Grafton,
from the 1880 Atlas of Oxford
County, Maine
The Town of Grafton surrendered its
charter in 1919, the year in which I was born. The only buildings
in Grafton which I can remember at all belonged to Joe Chapman, who
stayed on after the other Grafton citizens moved away. I do
remember, however, going through Grafton when I was about five years
old and our family accompanied my father (Dr. Raymond R. Tibbetts) on a
trip to Upton to see Cedric Judkins. In those days Upton was a
substantial journey with a particularly difficult hill just as you
approached the town. We stopped for a picnic on the way back
before we reached the Notch. The Brown Company had just recently
begun the process of reforestation and there were long thick rows of
little evergreens, ranging from about three to nine inches high.
My father and mother, who had grown up in nineteenth century rural
Maine where the forests seemed limitless, could hardly believe that
anyone would plant trees, and exclaimed at the Brown Company's
foresightedness.
The fate of the Grafton settlement had been determined by the fact that
after seventy-five to eighty years of hard cutting most of the easily
accessible timber in the town was gone. Without lumber to cut and
to sell, the community could not exist. The physical realities of
the area precluded much development beyond that of a pioneer logging
settlement. A large part of the town was hemmed in between Mt.
Speck and Saddleback (which some people call Baldpate) with one major
road for access. There were several miles of relatively flat land
above the Notch where there was room for farms, but because of the
short growing season, farming was of necessity limited; livestock, hay,
sometimes potatoes, and grain (usually oats) were the main crops.
Frosts came unfailingly in late June and mid-August, and were not
unknown in July. The average summer temperature in the warmest
month (July) was sixty-six degrees.
Originally, the area later called Grafton was known as Township
A. Much of it belonged to out-of-state speculators. In
1830, James Brown of Canton, Maine, made several trips to the area,
walking through the Notch on a footpath, the only available road.
He is said to have been preceded by Jesse Smith of Newry and his two
sons. James Brown's purpose was to look for lumber. In 1834
he married Ruth Swan of Newry and brought her to a log cabin which he
had built in what became Grafton.
Brown bought land and built a dam on the Cambridge River which rises in
the Notch and flows north to Lake Umbagog, to the east of the present
Route 26. He set up a sawmill there; these buildings were
completed by 1838. In 1840, he began to build a barn and by 1842
constructed and furnished a large house of fourteen rooms and five
fireplaces, where he lived until his death in 1881. For years,
Mrs. Brown cooked for the sizable crews of lumbermen who worked for
her husband. Their daughter, Mary, was born in 1839, the first
child born in Grafton. She lived there all her life until the
last two years (1908-1910), when she spent winters with her daughter in
Lewiston.
The Brown house was located in an area above the present Grafton
cemetery towards the Upton line. In time, Mary Brown married
George Otis who came to work for her father. The Otis house was
right across the road from the Brown dwelling. Ernest Angevine,
as a boy, lived in Upton and often came to Grafton. He has told
me that Route 26 goes directly through the site of the Otis home, so we
can visualize the old Grafton road as over slightly to the east of the
present road.
Other families soon followed the Brown settlement. Most of them
also located above the Notch, although, according to the 1858 wall map
of Oxford County, down near the Newry line were four farms. Most
of the Grafton homes were near the road. An exception was the
Morse
homestead off to the west near the Upton line and the Upton road known
today as Back Street. The settlers who came worked in logging or
in subsistence farming.
The first Grafton town records (now in the Newry Town Office) are
sketchy indeed. The Newry town officials believe it is possible
that some day other records may surface, since not all of the records
were turned over when Grafton was dissolved as a town (various local
families had records in their possession). By 1852 there were
enough residents for Grafton to be incorporated as a town.
Reportedly, James Brown's mother, Hannah, chose the name Grafton,
perhaps because Grafton, Massachusetts, is located beside Upton,
Massachusetts. Most of the early town business dealt with schools
and roads.
