Turner's Public Spirit, August 12, 1922
A look back in time to a century ago
Transcribed By Bob Oliphant
Center. Mr. and Mrs. Everett Wood of the north part of the town have been recent guests of their son Charles in Hollis, N.H.
Dr. Henry R. Coburn has purchased a new Hudson speedster.
Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Dunn, of North Andover, have been recent guests of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Blodgett.
Mr. and Mrs. William Roudenbush and the Misses Sarah and May Atwood are at Ocean Park, Me., for a week.
Miss Ruth Tuttle has been entertaining her two nieces from Lowell.
Owing to there having been two cases of rabies in town all dogs will have to be muzzled or kept in restraint for a period of ninety days, beginning August 7.
Warren Carkin and mother moved to Littleton on Monday. Mr. Carkin is at present employed in Littleton.
The many friends of William R. Carver, who is at a Somerville hospital, will be pleased to learn that he is improving.
Mrs. Williams, who underwent an operation at the Lowell General hospital recently, has returned to her home in Parkerville.
William Roudenbush will be in charge of the regular evening service at the Congregational church on Sunday.
Mr. and Mrs. Albert Donaldson and family, of Lowell, were weekend guests at Mr. and Mrs. Peter Clement’s.
Mrs. Hastings, of Lowell, is the guest of her niece, Mrs. Robert Prescott.
Mrs. Wiley Wright and daughter, Mrs. Flora Edwards, of Brookside, are to occupy the house recently vacated by Warren Carkin.
Barton Green, of Wortendyke, N.J., has been a recent guest of Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Hildreth.
In the district court in Ayer on last Saturday morning the defendant [Stephen Kilowskuk] in a liquor case from Westford was found guilty of an illegal sale and fined fifty dollars. [See “District Court” below.]
A dog owned by Louis Cloutier, of Parkerville, was struck by an auto and killed on Tuesday afternoon.
Timothy Connolly, while attempting to alight from a moving automobile last Saturday night caught his coat in the door of the machine and was thrown under the car, the wheels passing over his arm and shoulder. He was removed to a Lowell hospital and last reports gave his condition as comfortable.
Rep. A. W. Hartford has been informed that Governor Channing H. Cox will speak at the republican outing to be held here on Saturday, August 19.
The Abbot Worsted Company employees will enjoy an excursion to Revere Beach on Saturday. A special train will leave Forge Village at 8:30 o’clock, making stops at Graniteville, Brookside and North Chelmsford, returning at 6:30 in the evening. It is expected that about 500 will go on the trip.
George F. White and family are spending the month of August at Owl’s [Head] Island, Me.
The following Westford people attended the annual picnic of the Middlesex County Farm Bureau held at the Middlesex school, Concord, Wednesday: Mr. and Mrs. Frank Wright, Leonard W. Wheeler, Frederick Hanscom and Mr. and Mrs. Harry Nesmith.
Miss Pamelia Precious, who is supervisor [paper torn, line missing] in Littleton and Acton during the coming year.
Louis Cloutier of the south part of the town has leased the Webster House in Enfield, N.H., and will take occupancy of the same before long.
The condition of Mrs. Alice Lambert, who was so badly burned at the fire at her home in the north part of the town a week ago last Sunday, remains about the same. Mrs. Lambert is at the Lowell Corporation hospital.
The annual picnic of the Middlesex County Farm Bureau was held on Wednesday at the grounds of the Middlesex school, Concord. The Chelmsford band gave a varied program of sports, the points won to be credited toward banners for the towns getting the greatest number for a total. A basket lunch was partaken of at noon and addresses by Chairman Alfred L. Cutting of the county commissioners, and former Gov. Foss of Peterboro, N.H., were much enjoyed. There was a large attendance, the day being an ideal one for such an affair.
Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Cameron and family leave the latter part of the week for Chebacco Island, Essex, where they will spend two weeks.
The truck men are kept busy in carrying apples to the Boston market. As many as 1500 bushels have been reported as having been shipped in one night recently. The large number [paper torn, line missing] night.
About Town. The Walkden wheelwright shop at Chamberlin’s Corner, which was razed to the ground by the law of gravitation and some man help, has been raised skyward by the H. E. Fletcher Granite Company on Oak hill and is to be dedicated to boarding house uses.
Mrs. Lilla F. Holman Gardner died last week Thursday at her home in Lowell, aged sixty-three years. She is survived by her husband, Everett M. Gardner; two children, William M. and Lillian M. Holman, children by a former marriage, and a grandson, Morris H. Holman. She was a member of the Calvary Baptist church, Evening Star Rebekah lodge, I.O.O.F., and James A. Garfield W.R.C. She will be remembered in town as the adopted daughter of William Page, and married Alfred Holman, whom it will be recalled, fell from a staging with others while painting the old Abbot house near the Unitarian church. He afterwards was a member of the Lowell police force. Her adopted father, William Page, will be remembered by many, having lived in Townsend, Pepperell and Westford. While in town he lived for several years in the house now owned by John MacMaster on Main Street.
