Chapter 4: The life of the place
The Ellis River ran through the center of everything in Andover. The east branch came down from the mountains and met the west branch near the village, and together they flowed into the Androscoggin. Most of the men in the area made their living from the river and from the woods — logging, sawing, floating pulpwood downstream in the spring floods.
My own experience on the river came one spring when my Grandfather Howard was asked to supply long lumber — enough to make a floating log boom, which was a chain of logs fastened together at each end to hold pulpwood in place on the river. Pulpwood is wood that has been peeled in the woods and cut into four-foot lengths for floating downstream. People brought their lumber down to the riverbank all winter and waited for the spring floods to carry it away. The boom corralled the wood so it could be measured and claimed.
Dad, Howard Glover, Grandfather Howard, and Guy and I got up one early morning and went down to the river to get the logs together. We were building a raft — about thirty feet long and eight feet wide — to float the lumber down to the Androscoggin. The logs were eighteen to twenty inches in diameter, tied with strong rope and chain so they would hold together in the current.
Once the raft was in the water we pushed off and the current took us. The river was high with the spring runoff, and the raft moved at a good pace. We floated downstream until we met the Androscoggin, where the logs were tied up at the first landing with rope and chain so they would not be stolen.
Grandfather Howard brought us a hot lunch. He knew about where we would be if things were going well, and he came down to the riverbank with sandwiches and gravy in a thermos bottle. I remember the gravy. After lunch I had to leave the raft to go back to school, which was a real disappointment. The men stayed on the river.
During the start of the Depression, my grandfather put his pulpwood into the river at just the right time in the spring. But when the freshet came along, he could not control the flow.
He was able to get most of the wood back and measured, but to my knowledge he never got paid for it.
One of the industries practiced by the farmers in those days involved the hackmatack tree. These appear to be pine trees in the spring and summer, but after the first frost they lose their needles and show themselves to really be a deciduous tree — an American larch. The hackmatack was harvested for building boats.
Where the tap roots grow out from the trunk and bend down into the ground, the wood forms a natural curve. This curve was used for ship knees — the piece where the side of a boat meets the deck and extends upward to protect it. Many of these root pieces were twenty-four inches in diameter, and after the root was removed they would sell for a good price. A farmer who knew the size of the boat being built would know how many knees to get, and he would go out into the woods on order and hunt them out.
The remainder of the wood, usually cut by a handsaw, was sold to people who made tool handles — hammers, shovels, picks. Good straight wood was hard to come by, and my grandfather had a knack of finding it.
The rolled roads were the cause of some difficulty for the neighbors.
Mr. Hannaford lived at the foot of the mountains. He would start out bright and early with a load of birch logs for the mill, loading things up the night before for an early start. Several times the early hour got the better of him and he would doze off as he drove.
Unfortunately he often slept a bit too long and ended up in the ditch at the side of the road. He lost his load and had to wait for the goodness of his neighbors to help him pull his sleigh out and reload the logs.
He always claimed that the snow had blinded him, but as it happened several times during the winter season it was more likely that he was asleep when his team went off the edge. Mrs. Hannaford was probably upset that her dinner was late those nights.
My grandfather grew a lot of potatoes and sold them to a man in Andover who stored them in a potato hole — a large underground cellar dug for the purpose, cool enough to keep the potatoes through the winter. After the potatoes were gone and before the next harvest, this man would hold square dances in the potato hole. People came from around the area and danced in the place where the potatoes had been.
Guy and I went to school in a one-room building with six grades and about thirty-two students. It was near Rob Swain’s mill in East Andover. There was no clock on the wall that I can remember, but we could hear the twelve o’clock whistle from the mill and know it was time to go home for lunch. The advantage of a one-room school with six grades is that you could sit and listen to the older students do their lessons, so by the time you got to that grade you had already heard the material two or three times. We could listen to our homework and have nothing to take home. Guy had piano lessons but I refused to take them.
Our first teacher was a girl from Andover, Dorothy Thomas, who taught in the East Andover school in 1925 and 1926. Then we had an epidemic of scarlet fever and she died. They had to find a replacement over Christmas vacation, which was not easy in a place like East Andover.
The school board hired a young woman by the name of Miss Louise Merriam. She lived at our house in the front bedroom and had the front parlor as her study and office. She was very educated but very gullible.
She poo-pooed the quality of the homegrown horseradish. She thought it was more like ground turnip with some hot sauce to make it hot, and she claimed she could take a mouthful without any problem. My mother’s cousin Howard Glover challenged her to an eat-off. He went down to the garden, got the fresh horseradish, ground it up and added the homemade vinegar, salt, and pepper. Then he left it set for a week or two. You don’t eat horseradish the day you grind it. You let it sit until it has had time to come into its full character, and this batch had been given every opportunity. At the end of that time it was good and hot. Howard took his mouthful and so did Miss Merriam. She made it about halfway through before she ran out of the house to get rid of it.
She also claimed that she loved all sorts of cats. My brother Guy went out one night after several woodchucks had been shot and brought one back to the house. He propped it up against her window. It gave her quite a shock in the morning when she woke to find it peering in at her. My father chastised him but was laughing in between each swing.
She believed in St. Calamus Day — “half the oats and half the hay must be left on St. Calamus Day.” I think that Groundhog Day and St. Calamus Day are probably the same day, midway through winter. She left at the end of the year.
She was followed by Miss Vivian Martin, who was a wonderful teacher. She married Bob Milton. Next came Marie Elliot. The entire time that I was in school in Andover, Mr. Leon P. Spinney was the Superintendent of Schools. He wrote the Andover poem that is hanging on the den wall.
Guy and I attended school in Andover through the fourth grade. I was about ten years old the year we moved back to Weston.