Yarmouth’s shipyards which reached their peak in the 1870’s are now mostly buried under the interstate highway.

 Many years ago I asked a group of Yarmouth High School students if they could imagine what their town’s snug little harbor would look like if it did not have an interstate bridge crouching on top of it. Shrugging off my suggestions about Camden and Kennebunkport, the students concluded that they just couldn’t see it. Today’s photograph brings back to life key parts of the town’s heritage that ended up under that highway bridge. The photo is also a beautifully composed image. The willow tree on the left plays off against a whole series of diagonal lines that lead you to the buildings and ships in the background.

This rooftop view of Yarmouth’s waterfront was probably taken by Charles G. Gooding in the spring of 1874, looking south in the direction of what is now the Yankee Marina on the opposite shore. The date is significant because the 1870’s represented the high water mark of wooden shipbuilding in Yarmouth. Although the scene is eerily deserted, you can see two shipyards and six different vessels in various stages of construction.

Yarmouth's shipyards were at their peak in the 1870's.

In the foreground the Hutchins and Stubbs shipyard may not look very prosperous with its heaps of scrap lumber, but they actually set a record in 1874 by launching four ships. The historian William Rowe described those ships as “modest in size, but famous for the grace and beauty of their lines.” Given the very tight schedule to construct those ships and the fact that no workers are swarming around the newly laid keel in the center of the picture, the photograph was almost certainly taken on a Sunday morning. As soon as one ship was decked over and caulked, the yard would launch it and move the vessel to a finishing pier where the cabin joinery and other details could be completed. This freed up space on the ways to lay the keel of the next ship. The three masts above the tree line in the center of the picture very likely belong to the barkentine Hattie S. Jackson that Hutchins and Stubbs is known to have completed at Union Wharf in 1874.

Tucked into the lower right corner of the picture is a rough shed that housed the shipyard’s blacksmith shop and a boiler that was used to steam the long planks so they would bend into the shape of the vessel’s hull. On the wall of the shed facing Lafayette Street you can see advertising signs for products like health tonics and Florence sewing machines. Bob Collins, a colorful old timer on Yarmouth’s waterfront, once told me that the clump of willows on the left shaded a spring that was used by the shipyard workers.

Jutting across the middle of the Hutchins and Stubbs yard, you can see the long white keel of the bark Tewksbury L. Swett.. In 1889, during a voyage from New Zealand to Hong Kong, this vessel was hurled by a typhoon onto a reef. After much hardship the crew reached one of the Caroline Islands where they were robbed and held for ransom by a conniving local tribe. Captain William H. Gooding was eventually able to convince the chief that his tribe might face severe retribution if they harmed their captives. When he finally arrived home nearly a year later, he discovered that nearly everyone assumed he was dead and the insurance company was trying hard to convince his wife to accept that fact. Although this event was later overstated into “a narrow escape from cannibals,” it still demonstrates the extraordinary dangers faced by Yarmouth ships and sailors.

Returning again to our photograph, a row of commercial buildings on Central Wharf separates the Hutchins and Stubbs shipyard from Union Wharf where the ship C..F. Sargent is being built in the Blanchard shipyard. Although two of these buildings were originally constructed as warehouses, the Yarmouth ships of the 1860’s and 1870’s were so big that they were never intended to carry their cargoes of wheat and cotton back to the shallow Royal River where they were born. The oldest warehouse, built for the West India trade, ended up holding local products like hay and pottery for small coastal schooners. The little building on the right was Sawyer’s fish market which had a huge iron kettle for boiling lobsters. In the 1870’s a nickel would buy one of those lobsters!

In a future column I will return to the bold, innovative and somewhat ill-fated efforts of the Blanchards, Yarmouth’s most well known family of sea captains and shipbuilders. Several of their largest ships were lost before they could return a profit to the family. Others, like the C.F. Sargent which is under construction in this picture, had narrow escapes from disaster. A tsunami nearly destroyed the Sargent when she was loaded with guano and ready to sail from a Peruvian seaport. According to Rowe, the ship “rose on the crest of the wave and spun like a top on the sea.” Miraculously the staunchly built vessel survived to sail another day––much like her namesake the merchant Cyrus F. Sargent who was briefly detained for treasonous pro-Southern sympathies shortly after the Civil War broke out.

If you are intrigued by pictures and stories such as these, I encourage you to visit the Yarmouth Historical Society. You can find them in person on the top floor of the town library or you can visit them online at http://www.yarmouthmehistory.org/. Because they have some very exciting plans to relocate their museum and research facilities to the old Water District building on East Elm Street, I will soon share with you some wonderful photographs of what that area looked like a century ago.

The unique Cribstone Bridge to Bailey’s Island was born out of a blood feud but it is now a cherished symbol of Harpswell.