Owing to a mad dog epidemic scare in Forge Village, the selectmen have availed themselves of the law of “safety first” and have ordered all dogs muzzled or restrained for ninety days from August 7. We have always been unable to see the necessity of ninety days’ bondage for dogs when it is an established fact that rabies will take effect in less than two weeks after being bitten by a dog having the rabies. Of course it is true that there are a few isolated cases where after being bitten the virus has lain dormant in the system for twenty-five years, and then broken out in all its hydrophobia fury.
Last spring, when cutting potatoes at the Old Oaken Bucket farm for planting, several pieces bounded and slipped through the opening in some planks. They sprouted, and within a few days have come up through the flooring and grew as those in the field.
Gerald Decatur returned on Monday to New Rochelle, N.Y.
Dr. and Mrs. C. C. P. Hiller, who have been spending the first part of their vacation with Mrs. George F. Snow, West Chelmsford, returned on last Saturday to Millbury. Having had the degree of Doctor of Divinity conferred upon him by his alma mater, Denver college, Colorado, Mr. Hiller is now entitled to be called Dr. Hiller.
Miss Maude Jarvis, of Lowell, has been visiting her friend, Miss Lottie L. Snow.
The Boston Transcript of Saturday, August 5, has a picture of Miss Annie Hamlin and an account of this interesting young woman, the daughter of Charles Sumner Hamlin, and a connection of all the Hamlins so well known here.
The other evening one of our townsmen sat on his porch and counted the autos coming home from the Twilight league baseball game and he got as far as 134 and then stopped. That included just the autos going down Main street at the Center.
Arthur J. O’Brien, Pigeon hill, Stony Brook road, set out an acre of cabbage plants and before he could figure out how much income tax would be due the government on them the woodchucks did the figuring by eating them all up.
The next meeting of the Grange will be held on Thursday evening of next week in the town hall. The program will be in charge of Pomona, Ceres and Flora.
The Old Oaken Bucket farm folks and the F. A. Snows attended the Farm Bureau meeting in Concord on Wednesday. Some impressions will be briefly printed next week.
In a recent shower of hail in North Carolina, hail to the depth of one foot fell in some places. The only redeeming feature about it was that hailstones fell with a size and velocity enough to break open ripe watermelons. Oh, how we wished we had been there at the watermelon scene! We do not like thunder, lightning and hail as a daily diet, but when accompanied by watermelons please call the roll and we will be there.
When V. T. E. of Littleton informed the public through these columns that “It seems hard for a person working for twenty-five cents per hour to be cut to twenty cents per hour,” we at once ordained ourselves with a search warrant to find who these twenty-cent people were. Our first search was in Littleton, and as soon as wireless would get us there we ran right into this: “Wanted—Help on the roads. Wages 40 cents per hour.” I said right off I have got into the wrong pew; I cannot transact business here at twenty cents per hour. Then we rallied our courage to go to Chelmsford with a twenty-cent-hour message, and the same sign was hoisted as in Littleton. Then to get down to the vital question of wages on the railroads we asked some track repairers what about twenty cents per hour? They looked at me with the smile of surprise to think that they were fools enough to work for twenty cents per hour when unskilled railroad labor had walked out on a strike refusing forty-seven cents per hour. After several attempts to find twenty-cent folks and having worn out my search warrant I came to the conclusion that there are none.
Logical Labor Talk. Many in Westford and West Chelmsford will recall Rev. G. E. McIlwain, who was minister of the Methodist church at West Chelmsford for three years [1891-1894], and after leaving was ordained as a Unitarian minister, is now associated with the Roger Babson Company of Boston. He recently gave an address on “The education of employees on fundamental business conditions” before the ninth annual Wellesley industrial [paper torn, 3 lines missing].
To the employers of large numbers of men, who are attending this industrial conference, he advised:
“Take these workers into your confidence, keep them posted from time to time on the outlook of the industry in which they are engaged and thus recruit intelligent workers who will not decide to walk out on the announcement of a policy of retrenchment by the company employing them. The present industrial disturbances and strikes of recent years were not gigantic frame-ups to bring labor to its knees, but the swing of the pendulum back from a period of unprecedented prosperity up to 1920. Despite the assurance of labor leaders that big business is ‘trying to put something over on labor,’ employers know and employees would know, if intelligently informed on market conditions, that wage reductions and similar phases of the present situation were following a fundamental law of the business and manufacturing world.”
