Down East Latch Strings/Chapter 5

by Ernest Ingersoll

Chapter V.

Portland and the Maine Beaches.

And now her talk was of the East,And next her talk was of the sea.—Old Song.

n the morning the train out of Wolfeborough took us through the wild woods along the base of Copple Crown, down to Wolfeborough Junction on the main line (Northern Division of the Boston and Maine Railroad). There, after time for luncheon in a neat station-restaurant, we boarded a train going south, filled with tourists returning from the White Mountains, bearing sheaves of alpenstocks, rustic canes and rusty umbrellas, and accompanied them as far as Salmon Falls, where we met a northward bound train filled (for the most part) with pleasure-seekers outward bound, innocent as yet of trophies or rust. At Great Falls we change cars, for the train

Great Falls station. we leave goes on to Conway Junction, and then by the Eastern Division to Boston. We, on the contrary, intend to take the Western Division, or coast line, eastward to Portland. At North Berwick, half-a-dozen miles farther, the two Divisions cross—that which has been the coast line, from Boston, through Salem and Portsmouth, now taking an inland route through a series of farming villages which have nothing very striking to show us; while the Western Division, by which a few days ago we travelled from Boston through Lawrence and Haverhill to Dover, now seeks the coast and follows it closely to the outskirts of Portland.

How interesting would it have been, could we have spared the time,—as some day we mean to do,—to ride or walk along that coast by the old road and beaches at the ocean's edge which runs from Kittery to Kennebunk! Kittery Point is the oldest settlement in Maine, dating back to 1623. The next town above is old York, where the colonists of Sir Fernando Gorges established themselves in 1624; then comes Wells, "not a town, but a street, stretching for five or six miles along the shore, and everywhere commanding an extensive and unbroken ocean view." Then Kennebunk. The villages now are quiet enough, but each contains relics of the earliest colonial history, and coast scenery of the rarest beauty, Who has not heard of the beaches of York and Wells, with their hard, wide sands entombing hidden wrecks, that start from forgotten graves after storms to frighten the beholder? Who that has seen the surf flying against Bald Head Cliff, or overlooked the offing from the top of Mt. Agamenticus (of whose bulky green done we catch glimpses from the car-windows between North Berwick and Kennebunk), or scrambled over the rocks of Ogunquit, will forget it?

York beach was the highway for the scattered colonists 250 years ago, when they were afraid to trust themselves among the "lyrons" and "salvages" of the forests. To-day it is lined with summer hotels, and its sands bear the imprint of carriage wheels and the heel-marks of tiny boots and parasol-tips. Standing in front of the old church at York, with its quaintly-carpentered steeple, one can feel that he is on ground as nearly classic as any in America; for this is the centre of the first incorporated city in New England,—Gorgeana. In 1623-4, Englishmen, sent out by Gorges and led by Norton, had made their home on the York river. The Pilgrims bad already settled in "Agawain;" disputes as to relative rights were ended by the setting apart of the whole region between the Merrimac and Kennebec rivers, for 120 miles inland, as a grant to Gorges, styled the Province of Maine. He arranged for it an elaborate system of subdivisions and government, and united the "plantations at Agamenticus" into the city of Gorgeana, incorporated in 1642, This cumbrous machinery and the immorality of the community were both disadvantageous, and union with the Massachusetts Bay colonists was out of the question. Still, they increased, organized churches, had trade and fishing as well as farming industries, and prospered fairly until they were immersed in the Indian conflicts that followed King Phillip’s war. In February of 1692, the town was attacked at dawn by three or four hundred Indians and Frenchmen, marching from Canada and the Abnaki country on snowshoes, who destroyed all of the houses and killed or took captive everybody outside of the two garrison houses, which are still standing, though much decayed. From that time, until the peace of 1744, the district was in a constant state of seige, and during Queen Anne's war (1702-12) spy-boats patrolled the coast. A large part of the men in the Louisburg expedition were recruited here, and its contingent was among the earliest enlisted in the army and navy of the Revolution.

The old village of York is now most easily reached by a branch railroad from Portsmouth, which has been built the present year.

