The currently best-remembered Vanceboro School was built in 1925 at a then cost of $30,000 ($543,724.86 in today’s currency). The town population at that time was about 600, with more than 180 students in attendance.
It was a two-story Greek-revival style building that included all, then-modern, improvements such as steam heat, electric lights, running water, and electric ventilating system. The rooms were large, well-lit, finished in varnished dark wood with walls of light and dark green.
The first story was one large room separated by folding doors separating 1st & 2nd grade at the front from 3rd-6th to the rear. The doors, when opened, became a large auditorium for school entertainments. Grades 7-8 occupied the 2nd story front, with one large and one smaller room to the rear for the High School. The sidewalls in each room were configured as a cloakroom for winter coats and boots.
The toilets, lavatory, boiler room, and chemistry lab were in the basement. Entry/exit was restricted to boys on the left and girls on the right. The playground at the rear, not shown, contained a merry-go-round, slide, swings, and gym rings. Basketball was played in the Knights of Pythias Hall across the street.
The back of the Vanceboro school. The Knights of Pythias Hall is to the left, across Third Street. The hall was used for community events as well as school dances and basketball games.
The daily schedule in later years had classes starting at 8:30 a.m.; two 15-minute recesses (upper & lower schools) between 10:00-10:30; a 30-minute lunch period whereupon students walked home (uphill in the snow both ways); ending at 3:00 p.m. From 2:30 p.m., high school students were expected to study and prepare for the next day’s classes.
Of note is the seven on five high school class schedule used, at least the last many years. In order to offer enough credits so students could earn sufficient for graduation, seven class period subjects (times two for the two teachers) were planned. However, there were only five actual periods in the school day, so the schedule looked like this:
1st Day: 1,2,3,4,5
2nd Day: 6,7,1,2,3
3rd Day: 4,5,6,7,1
4th Day: 2,3,4,5,6
5th Day: 7,1,2,3,4
6th Day: 5,6,7,1,2
7th Day: 3,4,5,6,7
REPEAT
The last graduating high school class was 1967 with, thereafter, grade 9-12 students attending Lee Academy or East Grand High School. The elementary school was moved to an all-new facility on High Street in 1993 (closed permanently in 2016 and is now a town facility and home to the Vanceboro Historical Museum). The hall and school were subsequently demolished, and the town fire station occupies the school grounds.
A VENERATED, ICONIC EDUCATOR
It should be no surprise that one truly special teacher taught there for its entire existence. Madeline Hazel Field.
Born in Vanceboro on August 11, 1901, to Lewis A. & Mary C. (Sullivan) Field, she attended the local schools, graduating in 1919. She then passed two years at the University of Maine and began a teaching career at high schools in Columbia Falls, Jonesport, Harrington, and Caribou.
Continuing her education with summer classes, she began what became a life’s work as a high school assistant in the new Vanceboro High School when it opened in 1925, ending when it closed in 1967. She was awarded her bachelor’s degree from the University of Maine in 1933. She also became a full member of the American Association of French Teachers.
Teaching English, Latin, and French, her faithful and efficient work earned her the esteem of parents and students during her entire tenure. Her no-nonsense demeanor and instructional delivery gave her students a solid linguistic foundation. She passed away May 3rd, 1973, an exemplary personification of “Teacher.”
On Oct. 1, 1886 George W. Ross of Vanceboro Maine received a five year lease on the Junction House in McAdam, New Brunswick.1
The two story building to the far left, in the distance, is the Junction House hotel. The large building in the center is the New Brunswick Railway Station. In 1885, the Junction House was located between the north and east railroad tracks, close to the current tunnel.2
Mr. Ross was well known in Vanceboro and had many business interests. In January 1887 he became the proprietor of the Vanceboro Dining Hall (the railroad station restaurant and hotel) by purchasing all of the furniture and furnishings from his uncle, Michael Ross.3 He appointed Mr. Frank L. Thurber of Bangor to manage the Hotel in McAdam. Dan Bishop also managed the Hotel in McAdam for a time after Thurber.
The St. Croix Courier of August 1886 states that Ross planned to connect the two hotels with a telephone line.4 The Courier of May 30, 1889 confirms the telephone line was in use at this date.5 This may have been the first telephone connection out of McAdam. The Courier of Nov. 4, 1886 tells of a grand re-opening party at the Junction House.6 A special train with a large party from Vanceboro arrived in McAdam at 5:30 p.m. The evening began with a large meal followed by speeches given by Mr. Johnson and Mr. Sprague of Vanceboro, and Mr. Steves of Bangor. Mr. Watts of McAdam delivered a talk on the History of McAdam from 1871. There was singing by the railroad manager, Mr. Cram, and Mrs. Conley, with music provided by the Vanceboro Brass Band. Mr. Moreau of Vanceboro was the master of ceremonies.
Mr. Ross owned an 18 acre vegetable farm in Vanceboro. The produce was used to supply his hotels. George Ross was also a pig farmer and is mentioned in American Berkshire Record‘s ”Index to Owners”:7
Ross, George W., Vanceboro Me.
Boars:
* Cato of Riverside, Registry #: 25655
Sows:
* Juno of Riverside, Registry #: 25656
* Minnie of Riverside, Registry #: 25657
A Guest Book from the Junction House, the only known artifact of this hotel, is currently on display at the McAdam Train Station. Dated April 28, 1887, it reads “Geo. W. Ross Proprietor,” in the upper right corner. The Guest Book date for April 27, 1887 has an entry for Sir Leonard and Lady Tilley of Fredericton. Tilley was one of the Fathers of Confederation and at that date held the position of Lieutenant Governor of N.B. George W. Ross retired from operating the Junction House on Oct, 1, 1891.8
– Proprietor of a confectioner shop and filling station
– Postmaster General, Vanceboro
George Ross’s business life is one example of how the communities of Vanceboro and McAdam have been linked in many ways over the past 150 years. Ross ran the Junction House in the heyday of the small New Brunswick and Canadian Railway, just before it was bought out and transformed by the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Ross’s most famous arrest was the a German Spy, Werner Horn, who tried to blow up the Railway bridge connecting Vanceboro and St. Croix New Brunswick. This arrest received international attention on both sides of the Atlantic. ↩︎
Additional references:
Maine Register Or State Yearbook and Legislative Manual 1891 (free google book ), page 743
Court Directory and Court Officers , Washington Co. Maine , 1925
Vanceboro shared a serious piece of world history when it hosted, at the railroad station, the British Balfour Mission delegation.
The Mission, also referred to as the Balfour Visit, was a formal diplomatic visit to the United States by the British Government during World War I, shortly after the United States’ declaration of war on Germany (1917).
The mission’s purpose was to promote wartime cooperation, and to assess the war-readiness of Britain’s new partner. British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, President Woodrow Wilson and chief advisor, Colonel Edward House, had a meeting that discussed the secret treaties which bound Britain and France to Italy and the proposed Balfour Declaration.