Illustrating his talk by charts and graphs, he demonstrated that business moves in cycles and hazarded the guess that there would be a drop in the cost of living within the next five years, and that the cost of living five years from now will be 45 to 50 percent below the peak in 1920. Conditions which will bring this about should be talked over with employees, and real estate men who think they will be able to obtain rents paid today have another think [tear, line missing] which an employer can run his business—go into his work with a club, issue orders in the attitude of like it or lump it; or operate his business through intelligent cooperation with his men, who have been informed of what the employer faces to make his business pay. The men in the first class can count on drawing dividends in the form of grouches all along the line of the workmen, while the proponent of the second method will have a force that works with him, rather than for him.
We give a long and prolonged hosanna amen to the above, and if there is anything in doubt in the above address of Mr. McIlwain it is his prophecy of the high cost of living being so visibly reduced, for there are so many wicked modern complications that hinder to prevent it all along the line in every clime from the tillers of the soil to the diggers of oil. In this combination honest, underpaid labor is of course betwixt the upper and nether stones of the grinding, and has our sympathy and support at all times. But in the present industrial world crisis we are emphatically opposed to adding poverty to poverty by voting a strike, and if the labor leaders have not any more sense than to order these strikes when the whole industrial world is dragging anchor, then we advise making Jonahs of them and getting leaders who have sense.
A Nearby Lesson. We attempted recently to emphasize “individuality” as the chief asset of success and the lack of it as the chief cause of failure and present world unrest. We made several illusions to prove our point, but we found a better one and nearer to us in the paper last week under the Pepperell news, entitled “A wonder farm.” The title is not true to life and nature, and it should be “A wonder farmer.” The farm is inanimate as far as success goes and we could cover the farm with failures by those who lack individuality or business capacity if you like that expression better. Yes, failures—same soil, drouth, flood, pests, “big interests,” tariffs and the same “cussed legislation” by which the rich grow richer and poor poorer Everybody ought to read the piece entitled “A wonder farm” If that man, unaided can do all that on a ten-acre farm, what is the matter with the rest of us where nature and inheritance have given us a larger area or furnished us with steady employment and never-failing wages in mill, shop, mine or railroad? This is just what we are trying to find out why one person succeeds and another fails under the same circumstances.
Well, now instead of spending your time mourning and groaning about millionaires, big interests and a tariff that favors the rich, coal, sugar, oil and beef trusts, and the tyranny of sixty percent of the wealth in the hands of two percent of the population, just get down the mirror and you will see “face to face” the chief cause why you fell down. We have seen it traced through several generations—of financial incapacity with money legacies left them and going through the whole of it, and no habits of dissipation—simply lacking in the equipment for success through a long line of heredity.
Now there are those who thought that we pitched too high a key for a grand chorus of the common people when we mentioned last week, farmers worth $75,000. “Stop, look and listen.” The late Dr. George B. Loring of Salem, and a successful farmer, once said at a farmers’ gathering, among other things, “For I see before me farmers who have made $75,000 farming.” I did not refer to the same farmers that he did. It is one of those cases where “great minds run in the same channel all unknown to each other.” Well, what has this got to do with the railroad strike? Well, not very much, except showing the power of individuality.
Blot out the individuality of labor leaders and the tendency would be a grand stampede plump back to work under the rules and regulations of supply and demand as a bankrupt business world is tethered today. The element of sparring for fame and notoriety can easily be read in the advice and actions of labor leaders. The railroad strike has its Jewell and if it can force the strike demands to the arms of the strikers this [Bert M.] Jewell [president of the railroad workers union] will go into history as one of the brightest and most important Jewells in the galaxy of bright Jewells in the hall of fame of noted men. Hurrah and hurrah for fame in the railroad strike, even if we have to starve and freeze everybody to death to get it!
Then there is [Samuel] Gompers [president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL)] in the role of Moses, who has been chosen by his flock to lead them “as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night” away from the bondage of “big business” and the starvation wages of capital into the promised land where the natural law of supply and demand is ignored and the law of Moses in all is all; the Moses who denounces combinations and then proceeds to combine, the Moses who denounces the findings of the supreme court of the United States and then proceeds to ordain himself a supreme court and find his own findings and hands them down to the world in the smoke of the world war, which reads, “There must be no cut in the wages of labor.”
In a former communication we asked and hoped that V. T. E. or some of his friends of similar views would answer this question of old, “Whence hath this man this wisdom” that he can see so far through the world war trouble which has been augmented since the close of the war, that enabled him to steam up wisdom enough to demand no cut in wages. But for all this, we regret the conditions that seem to make it necessary to cut the wages of labor, and if tears would bring a rise in wages instead of a cut we would be willing to shed a small ocean full.