York beach is a mile north of York village, and is two miles long; it probably has no superior on the coast of Maine. It stops abruptly on the north at the rocky promontory of Cape Neddick, with its group of summer cottages, and the Nubble, an islet lying off the extreme point, in deep water, This is the nearest land to Boon island, whose
Early Morning—The Nubble, York Beachlight-house can be seen rising like a tall mast above the waves. Grim legends of shipwreck belong to both this island and the stern headland, and poems and pictures have been made to embody their thrilling tale.

To reach the next headland, six miles up the coast, one must pass through the pretty little village of Cape Neddick, whose inn (now destroyed by fire) used to be famous in the old staging days. It was here, that in 1676, one of the worst of the massacres occurred; and this is the point from which to reach Mt. Agamenticus, about four miles distant. It is a rough road thither, and the mountain, which is surrounded and covered with rocky, almost useless lands supporting a tangled forest, where a few rude woodsmen and basket-makers dwell, affords little reward for the exertion of climbing it, until its top has been reached—a naked, rocky platform. The outlook seaward is a very long one, and this mountain is a landmark to sailors for a great distance. "Large ships," says a recent observer, "resembled toys, except that the blue space grasped by the eye was too vast for playthings. Cape Elizabeth in the north and Cape Ann in the south, stretched far out into the sea, as if seeking to draw tribute of all passing ships into the ports between. Here were the Isles of Shoals, lying in a heap together. That luminous, misty belt was Rye Beach. And here was the Piscataqua, and here Portsmouth, Kittery and Old York, with all the sea-shore villages." Inland vision reaches to the White Mountains, of which Agamenticus is the seaward picket, and the spires and factory chimnies of many a village can be identified.

The headland north of Cape Neddick, to which I started at the beginning of the last paragraph, is Bald Head Cliff, the nearest village to which is Qgunquit, of which Samuel Drake, author of Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast, has given a graphic sketch; let me quote a part of it:—

"From the village of Ogunquit there are two roads. I chose the one which kept the shore, in order to take my way to Bald Head Cliff, a natural curiosity well worth going some distance to see. The road so winds across the rocky waste on which the village is in part built, that in some places you almost double on your own footsteps. Occasionally a narrow lane issues from among the ledges, tumbling, rather than descending, to some little cove, where you catch a glimpse of brown-roofed cottages and a fishing-boat or two, snugly moored.…Literally, the houses are built upon rocks, encrusted with yellow lichens in room of grass. Wherever a dip occurs, through which a little patch of blue sea peeps out, a house is posted, and I saw a few carefully tended garden-spots, among hollows of the rock, in which a handful of mould had accumulated.…A native directed me by a short cut 'how to take another ox-bow out of the road,' and in a few minutes I stood on the brow of the cliff. What a sight! The eye spans twenty miles of sea-horizon. Wells, with its white meeting-houses and shore-hotels, was behind me (northward). Far up in the bight of the bay, Great Hill headland. Lord's, Hart's and Gooch's beaches—the latter mere ribbons of white sand—gleamed in the sunlight. Kennebunkport and its shipyards lay beneath yonder smoky cloud, with Cape Porpoise light beyond. There below us, looking as if it had floated off from the main, was the barren rock called The Nubble, the farthest land in this direction, with Cape Neddick harbor in full view. All the rest was ocean. The mackerel fleet that I had seen all day—fifty sail, sixty, yes, and more—was off Boon island, with their jibs down, the solitary gray shaft of the light-house standing grimly up among the white sails, a mile-stone of the sea.

"There are very few who would be able to approach the farthest edge of the precipice called The Pulpit, and bend over its sheer face.…Here is a perpendicular wall of rock, 90 feet in height (as well as I could estimate it) and about 150 feet in length, with a greater than Niagara raging at its foot—a rock buttress, with its foundations deeply rooted in the earth, breasting off the Atlantic; and the mossy fragments lying splintered at its base, or heaved loosely about the summit, told of many a desperate wrestling-match, with a constant gain for the eld athlete.…The strata of rock lie in perpendicular masses, welded together as if by fire, and injected with crystal quartz-seams, knotted like veins in a Titan's forehead. Blocks of granite
Storm at Bald Head Cliff.weighing many tons, honeycombed by the action of the water, are loosely piled where the cliff overhangs the waves, and you may descend by regular steps to the verge of the abyss."