The Declaration was a public statement issued by the British Government announcing its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration was made in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland.
The declaration had many long-lasting consequences. It greatly increased popular support for Zionism within Jewish communities worldwide and became a core component of the British Mandate for Palestine, the founding document of Mandatory Palestine. It indirectly led to the emergence of the State of Israel and is considered a principal cause of the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict, often described as the world’s most intractable conflict.
Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour’s Issued Declaration
The American Commission at the Vanceboro Station, April 21, 1917
Generals George Leonard Wood, Robert Edward Lee Michie, Robbins, Admiral Frank F. Fletcher, and others2
Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long greeting Foreign Minister, the Earl, Arthur James BalfourThe combined parties start for Washington
Footnotes
Balfour, Arthur James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Collection. The Balfour visit: how America received her distinguished guest. Edited by Towne, Charles Hanson New York: George H. Doran Co, 1917. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/17030750/. ↩︎
George Warren Ross was, at various times in his life, a proprietor, postmaster, game warden, a state detective and the town’s deputy sheriff. He ran the railroad hotel and restaurant, owned a confectionery and ice cream shop, had an interest in the roller skating rink, co-owned the Armstrong Picture House, and ran a filling station. George, one might say, was a big bass in a small pond.1
Ross moved to Vanceboro before the town incorporated in 1884, even before President Grant himself opened the European & North American Railway in 1871. Born on July 11, 1858, the oldest of five, the son of a latch mill worker in Winn, Ross was fifteen when he was sent to apprentice as a clerk at his uncle, Michael L. Ross’s railroad hotel and restaurant. In 1882, twenty-four years old, he married Mary Bishop from Prince Edward Island and two years later welcomed his first child, a son named Warren.
Warren died in infancy and it appears Ross threw himself into work and community. In 1887 he bought out his uncle’s interest in the hotel and restaurant and then ran the whole affair for another nine years. He nurtured his various dealings and properties, accepted the role of postmaster general, then deputy sheriff and took to the rails as a state detective, ferreting out petty thieves traveling the dinky from Vanceboro to Bangor. During the summers he travelled with different circuses as a legal adjuster. By the time Mary delivered a daughter, Marion, twelve years later, in 1896, George had built them all quite a successful life.
At forty, George W. Ross joined the Maine Warden Service. It was 1898, and a slew of new game laws had just come into effect. As deputy sheriff, he already had the power to arrest poachers, but the additional warden pay plus half the fines and all the carcasses for each conviction would have made the job especially appealing. Within a year he was in an all-out battle of wits with notorious poacher George Magoon.
In some obvious ways, the two Georges were a lot alike. They married the same year. Both jumped into family and community life. Both were short and stout with clear moral principles and endless energy for the things that mattered to them. Persistent, determined, and enterprising, each in their own fashion, it seems, was larger than life.
They were also different. George Magoon was nineteen when he bought a hardscrabble farm near Love’s corner in Crawford, a full fifty miles south of Vanceboro. He didn’t have much as a kid, but he was no stranger to hard work. At twenty, he married Etta Love and together they had seven children. They raised cattle and pigs, tended a big garden and a large apple orchard. Magoon worked the lumber camps in the winter, the river drives in the spring, and he hunted year round for food and profit as was his right, or so he felt.
Ross and Magoon met on the Crawford battlefield for the next seventeen years. Ross shot Magoon’s best deer dog, arrested him for hunting, issued search warrants for his property, and resorted to clever entrapment schemes. Magoon thwarted Ross at every turn, escaping from the Machias jail, enlisting lawyers to fight Ross’s harassment and entrapments, and with the help of his many loyal friends, evaded Ross more often than not.
Nonetheless, George W. Ross’s dogged determination landed him the chief game warden job and newspaper headlines. The winter of 1915, when he announced his upcoming retirement he was the darling of the warden service and the press. The local edition of The Maine Woods sent him home strutting like a rooster. “Famous as a Game Warden” the title of the article announced.3
“Chief among his assets is his versatility. He can give a horse thief a good start and then catch him, trim out the cleverest scheme which the poachers of his county have invented; drive one horse or a dozen, run a circus, hunt and fish, tell stories of the woods galore, and take a hand in politics when necessary.”
The article continues. “When he went into the warden service, Washington County was regarded as a hotbed of poaching. The game laws were regarded as of little consequence. Scarcely a train or boat left the county which did not contain game or fish which was being cut contrary to law. Warden Ross, largely through his vigilance, put an end to the practice.
Warden Ross has ferreted out, in the course of his official career, a number of the daring poachers and has been over long and circuitous trails to their hiding places. Though the mission has been fraught with some danger, he has invariably landed his man.”
Given the chance, George Magoon, who was still poaching deer and moose after Ross’s retirement might have told a different story.
On January 30, 1915, German reservist Werner Horn, dressed in a rough coat and cap, stepped off the train from Boston. The Great War was on. Canada was engaged, but the United States had not yet entered. Horn immediately drew attention in Vanceboro. Two young people, Mr. Hunter and Miss Armstrong, reported seeing him place a large brown suitcase behind a woodpile before walking toward the railroad bridge. Questioned by an American immigration inspector, Horn identified himself as Olaf Hoorn and explained that he was Dutch businessman looking to buy property.
Horn stayed a few days at the Exchange Hotel, run by a twenty-six year old Aubrey Tague and his sister Bertha. The German checked out on a frigid cold evening of Feb 1 and instead of catching the train to Boston made his way to the bridge. At 1:10am that next morning, a loud blast woke the community. Windows broke in a number of homes and businesses, including the hotel. People thought it must be a steam engine accident or an explosion in the heating plant. Deputy Sheriff Ross, it seems, did not get up to investigate.
When, soon after the explosion, a near frozen Horn returned to the Exchange Hotel, a suspicious Aub Tague put on his coat and followed the man’s footprints across First Street and down the hill to the railroad tracks. At the pump house he met Fred Mills and a few other station workers. The stink of burnt sulphur still in the air, he relayed his suspicions. Someone called the superintendent of the Maine Central railroad in Mattawamkeag who called the border patrol who called the Canadian authorities who called the county sheriff. After sorting through the international bureaucracy, deputy sheriff George W. Ross, it seemed, was the local man in charge.
Ross and two Canadian constables marched up the hill to the hotel, where Tague directed them to Horn’s room. Ross arrested Horn and led him to the station’s immigration holding cell. There he learned further details of how Werner Horn, first lieutenant of the German army, sent from Central America to Vanceboro to prevent war supplies from traveling through the United States to St. John and overseas, had attempted to sabotage the bridge with eighty pounds of dynamite. Because the bomb exploded on the Canadian end of the bridge, however, Ross’s only choice was to charge Horn with illegal transfer of explosives and mischief for breaking windows in Vanceboro.