To the Editor: On some of my early excursions in the most numerous variety of gasoline propelled vehicles, a building somewhat out of the ordinary attracted by attention on the main road between Amesbury and Salisbury [Rocky Hill Meeting House]. When curiosity prevailed and a stop was made I got a surprise for when I stepped through the doorway I stepped back over a hundred years into church accommodations of my great-great-grandfathers. Here yet stands the high pulpit reached by a narrow stairway and overhung by a sounding board and with the deacons’ seats at its base. Here are the unpainted square pews with bare board seats on hinges that dropped with a resounding clatter when the congregation resumed their seats after singing. Here is the gallery on three sides with all the seats we read of.
Later, I saw other similar buildings, one of which a neighbor told of having read, so one day lately the lure of the road and the need of diversion coming strong my car started eastward. From Lowell we went through North Tewksbury, passing Haggett’s pond, beautifully blue in the morning light, and through William M. Woods’ new model village of Shawsheen and by his big mill in Lawrence to Haverhill, where we passed by Hannah Dustin standing in a little park, tomahawk in hand, to remind us of Kipling’s poem about “The female of the species.” The Indians had killed her baby before her eyes and taken her away from her other children. All that and the rest are in the histories. In Plaistow, the next town north, we turned from the main road and in North Danville reached our first objective of the day. Here, in 1766, in what was then the main part of the town, was erected a plain rectangular building well supplied with windows and with suitable entrance doors on three sides, but otherwise not likely by the average stranger passing to be taken for a church.
The Rocky Hill meeting-house above-mentioned and the two yet to be noticed are of the same appearance save that the one in Fremont has a porch-like addition at each end entrance. All of these, if given the steeple which is the universal distinguishing mark of the old New England country meeting-house, would at once be in the ordinary run of ecclesiastical architecture externally. Within, the pulpit and canopy, the galleries with their pews and the platform on three sides of the main floor which elevated part of the pews a step higher than the rest, are still there, but all the pews of the main floor are gone. The story goes that about fifty years ago, after the building had become a town hall, an element of the townspeople wanted these pews out so that dancing could be indulged in, but the town refused. So one winter night a watchman each way on the road saw the caretaker, who lived near, make his usual before bedtime nine o’clock visit to his livestock, saw the lights out and passed word to the gang inside the building. Their work was not discovered until a funeral came that way and as they were about to take the coffin in they found the floor covered with wreckage. The excitement of the country-side can be imagined. This did not make a dance hall after all, for when at the close of a church social dancing was begun a courageous woman took the stand that the orchestra was not hired for a dance, and a dance was not advertised, and she carried the day for her opponents were men and women enough to see that they had gone at the thing in a wrong way and long afterward some of them complimented her.
In the next town north, Fremont, is the third of this type of a meeting-house. Here the pews in the center of the floor have been removed and settees substituted for such rare times as the building is used. Next, we turned southwest into Sandown, which adjoins Danville and Fremont. Here is perhaps the finest of the four buildings of this type which I have seen. There may be others of which I know not. This was built in 1773. The front and side doorways are of the style of some colonial dwelling-houses and are creditable.
In the interior the main timbers, hewn so smoothly from ancient oaks that one has to examine carefully to find they are not planed, stand unpainted as sound as ever. All about the gallery is panel work of noble proportions matching that of the pulpit and all of skill. Thirty-eight windows let in the light through twenty-four panes of glass in each. The window back of the pulpit has four more panes so that the parson can see to read his manuscript. This church was founded in 1759.
In all four of these buildings occasional Sunday services are held in the summer time, and an effort perhaps commensurate with the size of the small communities in which they are is made for their preservation. They are all now in good condition. The plainness of these rectangular, plain, pitch roof, two-story buildings in their external appearance is curiously set off by the artistic workmanship of the pulpit. Try as they might in their revolt against ecclesiastical formality ceremony and trappings they could not wholly repress the aesthetic.
Stepping out of this last church from the eighteenth into the twentieth century, and from the ox-cart still in use where we got the church key, into a modern gas wagon gave some contrast. Through woodlands and hamlets we sped, passing through a valley in Salem which Lawrence is turning into a water supply reservoir, and by the rear of the Searles estate in Methuen, we drove along the Merrimack beautified by woodlands in their best spring finery to Lowell and home.
- W. Wheeler.
Ayer
District Court. Stephen Kilowskuk of Westford, charged with keeping and exposing liquor for sale and also charged with a specific sale, was found guilty and fined fifty dollars on the charge of keeping and exposing, but was found not guilty of the sale. Attorney John D. Carney appeared for the government and Attorney George L. Wilson for the defense.
Adam Lapniewski of Westford was also before the court on several liquor charges. His case was continued until September 2 upon his request.