By 1854 there were nine scholars, thirty by 1856, and thirty-seven by
1859. The numbers did not increase beyond this point and times
were lower. There were originally three school districts; houses
were widely scattered and even Grafton children could walk only a
certain distance to and from school. Originally, schools were
held in private homes. Eventually, a schoolhouse was built just
above the Notch, according to the Grafton map of 1858. In 1854
the appropriation for schools was $80. Most of the children
probably attended the school in the schoolhouse on the Grafton flats,
but probably school continued in private homes for the children who
lived below the Notch. By the 1880s it would appear from the
correspondents for the Norway and Paris papers that almost all of the
children were together at the schoolhouse. During the worst of
the winter weather there was no school; instead, children had a term in
the summer. Obviously the school was a matter of intense interest
and there are frequent items in the newspapers about teachers,
occasional new textbooks, recitations, etc. A good number of
children proportionate to the population went on to school according to
news items, usually attending Gould Academy or Andover High School.
Road upkeep was for many years a grievous problem with some improvement
coming almost at the end of Grafton's existence. Contact with the
world depended on the road through the Notch. Reading the
correspondents' reports emphasizes the problem of Grafton's isolation
-- economically and psychologically. Travelers faced deep snows
in winter, possible floods in spring and fall, and the terrible torture
of driving unpaved roads when the frost was coming out in the
spring. For many years, individuals were assigned areas of the
road to work on, and it is easy to imagine that some areas were better
tended than others. At best, the roads were primitive and
narrow. Today, by Mother Walker's Falls, on the right of Route 26
as one faces
north, one can see a small section of early road together with the
small bridges, without rails. It must have been frightful in
times of flooding. Throughout the years, correspondents wrote
often about road conditions, delay of the stage, no mail for several
days and bridges out, while the stage driver was forced to leave the
road and at times walk or snowshoe for miles leading his horse.
In the Oxford County Advertiser
of February 27, 1885, for example, appeared the following: "We are
having very bad roads up
this way, so bad the Stage had to leave the main road and take the R.
Davis logging road a short time ago, and when our surveyor, A. J.
Brooks, was notified to break out the roads, I heard he sent word back
that he was logging this winter, not breaking roads. And then
Richmond Davis took his team out of the woods and broke the roads . .
. Wednesday, R. Davis and E. Brown had to take their teams out of
the woods to break through Grafton Notch."
The period from 1850 to 1880 was for Grafton a period of growth and
activity, even though the Town never grew larger than 115, its
population in 1880. In 1859 there were twenty-one men between the
ages of eighteen and forty-five. Some Grafton men enlisted in the
Civil War. The fate of one of them reminds us how bitterly hard
life could be in the nineteenth century. Barrett Wriston, wounded
in 1862, was sent home from the Union Army; he died walking home on the
road between Bethel and Grafton. He left a wife, who died soon
after, and three children. The oldest boy enlisted for the $1,000
bounty and wages available; he survived the army, took his money
and emigrated to Minnesota where he prospered.
Basically, Grafton was always a very small and primitive pioneer
settlement. There was a post office, but never a real
store. There was no church; in the summer, ministers came
occasionally from Upton or Newry for services in the schoolhouse, and
there were occasional evangelical "missionaries" to the men in the
lumber camps.
Life centered on logging and farming, with logging the dominant
community interest. There were big lumber camps, in some cases
containing over a hundred men with almost as many horses. In the
spring after the camps closed there were large crews who worked to get
the logs down the Cambridge River to Lake Umbagog, where they were sent
down the Androscoggin. By late summer various entrepreneurs would
be in Grafton making their plans and by November camps would be set up
and men arriving from other parts of Maine, New England, and
Canada. Year after year, the correspondents noted the arrival of
the crews, the plans of various local women to cook for them, the work
piling up for the blacksmiths and the provision of hay and oats for the
camps by the local farmers. Often there were reports of the
amounts planned for cutting that year. For example, on November
20, 1885, "we understand there is to be some five or six millions of
feet of timber put in the Cambridge River this winter."
When logging ended for the winter in late March or April, depending on
the weather, interest shifted to the river drive, with the height of
water always a strong concern; low water meant particular difficulties.
With summer came the easiest time of the year. The stage arrived
every day instead of twice a week or even less, and there were many
visitors, either former Graftonites who came back to see relatives, or
strangers from the city who came for fresh air. (We forget how
foul and disease-ridden nineteenth century cities often were.)