Werner Horn (left) and deputy sheriff George W. Ross, February 4, 1915.
Word spread fast and by that afternoon crowds from both sides of the border were gathered outside the building, clamoring for information and justice. A World Wide News crew arrived by train the next morning. There to greet them in his best suit and tie was George, mustache and hair neatly combed, badge shining bright on his lapel, a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. He alone posed for pictures alongside a stunned Horn. Asked to re-enact the arrest, George complied. Captured on film by a young newsreel cameraman from Boston, Louis de Rochemont, the incident made national news.5
After a time, George received a personal copy of the World Wide Web news reel in the mail. When friends visited, he directed Frank Gatcomb, the projectionist at the Armstrong Picture House, to play the film as a short before the feature. His deputy sheriff star gleaming, his shoulders back, a determined look on his face, the audience cheered George as he rushed the hotel room, threw open the door, drew his big horse pistol and arrested the German saboteur. When the newsreel ended, Frank, on cue, turned up the house lights and George stood and took his bow. It must have been everything a millworker’s son could dream of.
George and the Big Shows
Mary Ross, George’s wife, died in 1920. George continued to travel the United States and Canada by rail as an advance man and legal adjuster for circuses like Hagenbach & Wallace and Howe’s Great London. When a show came to town, people said, he walked around with fifteen or twenty passes, handing them out to all his friends.
“George W. Ross of Vanceboro, the well known detective and deputy sheriff, arrived in Bangor Tuesday after leaving Howe’s Great London Circus in Alabama….Mr. Ross is looking younger and more cheerful than ever, even after his little jaunt over the face of the earth of 25,000 miles, visiting 25 states and five different provinces of Canada since joining the circus as detective last March….”
Vanceboro’s Deputy Sheriff to the End
Throughout his life and into old age, George W. Ross immersed himself in Vanceboro. He was a member of the Knights of Pythias and a Free Mason, attending the Baskahegan Lodge in Danforth, and was a contemporary of early town business leaders such as Stillman Armstrong, E.A. Holbrook, and Horace Kellogg.
A Knights of Pythias gathering. George Ross, 2nd from left.
No one knows when or where George W. Ross became known as Pooch. But one can well imagine why. Ross plied his skills sniffing out poachers at home and Vanceboro was a dry town in Ross’s time. Plenty of local characters tried his patience, shooting deer out of season, making home brew to get through the long winters, smuggling spirits across the border, fighting or generally causing a ruckus. The dogged little man with the bushy white hair and side burns, wide girth and sharp bark, had been hot on their trails for years.
Ross’s Good Gulf Gasoline Filling Station
Travel and adventure behind him, George settled into his life in Vanceboro. He ran Ross’s Good Gulf Gasoline filling station on the convergence of Railroad, Water Street and Salmon Brook Road and lived with his daughter, Marion. In early 1933 he was reappointed, at 74, the oldest deputy sheriff in the state.
“Mr. Ross has completed 40 years of continuous service in the office and has the distinction of being the oldest deputy sheriff in the state, his first appointment having been in 1893….His greatest achievement in criminal arrests was the capture of Werner Horn, the German reservist who blew up the C.P. Ry. bridge over the St. Croix River between Vanceboro and McAdam, N.B. on the morning of Candlemas Day, 1915. This episode was the subject of nation-wide newspaper comment at the time and a movie reel was produced showing Werner Horn and his captor…. Mr. Ross has also traveled widely with several different circuses as a legal adjustor until his health required him to lead a quiet life at his hometown. He is now conducting a filling station in plain view of the railroad bridge where Horn made the town famous to all readers of war news.”
George Warren Ross died on September 13, 1933. The funeral service was, his obituary says, “largely attended and the floral offerings were profuse and beautiful.” He is buried beside his wife Mary in the Vanceboro Cemetery.
Footnotes:
Local observations of Ross are attributed to Lindy Brown (1922-2006), who shared memories of the deputy sheriff with his family. ↩︎
Much of the information in this section has been gleaned from the Sandy Ives book, George Magoon and the Downeast Game War. University of Illinois Press, 1993. ↩︎
Maine Woods, Vol. 37 Issue 46 – June 10 1915 (Local Edition) ↩︎
On Saturday, July 20th Vanceboro will celebrate the town’s 150th Anniversary. The sesquicentennial celebration will include a short program –“Vanceboro: Past, Present, and Future” – along with music, a lunch version of your favorite Saturday bean supper, and the grand reopening of the Vanceboro Historical Society. There will be a chance to recall memories and tell stories of Vanceboro to be included in the historical society archives, tours of the museum, tables with old photographs yet to be identified, and a chance to include your favorite local recipe in the 150th Anniversary Vanceboro Historical Society Cookbook.
Georgia Crandlemire’s Camp de Bass fish chowder
Poke around your family recipe box and send us your favorite – the one that brings you home, reminds you of your grandmother’s love, the warmth of the kitchen on a winter’s night, the bright lights around the Christmas tree. We don’t always consider how recipes passed down through our families preserve local traditions. But more than a taste of home, they’re windows into the culture of those who came before us: bean hole beans baked on the river drives, thick molasses cookies packed in railroad worker’s lunch boxes, fish chowders eaten on cool spring evenings up lake. Vanceboro area recipes hold the delicious stories of our Maine and New Brunswick history.
There are multiple ways to submit your recipe:
Submit electronically: Click here to download a digital version to fill out on your computer/laptop. Then, please email the completed form to cluppi161@gmail.com.
Submit handwritten by mail: Click here to download a recipe form to be printed and completed by hand. Please send printed form and pictures to: Carol Luppi, 161 Quincy Avenue, Winthrop, MA 02152
Submit handwritten at the celebration: You can even bring a recipe and photos with you to the celebration on July 20th. We will also have forms to handwrite recipes available at the celebration.
Check out this sample submission, if just to get the juices flowing.
Story told by Genevieve Gatcomb Smith (Around 1900-1920’s). Written up by her son Raymond Smith
Armstrong’s Picture House was on the second floor of Stillman Armstrong Co. The protruding box above the stairs is the film projection room.
A major attraction in Vanceboro was the movie theater. Pooch Ross1 and Stillman Armstrong started the theater in Armstrong’s old moccasin factory where I had worked. The theater was on the second floor of the building one block south of the railroad tracks at the intersection of Water Street and Holbrook Street.2 This was just about the center of town and just across the street from the Hunter’s home. The railroad station was one block north and one block west.
My brother Frank worked for Mr. Ross and one of his jobs was to run the movie theater. Later, he bought it from Ross and Armstrong and ran it until talking pictures made the old silent movies obsolete. The movies were on Wednesday evening and Saturday afternoon and evening. The Saturday movies were the big event of the week. The town wouldn’t have been the same without them. There were very few radios in town in the early twenties and the roads out of Vanceboro were gravel. In the spring, they were virtually impassable because of the thaw and resulting frost heaves and mud. As unrealistic as they were, the movies gave us a touch of the outside world.