 Since it is summertime in Casco Bay, many readers of The Notes will travel over or under this famous Bailey’s Island landmark that has just survived three years of rehabilitation by the Department of Transportation. As a resident of Orr’s Island, I can attest that all three of the Rt. 24 bridges from Cook’s Corner to Bailey’s Island offer dangerously distracting views in opposite directions. To add to the fun, two of the bridges take sudden dips and curves as they follow the original line of ledges. Then the road suddenly rises up to leave a little headroom for fishing boats. In fact, you might want to hold off texting how pretty it is until you’ve cleared the SAD 75 school bus that’s probably on the bridge with you. 

 In 1821 the northern end of Orr’s Island was linked by a bridge and causeway to Great Island––more than a century before the cribstone bridge connected the southern end of Orr’s to Bailey’s Island in 1928. This delay was no accident. In a small town like Harpswell, costly proposals that involve major changes in how things get done are guaranteed to rile up a whole string of town meetings. Consider, for example, the recent dust ups over constructing an L.N.G. terminal and consolidating the town’s two schools. 

The unique design of the granite cleverly absorbs the force of ocean waves and

reduces the current flowing through the main channel.

 The first serious design for a bridge to Bailey’s Island was drawn up in 1880 by George L.Vose who was highly respected as a professor of civil engineering at Bowdoin. It was Vose who rejected the popular notion that the bridge had be constructed of local stone combined with sections perched on driven piles. He argued that piles could not be driven into the ledges that fringe Will’s Gut and that the local stone was unsuitable for the causeway because it was “too friable.” He went on to suggest that curving the bridge to follow the inner line of ledges would reduce the amount of granite needed for the causeway.

 Over the next forty years, the arguments for and against the bridge were so intense that the issue had to resolved in court several times. Harpswell historian Richard Wescott called it a blood feud. Understandably, the voters on Bailey’s Island were generally in favor of the bridge, while other folks argued it was simply too expensive for a small town to finance such a big project. Nevertheless, by the 1920’s popular support began to shift toward the bridge. Gasoline engines not only brought a flood of tourists, but they also made it possible for fishermen to put out to sea without having to carry a sailing rig through Will’s Gut. In addition, state and county financing for big transportation projects became available after 1920.

 In 1926 and 1927 the cribstone bridge was pieced together out of Pownal granite that was hauled to a landing on the Cousins River in Yarmouth (now the site of the Muddy Rudder restaurant). Frank Knight, who is 102, told me that he worked on this project and that the same vein of granite used for the bridge was also used to construct Yarmouth’s Catholic Church.

 The final design of the bridge closely followed Vose’s original plan, but it reduced the number of openings through the span from three to one. The distinctive criss-cross of granite slabs (the “cribstones”) allows the tide to swirl through the bridge instead of acting like a huge dam and sluiceway. This greatly reduces the impact of storm surges and also considerably weakens the intensity of the current that flows through the single narrow opening. In this way the unique design of the bridge works with nature instead of fighting every big green wave that rolls in from the North Atlantic. Personally, I also like the fact that not long after you cross the cribstone bridge, the highway comes to an abrupt end. In an age of endless choices and committees to discuss options, there is something refreshing and unambiguous about a road that simply stops in the ocean. When it comes to life on islands, the sea always gets the final word.

Hidden along the banks of the Harraseeket River Pettengill Farm is a house full of very old secrets

Although I enjoy researching and writing about history, I love it when history simply smacks me in the face. For example, I didn’t know anything about Freeport’s lovely Pettengill Farm until one gorgeous summer day in 1974 when it suddenly loomed over my head and announced its presence. At the time I was living on Staples Point near the Harraseeket River and enjoyed canoeing far up into the tidal streams near Mast Landing.

The Pettengill House in Freeport is a treasure that has survived for over 200 years without ever being"modernized" with electricity or indoor plumbing.

 What I saw on that hill overlooking my canoe looked like a movie set for colonial Salem. In the photograph you can see the northwest corner of the Pettengill House. The long sloping roof of its “saltbox” style was designed to carry the cold north wind up and away from the farmhouse while the double row of windows on the southern facade invited in the sunshine. What we now describe as a clever bit of passive solar engineering was probably just viewed as common sense in the old days.

The more I learned about the Pettengill House, the more mysterious it became. The saltbox style suggested a home from the late 17^th to mid 18^th century, but I discovered that all of the earliest settlers’ homes in what is now the Yarmouth and Freeport area were destroyed in a series of bloody Indian wars in the 1670’s and 1680’s. When these early homes were abandoned or burned, their owners fled to Boston if they were lucky.

 

 An archaeological dig at the Pettengill farm in 1978 confirmed that an older building did occupy the site in the late 1600’s and was destroyed by fire. This interrupted settlement pattern meant that many decades later when settlers returned to the area, they were more likely to use newer architectural styles such as Georgian/Colonial. When Joseph and Aaron Lufkin built the current Pettengill house around 1800, they were apparently influenced by the old saltbox homes they had known in Gloucester, Massachusetts where they had grown up. 