The local people went blueberrying and raspberrying everywhere; both
berries were plentiful and were reportedly picked by the barrel.
It was not uncommon to see bears when berrying, which produced such
jokes in the paper as "Uncle Joe Bennett met a bear when picking
blueberries the other day. He did not say which one picked more
berries." There were occasional picnics and socials, always with
refreshments. To be sure, sometimes the nights were cold and
there were worries about deer in the garden or rotting potatoes, but
invariably references were made to beautiful summer days.
In the 1870s tourism was becoming something of an economic
factor. Farrar's Illustrated
Guidebook of 1879 (see below) describes the trip from Bethel to
Upton along lines familiar to many of us except for the time involved;
Farrar says that if one leaves Bethel after arrival on the morning
train, Upton is reached by early evening. The sights along the
way are carefully listed: Poplar Tavern, Screw Auger Falls, the Devil's
Horseshoe (a large horseshoe-shaped indentation in the rock above Screw
Auger), the Jail (a deep pothole made in stone with sides too high and
steep to climb from easily), and Moose Cave. Neither the Devil's
Horseshoe nor the Jail are identified for tourists by today's road
signs, but our family always visited them in the 1930s. The roads
are described as very narrow and the bridges of logs with no protective
rails.
Most of the tourists who came to Grafton over the next forty years came
for the hunting and fishing. The fishing was marvelous. In
August of 1884 the correspondent noted that Leander Bennett caught
forty-three trout in an hour. Leslie Davis remembered that it was
not uncommon for his mother to ask him in mid-morning to catch enough
fish for dinner. The hunting was also good but at times more
difficult. Local men usually got a deer more easily than did the
visitors.
Reading these newspaper reports, which cover some forty-five years,
bring out certain aspects of Grafton life. Accidents were
common. Children cut themselves on scythes -- at times badly --
or stabbed themselves with pitchforks. The men who worked in the
woods were always at risk from accidents with saws or axes, falling
limbs, or runaway horses. At times these accidents resulted in
deaths: today, in the Grafton Cemetery, one can see the marker for a
young man lost in the Cambridge River. There were no facilities
for local care and no way to get treatment except to harness a horse
and head down through the Notch for Bethel.
Illnesses were also common, at times serious and even potentially
terrifying. The news of diphtheria or typhoid in one of the
lumber camps could send a chill through the community as happened in
the 1870s and 1880s, although fortunately there were no
epidemics. But pneumonia was well known and always a threat, as
was consumption. One gets the impression of a community with a
good number of very tough and strong individuals who were able to
survive, but where the difficulties of climate and location meant that
weaker members were eliminated by disease more quickly than in larger
and less remote communities. Almost every family experienced one
or more early deaths.
Despite hardships, Grafton citizens met life with courage and
energy. They had simple and small pleasures, and they enjoyed
each other. There were parties to which everyone was invited and
to which almost everyone went. There was dancing and the
refreshments were always carefully noted in newspaper reports -- such
things as molasses candy, roasted peanuts, lemonade in the summer,
berry pies, fudge from a new recipe, etc. There was a Fourth of
July picnic for the children and a Christmas tree at the schoolhouse
each year. By 1890, the stage brought fresh fish every Friday and
at times there were oyster stew parties. The women, under the
leadership of Mary Brown Otis, organized a Library, which for years was
a source of pleasure and pride; gifts from summer visitors were noted
with great satisfaction. Even in the winter they were able to
find a source of pleasure in one woman's large collection of house
plants or in the handiwork of another's work on quilts. And
always there was the thrill of an occasional trip to Bethel or Andover
to anticipate and to enjoy. Leslie Davis notes what a treat it
was to visit a store twice a year.
By the 1890s the major part of the logging was for soft wood for the
Berlin Mills. This cutting was done in the extreme western part
of Grafton very near the New Hampshire line. In 1893 the Success
Township logging railroad was built from Berlin to the New Hampshire
line to take logs directly from Grafton to Berlin. For a number
of years this logging was intense. In the first year of using the
railroad twenty million board feet of soft wood was taken out.
This operation lasted for fourteen years until too much of the
accessible (and therefore profitable) wood had been cut. In 1907
this railroad service ceased.