I sold the tickets except on Saturday afternoon when Mama took over the job. They were ten cents for children and twenty-five cents for adults. Frank ran the projector which was powered by a generator run by Frank’s car after the powerhouse fire. He simply jacked it up and attached a drive belt from the rear wheel to the spindle of the generator. Since the movies were silent, there was a piano on stage to the right of the screen and a pianist played the music which had been scripted to the film and sent with it. Maude Dickinson, the piano teacher, was the first person to hold this job. She taught Flo to play the piano and tried without much success to teach Ray. Lucy Farnum took over the musician’s job at the theater after Maude left and then Florence.
The movie consisted of several individual reels so Frank always had slides to show while he was changing the reels. The movies would start with a slide showing a lady with a huge hat and the title, “Ladies, please remove your hats.” That would be followed by a slide or two of oncoming attractions. First there was a comedy short followed by some advertising slides while Frank rigged up the next reel. His advertising slides were sometimes hilarious because Frank made them himself and was a terrible speller. He might have something like, “Holbrooks Store For A Fine Gift Of Julery.” After the comedy, he would either have a news reel or a serial episode. The news might be two months old but to us it was news. Today’s soap operas are an outgrowth of the movie serial. The average movie consisted of four reels.
Ralph took the tickets and when Frank put on a local stage production, he was one of the lead singers. Ralph had a wonderful voice. He and Flo were the musical ones in the family. Les and Ray sold cracker jacks and popcorn, which we popped at home. I can still see them between reels, walking down the isles with their wares in a box supported by a strap around their neck. Les and Ray also cleaned out the theater. After a show, it was an awful mess. One of Frank’s slides that went up after every reel read, “Please Don’t Spit on the Floor!” That was a waste of time because there were lots of tobacco chewers and they spit copious amounts of Spearhead juice during the course of a movie. It was especially bad in the back row.
There were certain regular customers who insisted on the same seat each time. They would come early to get them and surprisingly enough, on the whole, people would honor their unwritten desire and avoid taking, for example, Mrs. Crocker’s or Mrs. Hunter’s seat. In fact, there was usually a jostling to get a seat near Mrs. Crocker. If she happened to be a bit late, her favorite spot would be open and all the seats around it taken up. Keep in mind that the movies were titled as the action went on but not all adults could read. Allie Crocker was in that fix, but she loved the movies and got very vocal and excited. She was a fairly good yard stick on which to measure how good a movie was. If the villain would sneak up behind the heroine to grab her, Allie couldn’t contain herself and might shout, “Watch out! The bastard’s right behind you!”
If someone missed a show, they would want to know what Mrs. Crocker told the actors.
There wasn’t a toilet associated with the theater so every one had to hold their water. Some of the kids would pee down the steam pipes by the walls. There was a combination of individual seats and long benches. So, on the benches, you could always get a seat by just squeezing everyone a bit more. On the whole, the crowd was well behaved because they were truly interested in the films. The children loved Tom Mix, Jack Hickox, Ernest Torrance and the westerns. The adults drooled over Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Douglas Fairbanks or William S. Hart and everyone went wild over Charlie Chaplin.
The silent movies gave the children a great incentive to learn to read. Some adults like Fred Mills couldn’t read, so he needed a reader. Elmer Swaney sometimes read the words for Fred that appeared on the screen. Fred was very smart in other ways. He worked on the railroad and knew the number of every train that came in just by the looks of it. This encouraged the kids even more to want to read.
Footnotes:
Pooch, a Vanceboro nickname given to George W. Ross, the town’s deputy sheriff, perhaps because he was a short squat man with ample white hair and sideburns or maybe because of his dogged determination. ↩︎
Holbrook Street, in this reference, is now Route 6, known historically as Railroad Street, The Old Codyville Road and The Lambert Lake Road. ↩︎
In August 1945, according to the Maine Central Employees Magazine, the 56 miles of jointly operated Maine Central and Canadian Pacific rail line between Vanceboro and Mattawamkeag was maybe the hottest single track in America. Twenty-four or more trains a day traveled from Vanceboro to Mattawamkeag and on to Megantic, Quebec. That’s a train every hour – at least. On March 15th of that year “32 trains were run, including eight passenger trains and 24 freight trains.”1 Each Canadian Pacific freight heading east toward Vanceboro averaged 40 cars. Maine Central running west averaged 69.
The freight trains were heavy and traveled steep grades through all kinds of weather. This meant double heading or using two locomotives at the front of the train, each operated by its own crew. The men were experienced, the track well cared for and though accidents were rare, they sometimes happened and with devastating effects. The accident in Lambert Lake was especially tragic.
It was December 12, 1950 and Canadian Pacific train #951 was hauling general merchandise west from McAdam to Brownville Junction. It had been raining for days, so much so that a Penobscot River rise at Mattawamkeag halted travel on the Boston-Halifax, Nova Scotia line.2
Danny McCracken of McAdam recalls the horrific early morning scene as it unfolded:
“December 12th was very dark and wet when shortly after 6:15 am the shop whistle with a series of long blasts alerted McAdam that there had been a wreck on the CPR. Immediately men rushed to work, those working alerted a train crew & made an engine ready to take the auxiliary to the scene. A local store keeper went to his store and got ready a list of foods to be picked up for the crew of carmen who would be away for a number of days. My Dad was contacted and directed to go to the scene of the wreck instead of his normal 8am operator’s job at the station. Train #951 with 2 steam engines, #2597 & #5166 had hit a track washout 3571 feet East of the Lambert Lake Station. The 3 men in 2597 suffered injuries, but the 2 men in 5166 were killed. The 2 engines and first 16 cars of the 34 car & 2 Vans (cabooses) derailed.”
The crash was the result of a series of unexpected and unprecedented events. According to the Interstate Commerce Commission Report, there was no initial cause for alarm.3 The engineer and the fireman of Extra 5332 East, an east-bound CP freight train that passed through about about an hour and a half earlier, said that it was raining hard but the engine rode smoothly. They noticed no water on the track nor anything unusual.