Around 1850 a Porters Landing sea captain and store owner named Charles Pettengill bought the farm and 120 acres. After 1925 the farm was being run by his grandchildren Frank and Millie Pettengill, neither of whom ever married. They eked out a subsistence lifestyle, raising their own food and earning cash mostly from the sale of milk. They plowed their fields with a horse and cut their own ice in the winter. Millie walked everywhere to collect local plants and combined them into beautiful flower gardens.

 Unfortunately, as they grew older, it became much more difficult for Frank and Millie to live by themselves in a house that was heated only by wood and never modernized with plumbing and electricity. In 1959, their situation attracted the attention of Lawrence M.C. Smith and his wife Eleanor who offered the Pettengills a kind of reverse mortgage. The arrangement gave Frank and Millie some financial security and the right to live at the farm even though the title to the land passed to the Smiths.

Before she died at the age of 98, Millie told the Smiths about another mysterious feature of the house. She described whales, sea monsters and old sailing ships that were scratched into the plaster walls. This “sgraffitti” as it was called, had been hidden under layers of wallpaper. Oddly enough, these images sometimes refer to events from the War of 1812, which was a time when the house was probably not even occupied. 

Mysterious images scratched on the walls and a secret packet of letters in the attic

add to the mysteries of the Pettengill Farm.

Personally, I think the most fascinating mystery associated with the Pettengill farm is the packet of letters found in the attic after the property was transferred to the Freeport Historical Society. To find out more about Millie’s secret romance and what it was really like to live at the Pettengill Farm, I highly recommend seeing the video Words from Millie’s Garden. This documentary by Ronald J. Gillis is available from the Freeport Historical Society. Visit their website, www.freeporthistoricalsociety.org or stop by their museum at 45 Main Street in Freeport to see what archaeologists have discovered at the Pettengill farm. The current exhibit is called “Diggin’ History: Piecing Together Pettengill Farm’s Past.”

Yarmouth's Old Brick Store

 Today’s column reawakens a very old tradition at The Notes.  For many years, each edition of this paper featured “The Way We Were”--an old photograph from one of the towns covered in its circulation area. Like many local residents, I remember being fascinated by those images and slightly frustrated that their tiny captions didn’t reveal very much. Years later, when I was trying to locate vintage pictures for my photographic history of Yarmouth, I found that the first thing many old time residents would thrust into my hands was a thick folder of yellowed images torn from those old copies of The Notes. 

 My approach will be little different. Instead relying on a brief caption, I promise to breathe life into each old picture by providing odd bits of historical background and telling stories linked to that image. Eventually, some of my columns will leave you with an occasional “cliffhanger” to encourage you to visit the website of one of the local historical societies in order to find additional stories and photos about that topic.

Source: Collection of Alan Hall

 I’ve chosen today’s photograph because it takes us right back to the origins of The Notes.  Many of you will recognize this old brick store that still exists on Main Street in Yarmouth, near the Baptist Church.  Although dozens of commercial ventures have occupied this location since it was built around 1830, it has a special place in the history of The Notes because it is where Ken Larrabee first edited and published this paper.  Full of energy and opinions, Ken clearly savored his role as a community gadfly.  He and his friends like Phil Shephard and Stan Milton could turn a breakfast at the Downeast restaurant into a full-blown debating society with topics ranging from controlling nuclear arms to controlling the “bloated” town budget.

 But even in his most indignant editorials, Ken’s commentaries were meek compared to a 19^th century newspaper publisher who occupied this building.  In the 1830’s a fiery Universalist minister named Zenas Thompson became the scourge of the First Parish Church. Thompson’s newspaper, The Christian Pilot blasted the Congregationalists for their narrow-minded view of salvation and for their habit excommunicating people for things like setting up a dancing school in Yarmouth. Indeed, it was James C. Hill, the owner of the Brick Store at that time, who ignited the dancing school crisis when he rented a house to the Universalists for their dancing school.  After Hill and his wife were excommunicated for promoting indecent behavior, he got even by purchasing a printing press and bringing Zenas Thompson to unleash his attacks on the First Parish.

 Today’s photograph shows the building around 1880.  William Marston’s clothing store on the left was carried on by his son until just about the time that The Notes was founded in 1952. The odd-looking pole on the left side of the photo was an advertisement for Isaac Johnson’s barber shop.  He was an ex-slave who came to Yarmouth after the Civil War.

 The Yarmouth Historical Society has an excellent collection of materials related to today’s story, including the First Parish Church records about the excommunications and a copy of Zenas Thompson’s Christian Pilot declaring the innocence of James Hill.  To find out more about the activities of the Yarmouth Historical Society, visit their website at http://www.yarmouthmehistory.org/.