It was with reading and talking thus, about this historic, grandly picturesque, sombre-storied old shore, that we beguiled the time as we sped alone through the woodlands and farms of York, Wells, and Kennebunk, to the twin cities, Biddeford and Saco.

From Kennebunk, a branch railway, five miles long, runs down to Kennebunkport, at the mouth of the Kennebunkport river, once a ship-building and fishing port of great importance to Maine. Years ago, large and important vessels were built there, and the reputation of its yards was high for staunchness and good "lines;" but the decay of this industry, and the retreat of cod, mackerel and menhaden, would have left the quaint old port desolate, had not the good taste and wealth of interior cities found the locality and chosen it for a summering place. The huge old homesteads of rich skippers and shipwrights were opened to summer boarders, and upon the beaches that face the sea at the river's mouth great hotels were erected, like the well-known Ocean Bluff House and others. Beside them, little groups of private cottages and semi-private boarding houses were built, employing labor and spending money which have given the coast people a new era of prosperity. Of all the many charming summering places along this noble coast, none excels Kennebunkport in artistic value, or the opportunity for healthful and varied pleasures. New England cannot show a more interesting region for walking or driving than these beaches and shore reads between the Piscataqua and the month of the Saco, at Biddeford Pool and its curious rock-hollowed "basin."

Biddeford and Saco are large and flourishing towns at the falls of the Saco, where a magnificent water power drives a group of immense cotton mills and machine shops. On the Saco side, many summer residents dwell in cottages and hotels near the month of the river, or along the fine beaches eastward. The fishing in tributary brooks, and the shooting in the coniferous woods and old pastures of the neighborhood, add a powerful attraction.

Three miles beyond Saco the railroad reaches the ocean itself at Old Orchard beach, where lines of hotels, great and small, "pavilions," amusement places, bathing houses and summer shops extend compactly along both sides of the railroad tracks, and the sand is alive with visitors, making holiday. The name is derived from a traditional orchard, the last tree of which disappeared before the Revolution; and the Old Orchard House, now one of the largest and most fashionable of New England seaside hotels, grew out of a single farmhouse which a few years ago stood upon its site. In 1875 a fire swept the shore clean of houses; but the people had become too fond of the place to abandon it, and there has arisen since an almost continuous village of hotels and cottages between here and the month of the Saco at Camp Ellis, grouped about Ocean Park, Ferry beach and other centres, and connected by a branch railroad which runs hourly trains back and forth through all the warmer half of the year. Its admirers think that no beaches in New England are equal to this ten miles at Old Orchard, and the almost equally long stretch in front of Scarborough a little way to the eastward. In a fine grove just back of the station, an immense re-
Ocean view from Cape Arundel, Kennebunkport.ligious camp-meeting is held every summer. In short, Old Orchard is to Northern New England and Canada, what Ocean Grove and Asbury Park together, are to the Middle States; and the relation which these latter bear to Long Branch or Cape May is very much that between Old Orchard and Newport and Mt. Desert. The station for Scarborough beach is three mites eastward, and the whole road in this part runs along the edge of the sea, whose cool breezes blow against our faces,
Spouting rock, Kennebunkport, ME.while the surf delights our eyes. Scarborough, and in fact, all this country-side has an eventful story, in which well-remembered names and incidents appear, going back to the advent of the 18th century, while its very beginnings belong to the earliest discoveries in America. The Boston colonists of 1630 were boarded when entering Salem by a

Old Orchard beach. Plymouth man going about his business at Pennaquid. English fishing ships hovered about the island fora dozen years before the Mayflower swung to her anchorage in the 'ice-rimmed' bay.