And everyone had done their jobs. “Because of the heavy rain, the track was being patrolled ahead of all passenger trains. The section foreman had inspected the track about 4pm the previous day and had assigned two employees to patrol the track during the night. One patrolman had inspected the track and observed conditions in the vicinity of the point of accident…2 hours 15 minutes before the derailment occurred. He examined both ditches and did not consider the flow of water to be excessive. At that time there were no indications of scouring and he saw no condition which he considered abnormal or dangerous.”4
The crash occurred at 5:15am. The Commission Report describes in detail what happened:
“As No, 951 was approaching the point where the accident occurred the speed was about 35 miles per hour. The brakes of this train, which were being controlled by the engineer of the first engine, had been tested and had functioned properly when used en route. The headlight of the first engine was lighted brightly. The engineer and the fireman of the first engine and the front brakeman were in the cab of the first engine and were maintaining a lookout ahead. The engineer and the fireman of the second engine were in the cab of that engine and the conductor and the flagman were in the caboose. The engineer of the first engine said that It was raining hard as the train approached signal 2464 and that water was running down the side of the cut with considerable force, a condition he had never before observed. He was watching the track closely and after the engine passed signal 2464, which indicated Proceed, he observed that the ballast had been washed from under the north end of the ties. He Immediately made an emergency application of the brakes and the speed was reduced to about 30 miles per hour when the derailment occurred.”5
Interstate Commerce Commission Report, map of the accident
The Waterville Morning Sentinel described it as a “spectacular derailment.” The engineer, fireman, and the brakemen in the first engine were injured when they jumped to safety. Engineer Joseph Doiron and fireman Colin M. McKay in the second engine, died at the scene. Both of Brownville Junction, Doiron was the father of four sons and a daughter, McKay the father of a young son.
The Bangor Daily News, Dec 13, 1950: Trainmen who escaped serious injury in the “tangled mass of wreckage,” left to right: Bert McDermott, Brownville Junction, engineer on first engine. Clayton White, Danforth fireman on first engine and George Madore, Brownville Junction brakeman on first engine, all of whom leaped to safety. Edward Murray, Brownville Junction rear brakeman on first train, and Manners Wansink, Brownville Junction conductor on first train.
After careful consideration, a veteran track supervisor determined that debris had formed a temporary dam across a ravine on the slope and when it broke the surge of water overflowed the dike and undermined the track structure. In the end, the Commission report concluded, the accident was caused by a washout.
Newspapers across the state reported the derailment, the tragic deaths, offered weather-related theories. They published photos of the crash aftermath, engines on their sides, the sheer force of a stop that piled freight cars one on top of the other like a falling row of dominos. But history is not only the description of events and their causes, not just the newsworthy facts. As important, or perhaps more so, history is the way such events land in communities, the way people remember and respond and care for one another in the moment.
Those living in Lambert Lake who awakened that cold rainy morning to the sound of car slamming into car after car, recall something deeper, more personal than what the papers report. They remember the faces of shocked, injured trainmen knocking on their doors in the early morning, recall parents taking the men in, calling out for help. They remember stories of the scene, the sadness of losing two men. They remember a storeowner opening his doors, readying and delivering food to those off to clear the line. As children, they recall walking from their homes the next day to look at the mangled wreck, thinking maybe for the first time in their lives how dangerous a job their father, uncle, cousin had and how fortunate they were to have them home and safe.
Because it is the culture of the area to hold memories of loss and sorrow in song, local balladeer Eldon Yeo of St. Croix captured the tragic event for posterity.
An official report is one thing, useful as an historic document, but Yeo’s song and the many local memories of that December morning paint a richer picture of a border community tied by rail and deep relationships, a close-up view of the care and concern people had for one another.
“‘Hottest’ Single Track in America?” Maine Central Employee Mag, Aug. 1945. ↩︎
Interstate Commerce Commission, Washington, DC. Report no. 3381, Maine Central Railroad Company re Accident Near Lambert Lake, Maine on December 12, 1950. ↩︎
In 1987, Judson Hale’s memoir, The Education of a Yankee, hit the bookshelves. The son of New England Brahmin,1 Roger Hale and Marian (Sagendorph) Hale, herself from a wealthy Philadelphia family, Hale’s early life was spent on an experimental farm his parents built in Vanceboro, just outside the town proper. Though young Hale would go on to succeed his father-in-law as the editor of the Old Farmer’s Almanac and Yankee Magazine, much of his memoir tells the colorful story of life at Sunrise Farm.
Beginnings
Each summer during the 1920s and 30s, Jane Sagendorph, Marian’s mother, traveled from Philadelphia to Vanceboro and then by boat to her log cabin retreat on Star Island in the middle of Palfry Lake. When she could no longer make the trip, she left the island and cabin to Marian and son-in-law, Roger Hale.
Roger’s father, Frank, was a hardworking rags to riches sort, a textile magnate worth millions. Roger and Marian, benefitting from Frank’s largesse, living in upscale Chestnut Hill, just west of Boston. They were so wealthy, Roger didn’t need to work. “Life was one big, long picnic,” his son Judson writes.2 The couple entertained, went to elegant parties and traveled. Roger played polo and tooled around on his 42-foot sailboat.
From The Education of a Yankee. After their three-month honeymoon in Europe, Roger and Marian Hale on their sailboat, Marianette.
When Roger and Marian’s first son, Drake, began experiencing unpredictable spells and violent behavior, they sought medical help. With few answers, they found their way to the Rudolph Steiner School in Switzerland. Steiner, an Austrian scientist and philosopher, was the founder of anthroposophy, an approach to physical and mental health that emphasized the spiritual benefits of the natural world and the arts. Their son responded positively to the school and so, after a time, they left the boy in Switzerland.
The Hales dreamed of building their own experimental anthroposophy center, a place to explore Steiner’s theory and its relationship to nature, education, medicine, the visual and performing arts. Marian was an opera singer and especially attracted to the Steiner philosophy. Their familiarity with Star Island made Vanceboro the obvious choice. In 1936, using a million dollar trust fund his father set up, Roger Hale purchased 12 thousand acres, most from Eastern Pulpwood Co., some from local landowners. The purchased land surrounded the entire town and included over ten miles of lake and river front property.
The Hales began their project in earnest. In addition to buying Stillman Armstrong’s spool mill on Spednic Lake, Roger Hale hired local men to construct two sawmills and then to build nearly fifty structures, including a seventeen room house, a school, greenhouses, a woodworking shop, barns, a lab, and a theater.
Harold Kelly pulling logs into Spednic right before dam. Background far left is spool mill with stack, center is workshop , right is saw mill and far right farm. Edgar Barry collection
The Hales gathered “a veritable herd of horses” for work and play(they trailered riding horses for Marian and Roger from Santa Fe, New Mexico).3 They hired local horse whisperer, Frank Smith, as their main teamster and Carl Hanson as their blacksmith. Teachers for their Mainewoods School, a Waldorf school for 1st-8th grade, came from Switzerland. They hired a couple from New York to chauffeur and run the kitchen. The Hales lavishly furnished their new house with silver wallpaper, original paintings, and a grand piano. Sunrise Farm as they called the entire enterprise would became a spiritual beacon, an educational experiment, a destination for artists and performers, educators and doctors.
Sunrise Farm, just after 1936. The house to the left, barns to the right. Early days, before the school, theater, labs and mills.