The change in Grafton's fortunes with the cutting of the wood comes
through indirectly and gradually in the correspondents' accounts of
Grafton doings. More and more items concern Grafton men going to
Rangeley or Errol or Milan to log. Increasingly, it is said that
only small crews are cutting "this year" in Grafton. It is clear
that there was much discussion of other types of work, either actual or
anticipated. Men were doing guiding as much as possible.
Some were cooking in various establishments, such as Poplar Tavern,
rather than in the lumber camps. Others were gathering spruce gum
to sell, or going to Gorham, New Hampshire, to see if they could get
work. From 1890 on, more and more of the Grafton children who
went away to school were staying on to work, coming home only for
vacations. The town was dwindling to fewer and fewer homesteads,
increasingly inhabited by older people. In 1904, when Leslie
Davis was twelve, his family left for Hanover where it was easier to
make a living farming. He noted that in the Grafton schools by
the late 1890s there were only ten pupils.
In 1910, Mary Brown Otis, who was the first child born in Grafton,
died. She was the last of the founding family still living there,
for the Browns had prospered but scattered to other Maine towns and
cities. Her death brought the sale of the old Brown house which
for so many years had housed lumbermen and boarders as well as the
family; the Brown Company bought it and used it for storage.
Without prospects of real work for the men, Grafton could not
survive. In 1919 the Town surrendered its Charter and the
remaining farms were sold to the Brown Company except for the Joe
Chapman place. Chapman continued to live in Grafton until the
1940s and spent his last year with Leslie Davis.
In the early 1920s the Brown Company razed the remaining buildings in
Grafton to lessen the dangers of fire. Today it is hard to find
traces, even cellar holes, of the homes that were once there because of
years of bulldozing, road construction, timber cutting, and
reforesting. Even if its inhabitants had not cut off their wood
so prodigally, Grafton could not have survived, for there was no other
source of livelihood.
Of the "lost towns" of Oxford County, Grafton is particularly
interesting. It was a pioneer community in New England at a time
when most Americans think of pioneers only in terms of the settlers
streaming west in covered wagons. Despite its remoteness, its
smallness, and its lack of many amenities, Grafton was a community of
good standards and sound values. Its citizens worked well
together and met their problems with courage and resilience.
Today, descendants of those Grafton families who left to settle in
other Oxford County towns remain justifiably proud of their Grafton
origins.
Author's
Acknowledgments
The definitive work for the history of
the Town of Grafton is Charles B. Fobes'
Grafton, Maine: A Human and Geographical
Study, published as
Bulletin
#42 of the
University of
Maine Studies. Mr. Fobes, a
retired Meteorological Aide at the Weather Bureau Office in Portland,
is a descendant of Captain James Brown, who founded Grafton in the
1830s. Mr. Fobes also furnished to the Bethel Historical Society
an article by a "Special Correspondent" in the
Rumford Falls Times of August 26,
1899, which contains interesting information about some of the early
settlers and early Grafton. I have used Mr. Fobes' work
extensively, and he deserves our gratitude as the rescuer of Grafton's
history from oblivion.
I have also used two sources brought to my attention by Randall
Bennett, namely
Logging Railroads of
the White Mountains by C. Francis Belcher, published by the
Appalachian Mountain Club (Boston, 1980) and a portion of Charles A. J.
Farrar's
Illustrated Guidebook to
Rangeley, Richardson, Kennebago, Umbagog and Parmachenee Lakes,
published in Boston in 1879. Of considerable interest were the
memoirs of Leslie Davis in the possession of the Bethel Historical
Society.
I was helped considerably by conversations with Beatrice Brooks Brown
(granddaughter of the family which ran the Grafton Post Office for many
years), Ernest Angevine, Roger Hanscom (who worked for years on the
road through the Notch), and Phyllis Davis Dock (who remembered Joe
Chapman). Of basic use were the contributions from Grafton
correspondents to the
Oxford County
Advertiser and the
Oxford
Democrat over the years (often very intermittent) from 1861 on,
increasing in regularity by the end of the century. This material
was transcribed and made available to me by Agnes Haines. For
these sources and assistance I express my thanks.