A Ridge Runner’s Legacy
Gerald Averill ( I had thought it was Frank sometimes) was a Maine Woodsman, grew up in or around Penobscot River country and lived most of his life in Waldo County. His tramps included many climbs of Mt. Waldo, and he wrote of his life in that time in Winterport & Frankfort and life along the Penobscot River. He is famous for a qualification of eels as food after seeing a dead horse on a mud flat of the Penobscot River. (A favorite story of mine).
His wife was his living biographer, and told tales of him as she could to her junior high school classes in English in Winterport Maine’s Leroy H. Smith Public school in the 1960’s (partly replaced today by the Samuel Wagner Middle School – the Town’s Harvard MD when I lived there). She also used to run a laundromat in town with her sister, Clara?, and sold baked beans off the Frankfort Road at her “camp” there.
Gerald Averill was a rare breed then, rarer today. he published his work in 1948.
Other “historical notes” .. the town’s golf course, a one time farm conversion to the Streamside Golf Course had nine holes, and was the three season “hobby” of a Mr. Sumner Clark, who also taught science at the town school. His memory was equally grand; and he reveled with boyhood tales such as rolling the town’s snow covered main street with a stone weighted sledge drawn by draft horses to prepare it for sleighs. There is now another Streamside Golf Course there – recommenced in 1998.
The old Rivertown as the Winterport Maine YearBook called it, had the fortunes and misfortunes of Maine. By chance, we lived there as an Air Force family , my father stationed at Dow AFB in Bangor (now closed); and as my genealogy became known to me, we interrelated with the Theophilus Cushing [we owned and lived in the former home of Theophilus Cushing Jr. – 2 Cushing Street] family (with Traftons, Thaxters and Hobarts descended from Abington & Hingham Massachusetts) which had invested so much in the town in the 19th century. They suffered a severe bust in the depression of 1873.
A pleasant shared thought of an old town in Maine, after re-perusing some of Thoreau’s old essays about Katahdin (Mt. Waldo was just about Katahdin to Mr. Averill), much to the north. A transit brought on my thoughts of expanded camping or New England travel likely next year.
Swan Lake, nearby was the site at its head of land owned by a friend –Mark Foley’s parents. They contributed it to the creation of a State Park, now Swan Lake State Park. AS Air Force families go, we returned to the USA there, after three years in the UK. What a tailing effect we must have had, spending the first summer back on that lake, and then into that small town and the big old colonial style Greek Revival house. Must have really re-enforced the bourgeoisie during the Cold War.
When you get my age, an anti Orwellian check on past places, people , and doings never hurt anyone.
posted by scotty of course at 11:32 PM
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