And for a time it was all of this. The Hales hosted famous opera singers, artists, and doctors, shuttling them to and from the farm to Star Island on their 26-foot cabin-cruiser, the Milky Way. Marian gave performances and wrote, directed, and produced a series of plays, the most ambitious being a theatrical production of Cinderella staged outdoors with a real coach and horses driven by Frank Smith and casting students from Mainewoods School in the main roles.
Cinderella, presented by students at the Mainewoods School at Sunrise Farm. Ferne Cropley as Cinderella arrived at the ball in a real coach driven by Frank Smith, seen in the background in top hat and tails. Over 150 local people attended.
But it didn’t last, couldn’t last. Roger Hale, his son suggests, built too much, too quickly; spent too much and ran out of money. Hale’s father continued to support the farm for a time but in the end, facing debt, agreed to bail Roger out only if he sold Sunrise Farm. And so, just eleven years after purchasing the property, The Hale family moved back to Chestnut Hill. In 1949 Roger Hale hired Henry. S. Anthony & Co. to auction off the farm.
The Miseducation of Judson Hale
Judson Hale was just three years old in 1936 when the family first moved to Star Island and buildings began to go up at Sunrise Farm. He was still a boy when the family returned to Chestnut Hill. Age and memory are a funny thing, but neither fully account for the inaccurate and sometimes patronizing way he describes Vanceboro and the people living there at the time of his parents’ experiment.
Judson Hale tells his readers that Vanceboro, at the time of the family’s arrival, was “a two-class society: poor and dirt poor.”4 If you weren’t working for customs or the railroad, the saying went, you were working for Hale. That wasn’t entirely true, of course. There were roughly 700 people living in the village at the time the Hales arrived. Local folks owned and ran shops and general stories and gas stations. There was a fairly new school with a principal and well-educated teachers, a post office, a town sheriff. There was WPA work and lumbering and river drives and sporting camps. It was true, with many away fighting in WWII, families welcomed the extra income and some found full time work at Sunrise Farm. Local men farmed the Hale property, worked in the mills and built the Hale’s buildings. Others cared for the herd of dairy cows and other livestock. Local women cooked and cleaned. But Vanceboro was an active railroad hub and international border crossing at the time and doing just fine before the Hales arrived.
In a chapter fittingly called “Audacity,” Judson Hale describes the shock of arriving in a place so remote “there were no inns, hotels, motels…no drug store, no golf courses, no tennis courts, no swimming pools, no summer people, no library, and no organizations like Lions, Rotary, Women’s Club, Historical Society.”5 Their shock says more about the rarified air the Hales breathed than Vanceboro. In fact, there was a station restaurant and hotel. There was an active Knights of Pythias fraternity, Masonic Lodges in McAdam and Danforth, each with an active Order of the Eastern Star. There were sporting camps and lodges with world-class hunting and fishing that appealed to the sort of summer people invisible to the Hales. The entire lake region was a swimming pool. There was a beautiful well-maintained baseball field and a successful town team. There were lively school events and Catholic and Methodist churches where parishioners planned annual picnics, spring socials, and bingo nights.
The people of Vanceboro provide a kind of comic relief for Judson Hale. He gives them a dialect more likely to be found in Jonesport than a border town with New Brunswick, where no one says bahgain for bargain or ayuh for yes. In bits of dialogue good for a laugh but most certainly never uttered (unless purposely to mess with the Hales), local people sound uneducated and, well, stupid. For example, Hale recounts an overheard exchange between a customer and local storeowner, Aubrey Tague (misspelling Teague throughout the book).
Customer: “Y’aint got no eggs today, has yuh?”
Mr. Teague: “I ain’t said I ain’t, did I?”
Customer: “I ain’t asked yuh is y’aint–I asked yuh ain’t yuh is, is yuh?”
Mr. Teague: “Ayuh.”
Anyone who knew the polite and well-spoken Mr. Tague, himself originally from New Brunswick, would never, for a minute, believe it.
On many occasions, Judson Hale positions his mother, Marian — her training as a opera singer, her sophisticated upbringing, her clothing and manners, “her cultured Boston accent”6 — against the uncouth, uncultured local townspeople. She was a lady, unlike a local woman with her “small, snuffling, raggedy” children.7 Local people, he wrote, were in awe of Marian Hale and her efforts, a “first step in bringing culture and the arts” to backwoods Vanceboro.8 To be sure, by the time the Hale’s arrived, The Armstrong Picture House had closed, along with the other productions offered there. But of course, there was the movie house in McAdam and a variety of performances came through town on the railroad. Vanceboro families could take the train to St. John, Calais, Bangor or Boston for events and they did. And while opera may not have been on the Vanceboro docket before the Hales arrived, there was a lot of local music and art, a rich cultural heritage, with fiddlers and singers and poets and dancers. Vanceboro and neighboring towns across the border shared a unique way of life and culture apparently lost on the Hale family.
In the end, Judson Hale writes, their venture brought out “the best and worse in Vanceboro.”9 The best, Hale implies, was the townspeople’s initial embrace of his family, their appropriate awe and adoration, their hard work in the service of Roger Hale’s vision.
The worst was twofold. First, the local suspicion of the German-speaking visitors to the farm and the Swiss teachers the Hales hired. Though not a full excuse — there was some nasty behavior10— in truth it was a scary time. Canada entered the war in 1939; the US in 1941. The two countries shared a fear of Hitler’s army. Yet, had the Hales protected themselves less from “backwards Maine living”11 and built a deeper trust and connection with the community, such suspicions may never have taken hold.
Second were accusations that Hale was “stolen blind” by his workers.12 Roger Hale, his son suggests, was just too honest, an easy mark, someone who paid too much for local work and in the end fell victim to unscrupulous employees. But Hale held the purse strings and was in full charge of all operations. There may have been some light-fingered laborers who stole or wasted lumber or equipment, but the suggestion that this accounts for a million dollar foundering fails the sniff test.
Epilogue
Sunrise Farm went on the auction block on Oct. 26, 1949. Everything went, from land to buildings to farm and lab and mill equipment. In an echo of the earlier land purchase, building construction, and failure of F. Shaw and Bros. tannery, dozens of local folks like Paul Susee, Frank Gatcomb, Daniel and Philip McIver, bought back land and buildings. Like many current and seasonal residents, the Luppi (Crandlemire) family and Alaine and Christopher Hinshaw can trace their camp property to Roger Hale. My grandmother, Louise (Hodgkins) Main, brought up on High Street, bought the Hale farmhouse with its seventeen rooms and six bathrooms and opened a fishing and hunting lodge. Her sister, Muriel (Hodgkins) Kegin, helped cooked for the lodgers and soon after, my mother, Diane (Main) Brown, newly divorced, moved in with her youngest, my brother and sister.
