauty of the rebuilt downtown area and the post-war economic boom brought new residents some were retirees some were second home residents and some were just pre-1960s dropouts from the cities they built and lived in modest houses and became active in town life they were welcomed and helped by the old families of rockport and the bond that was established between the quote mainers and the newcomers made rockport a special place to be tourists were drawn to rockport by this special feeling and every summer the harbor filled with boats of all sizes from all places all the new people in town they come here because they like the place we got i guess they got treated like everybody else as far as i know i didn't never wasted any time being different to them i don't know what anyone else ever did they uh they came here because they liked the way we did things in the 1960s and 70s thousands of tourists were attracted to rockport's most extraordinary resident ever andre the seal andre was found by fisherman harry goodrich over a 16-year period the two developed a close friendship and for a time andre even lived at the goodrich home together they not only developed an array of tricks but harry also learned of his friend's remarkable intelligence andre could locate and retrieve submerged objects at long distances he responded to language and he frolicked on equal terms with skin divers word about andre quickly got around and when harry and andre practiced tricks in the harbor a crowd often gathered by the early 1970s the crowds grew quite large and andre began attracting nationwide media attention there were many articles written about him and he even appeared on national television andre was more than an extraordinary pet he was also a town character who was named honorary harper master because of all he had done for rockport although he roamed free from boston to maine he never failed to return home when andre died at 22 years of age jane wayzey designed and built a sculpture of his likeness which now sits facing the sea at the head of rockport harbor if you drive up route 1 from rockland to camden you'd never know rockport was there unless you turned right on pascal avenue many rockport year-round residents wish that folks didn't know that pascal avenue takes you to rockport but each year folks do know and several hundred thousand tourists pass through today rockport maine is home for 2854 well-known and not-so-well-known extraordinary ordinary residents rockport is also home to the international film and television workshop and the world famous wooden boat building school the apprentice shop but perhaps the most famous spot in downtown rockport is the rockport corner shop where locals outsiders and tourists alike gather to enjoy good food and good people rockport and camden get along just fine these days the children of the two towns shared the same school and the adults have finally decided to connect their sewer line back in 1891 the dispute over rebuilding goose river bridge sent rockport and camden their separate ways in the centuries since the bridge has been rebuilt numerous times and rockport has experienced many changes and the view of rockport harbor is still breathtaking it is the most beautiful spot and i love it i love the people i love i think that rockwood is a wonderful place to live and my father spoke about it the same way he says in this letter that he had written to me one time and he says i'm looking down on the harbour and thinking of it as it used to be and how it was before man came here and then he says and now i can feel so good and standing here and never did i realize he's in that i would have part in making this so beautiful so you see the love has stayed with it and it stays with you i've been following the same footsteps as my forefathers have for five generations right here nothing like it there's nothing like it of course i i wouldn't trade no place on earth for for up or my home the life to live in freedom your way of life your neighbors the good will always be here if you use it if you work it

Channel: David Hoffman

Views: 420,193

Rating: 4.8748565 out of 5

Keywords: American Indians, New England history, New England (Region), Rockport, ice cutting, Maine (US State), maine vacation, andre the seal, downeast, Maine history, Camden, Rockland, maine documentary, logging in the North, from stump to ship, homesteading in northern Maine, Christmas in Maine, interview with a main lobstermen, Maine two foot railroads, Portland Maine, coast of Maine, winter in Maine, maine logging railway

Id: RSGt6iRMG-g

Length: 38min 36sec (2316 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/mainlydank]

There is a really cool park in Rockport down by the water, it has a few plaques and old structures still left from the salt era.