My father, Lindy Brown, was a Vanceboro teenager when the Hales arrived, one of the local boys who chose the railroad over working for Sunrise Farm. Years later, when The Education of a Yankee was published, he gave a copy of the book to my mother as a Christmas present, a reminder of her time on The Farm, as our family called it. The two of them read and talked about Judson Hale’s version of Vanceboro and his off-kilter descriptions of people they knew so well. As was often the case, my mother struggled more with inaccuracies than my father. She wrote Hale a letter informing him that he’d confused Aub Tague with someone else and let him know her mother bought the farmhouse. It’s safe to say, his response — his misrepresentation of her name, continued use of Teague for Tague and pleasant lack of accountability — did not delight her.
There’s more than one or two stories yet to be written about the Hales, Sunrise Farm, and Vanceboro — stories more focused on historical record and less on memory and family loyalty. There are, no doubt, bits and pieces of Sunrise Farm sitting on dusty barn shelves and tucked in garage and basement boxes. Whatever else is written or discovered, there’s no denying the significance of the Hale’s presence and what might have been for Vanceboro.
Footnotes
A Brahmin refers to a socially or culturally superior person, especially one from New England. ↩︎
Judson Hale, The Education of a Yankee, Harper & Row, 1987, p. 33. ↩︎
Frontier Week Fishing Tournament, St. Stephen-Calais, July 3-7, 1961 Photo taken at Loon Bay Lodge (St. Croix River) Back row, l to r: Charles Vaughn (Philadelphia Inquirer), W. G. Hreenaway (Bedford, NS), Dave Roberts (Cincinnati Inquirer), Milton Lounder (guide), Bud Leavitt (Bangor Daily News), Julian T. Crandall (Ashaway Lines), “Happy Jack” Felton (Philadelphia), Horace Tapley (Field & Stream), Jack Keddy (guide), Ted Williams, Elmo Wright (guide). Front row: Fred Brisley (guide), Frank Lounder (guide), unknown, Henry Lounder (forest Ranger and guide), Beecher Scott (guide), unknown, David Scott (guide), Norman Hatheway (Brewer, Maine and winner of fishing tournament), Owen Clendenning (guide).
In the thirties and forties, the only radio station local folks could pick up aired the Yankees games, so a good many baseball fans grew up rooting for Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Micky Mantle. Still, when Red Sox star Ted Williams started showing up with his fishing buddy, Bangor Daily News sports editor and outdoor columnist Bud Leavitt, people were excited to see him.
Vanceboro, where Spednic Lake feeds into the St. Croix River, is pretty much a perfect fishing spot, and Ted Williams loved to fish. He met Leavitt early in his career and together during the off-season they headed north. People from around town remember seeing Williams come and go. He’d stay at local camps, drop into Monk’s store for supplies, and take in an occasional fishing derby. Bill Kaine remembers when Red Sox pitcher Bill Monbouquette came up with Williams a few times and they stayed at the Hilltop Inn. Bill Smith and his friends would go up to the inn and watch them play catch.
Williams had a camp in New Brunswick, up on the Miramichi River, and Jean Hogan recalls working the border when he came through in the early 1990’s. He was also a familiar figure in Grand Lake Stream, where he stayed at Weatherby’s and fished for landlocked salmon in both the lake and the stream.
Williams had a few favorite guides while in town. Milton Lounder from McAdam would take him up lake to stay at Loafer’s Lodge. Elmo Wright, considered one of the best whitewater guides on the St. Croix, would take Williams down the river to Loon Bay.
Guides at Loon Bay: From left, Eddie Scott, Elmo Wright, Beecher Scott, Jack Keddy, Milton Lounder, and Fred Brisley
If he was not fishing with lifelong pal, Leavitt, “the last of the 400 hitters” spent hours casting a line in solitude, no doubt enjoying time away from the limelight.
But in a baseball town like Vanceboro, it’s no surprise that every boy with a glove would do his damnedest to chance a meeting with Williams. Richard Monk tells of the time he and his brother skipped school to sneak up lake, only to receive a chilly reception. “The Kid” was on vacation and wanted nothing to do with them. Richard was so upset he went home and cut up all his Ted William’s baseball cards.
Richard might be happy to know that Williams, as they say, could get a little ugly. Jack Gartside, a noted fly-tier, remembered standing around the Fenway Park entrance as a boy, hoping to catch sight of arriving ballplayers. His friend who got there before him said, “You’ll never believe this, but Ted Williams talked to me before he talked to anyone else.”
“No kidding. What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Get out of my way, kid.'”
A ten-year-old Bill Brown remembers meeting Williams in 1961, the year the ballplayer retired. “I had a chance to meet him in St. Croix. He was in a fishing group with Bud Leavitt, his daughter, and others. They put in just on the other side of the trestle and canoed down to Loon Bay. I got up early, walked across the trestle and got his autograph before they put in.”
When he was sixteen, Gary Beers and a bunch of his friends “trekked through the woods to a camp (might have been Christensen’s) on the lake to see if we could meet him. When we got to the ridge overlooking, we saw his daughter Barbara (about 14 then) on the dock, casting a fly into what appeared to be an 18″ tube thing.. .. at about 40′. No teen-aged boy I’ve ever known would walk up to that. We slunk away quietly.”
Williams’ connections to Maine were long-lasting—from promoting Moxie during his playing days to Nissen bread in his retirement.
Considered one of the greatest hitters of all time, Ted Williams was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1966. Also considered one of the greatest fly-fishers, he was inducted into the Fishing Hall of Fame in 2000. The latter is an accomplishment Vanceboro townspeople, guides, and sports camp owners can feel part of.
A newspaper ad created for J. J. Nissen Bread in Portland, featuring sports journalist Bud Leavitt, Jr. and baseball great Ted Williams.
Addie and Stillman with Stillman’s brother, George, in New Hampshire’s White Mountains
Stillman R. Armstrong (1879-1938) was Vanceboro’s version of a Renaissance man. At various points in his relatively short life, he was a taxidermist, a shoe manufacturer, an inventor, the co-owner of Vanceboro’s silent movie house, a fire insurance agent, the owner of a lumber mill, and the proprietor of the town’s first electrical plant.
Armstrong was more than an astute businessman, though. As former Vanceboro resident Herb Gallison wrote in his memoir, The Long Life and Pretty Good Times of Herb Gallison, Armstrong was beloved in Vanceboro for his creative energy and commitment to the well-being of the community.
“More than any of his contemporaries he was altruistically civic-minded, too honorable to ever be politically inclined. Everything he developed improved the living conditions in our community. He made jobs for and paid good wages to local people who weren’t on the MCRR payroll. He provided [the town] with our first household electric power, enabling us to have useful appliances and retire our smoky kerosene lamps. He introduced us to our first moving pictures.”1
Armstrong was born on February 6, 1879 in Perth, New Brunswick, a village located just across the St. John River from Fort Fairfield, Maine. In 1899, at the age of twenty, Stillman co-owned Hill & Armstrong’s Taxidermy Shop in Fort Fairfield. In 1903, he married Adele “Addie” Marion Levesque from Grand Isle, Maine, an Acadie village just north on the St. John River. Perhaps realizing the importance of the US Canada railway to an emerging entrepreneur and businessman, the couple moved to Vanceboro.
In February of 1904, Stillman purchased a house on the corner of Railroad St. and Salmon Brook Road from Charles Hunter, E.A. Holbrook, and E.T. Holbrook. The following August he bought the Railroad Street property next door, from Horace Kellogg. There he constructed a two story building and began manufacturing shoes under the business name Stillman Armstrong Co. The next year, he and Addie welcomed a son, Vose, their first of twelve children.
Armstrong was, by then, also operating a taxidermy shop. As a newspaper article of the time reports, the shop employed two part-time workers and did “very fine work” mounting moose, deer, and caribou heads sent to him from as far away as Alaska and Newfoundland.”
S. Armstrong Taxidermist advertisement on the side of Aub Tague’s store on First Street. There is no record of Armstrong purchasing or using this building for his business. The shop may have been housed in Stillman Armstrong Co.
Armstrong Moccasins: Yours from Maine
Stillman Armstrong Co’s specialty and most popular shoe was the moccasin and he advertised them widely.
“Here is a Moccasin that fits; it’s clean, stylish and restful to the foot” the ad claims. “They wear forever — are forever worn….Yours from Maine”
He studied the moccasin’s construction and on Feb. 21, 1909, filed a patent with the U.S. Patent Office:
“Be it known that I, STILLMAN ARMSTRONG, a citizen of the United States, residing at Vanceboro, in the county of Washington and State of ‘Maine, have invented new and useful Improvements in Moccasins….”
The invention, he continues, “has for its object the provision of a moccasin of the ‘low quarter” style, in which the disposition of the lacing flaps insures the secure fastening of the moccasin against looseness and slip; and, furthermore, such lacing flaps, together with the tongue, when arranged in accordance with my invention, afford a complete protection for the instep of the wearer; these results being accomplished without adding materially to the weight or cost of the moccasin, and without detracting from its appearance or comfort.”
“In order that the invention may be understood by those skilled in the art I have illustrated in the drawings herewith one embodiment of my invention….”
Armstrong’s “new and useful improvements” were popular and the patent, it would seem from his subsequent land purchases and businesses, was quite profitable. His design remains a fundamental reference for other patent applications. A search for Armstrong’s patent number takes us to a 2012 design application submitted by Croc, Inc. The earliest listed reference, distinguishing their filing from any other, is “March 1909, Armstrong.”
Over the years, Stillman Armstrong became a wealthy land and business owner. In 1913, he bought the spool mill and all associated buildings and machinery on the shore of Spednic Lake from King Maxwell (one acre of land). In 1924, he bought property, including “the mill, the dam across the river, and the water power thereto belonging, known as the Vanceboro Tannery land and bounded on the north by the Maine Central Railroad, east by St. Croix River, south by line of pasture land and house lot, west by Salmon Brook St.” On this property, utilizing the dam and river, he built an electric plant that brought light and energy to Vanceboro in 1925.
In 1937, Armstrong sold the spool mill to Roger Hale of Chestnut Hill, MA. The mill then became part of Sunrise Farm, the anthroposophy center run by Roger Hale and his wife, Marion.2
Even with all this success, it was Armstrong’s earlier 1916 venture with deputy sheriff and state detective George W. Ross to bring silent movies to Vanceboro that made him a truly popular fellow.
The Armstrong Picture House was located on the top floor of Stillman Armstrong Co shoe factory.
Armstrong’s shoe manufacturing plant, movie theater and office. The protruding box above the stairs is the film projection room.
Again, we look to Herb Gallison for a full description of the theater:
“The main entrance was in the south end of the building at the top of a rugged wooden outside stairway. Another stairway and exit door on the opposite end (seen above) provided a fire escape. The picture screen was mounted on the north wall of the long, narrow room. In front of and below the screen was a small stage, about ten feet deep and four feet high. A piano rested on the floor, backed up against the front of the stage. It provided the melodic accompaniment for the silent pictures.
An enclosed mezzanine about ten feet square in the south end of the hall, above the main entrance and the ticket booth, was the projection room. The little room had one carbon arc projector and a work table with film rewinding equipment. At the end of each reel of film a slide was flashed on the screen reading, “ONE MOMENT PLEASE FOR CHANGE OF REELS.” During reel changing another slide showing some gay nineties millinery suggested, “LADIES PLEASE REMOVE YOUR HATS.” Other slides were hand-printed announcements, covering everything from LOST AND FOUND to MISS COBB’S LINE OF NEW BONNETS….
The movie changed every week and was shown only on Wednesday and Saturday, matinee and evening….Saturday afternoons were for us kids. Every youngster in town who could conjure up fifteen cents was there, as far down front as possible. We had to arrive pretty early to get a front row seat. To miss the next episode of the current serial would create nothing less than a trauma. A very popular one was Stingaree. One of the principal characters wore a monocle. In our homes many old spectacles turned up with missing lenses. Young spies were seen lurking around corners and behind shade trees, wearing a glass in one eye, brandishing hand-whittled pistols and shouting “Bang! Bang!”3
Stillman and Addie’s many children can be seen in all variety of school photos over the years. Herman and John played football and later, Herman attended Blessed Electric School in Washington, DC. Marion played basketball. Vose studied Forestry at the University of Maine, where he landed the nickname, Beaver.
1928 VHS Hockey Team
Back, l to r: Vance Johnston, Don Crandlemire, Earl Crandlemire, Don Vernon, Theron Crandlemire.
Front: Roland Tibbets, Hubert Vernon, Hermon Armstrong (Pres.)
1931 Girls Basketball Team Constance Beers, Ruth Beers, Dorothy Watt, Marion Armstrong, Margaret Beers
Vose Armstrong’s UMaine yearbook photo: “Beaver demonstrated to boys in camp how to cross thin ice on a beaver pond without getting wet. The method was all right but the weight was too great. All the same though “Beaver” is just what the name implies when it comes to work.”
Most of the Armstrong children left Vanceboro. Some married, had children of their own, built lives elsewhere. But Stillman and Addie remain with us, here in the Vanceboro cemetery just down the road from where the shoe factory and the picture house stood, anchoring a life well lived during a prosperous era in the life of the town.
Gallison, Herb. (1992). The Long Life and Pretty Good Times of Herb Gallison. Edited by Kate Gallison. Lambertville, N.J. Mystic Dog Press. [University of Maine, Raymond H. Fogler Library]. ↩︎
Hale, Judson (1987). The Education of a Yankee: An American Memoir. New York: Harper & Row. ↩︎
Vanceboro Historical Society 