Beyond Scarborough the train runs across Cape Elizabeth, upon whose breezy headlands are other favorite summer resorts, crosses the long and expensive bridge that spans Fore river, halts at the animated Maine Central Junction, where those going to the interior of Maine, change cars, and then enters the city of Portland, rising in terraces of architecture upon the bluffs at our left, as we skirt the harbor front to the Union Station. Here we intended to spend Sunday, as it was now Saturday afternoon; and we therefore lost no time in betaking ourselves and our baggage to the hotel.

In Portland, the "regular thing" to do, and in this case a most satisfactory thing, is to ascend the Observatory on Munjoy hill, and
Old house on Cape Elizabeth.scan the whole city, harbor and outer country. This we did immediately after tea, and in time for the sunset.

Horse-cars pass the Observatory, which ts an octagonal wooden tower surmounted by a lantern, like a light-house. It was built by merchants early in the present century as a watch-tower for incoming ships,—ships running up and down the coast with fish and fruit and merchandise, not only, but weather-beaten craft that had circumnavigated the globe.

And the homeward vessels which long have sped, Through tempest, and spray, and foam,Catch first a glimmer of old White Head, And are sure they are almost home.

The moment a ship is sighted, one of the signal flags, or burgees, which fill rows of pigeon-holes in the top of the tower, is flung to the breeze by the watchman, and its coming is announced in the shipping-exchanges of Boston and New York, before it has cast anchor.

The telescope with which this keen-eyed sentinel of the sea scans the offing, is placed at our disposal, and we turn it hither and thither upon the landscape, while we chat with him.

Munjoy hill, he tells us, is named alter one of the early settlers, who was an important man in the new colony, though not the first. The earliest white man (to stay) were Cleaves and Tucker, two men from Plymouth, England, who settled near the shore at the base of this hill, The spring by which they placed their cabins still flows, at the foot of India street. "When was this?" In 1632, and in 1637 they received a grant of the ridgy peninsula upon which the city now healthfully stands, and induced settlers to come in by generous gifts of land. In 1658, however, Massachusetts asserted her control over the region, and named the locality Falmouth,—a name which has survived in the surburbs, among several other designations going back to the 17th century. A very superior class of persons now arrived, among whom the most prominent was the owner of this hill—George Munjoy, an educated man from Boston.

"Of course," Baily, the envious New Yorker, interrupts spitefully, "Where else in the world could an 'educated' man come from?"

Thus affairs were flourishing, when a fearful interruption was caused by the Indian massacre of 1676. For two years the town remained desolate, after which a few persons returned, and that other hill over there in the western part of the town, now perpetrating his name, was bought as a part of his farm by George Bramhall, of Portsmouth. Not long afterward a party of educated Huguenot immigrants was welcomed; Fort Loyal was built, and the town was again progressing spiritedly, when the terrible French-and-Indian campaigns of 1689 caused its ruin a second time, nor did it revive until after the peace-treaties of ⟨1713⟩. At the time of the breaking out of the Revolution the town numbered 2,000 citizens, Boston having less than 15,000 at the same date.

As usual in the seaports, the parties of revolution and loyalty were each strong; and here the more than ordinary wealth and intelligence made excitement run higher than elsewhere. Political street-rows were frequent enough; and once, when Mowatt, the commander of the British fleet, and his surgeon, were walking with a well-known Tory on this very hill-top, all three were seized by a hot-headed captain of militia and locked up. Though the officers of the ships gave the town short grace to release their superior or else take a cannonade, it was no easy task to persuade the eager Continentals to set him free.

"That officer must have remembered this town," we remarked.

"Remember it? Indeed, he did, sir. He never forgave it, and the next October, on the 18th,—I’ve heard my grand-father tell of it often,—he came back with five men-of-war and bombarded the town till he'd laid it in ashes. Almost the only building left standing, in the thick part of the town, was the old wooden meeting-house, which stood down there where the First Parish church is now."

As we look down over the beautiful bay, with its many islands dotted with farm-houses and summer hotels, and completely sheltering the deep and spacious harbor, we do not wonder that when the war was over, Portland (as it came to be called, after the incorporation act of 1785), was quick to revive, and grew steadily in commercial prosperity. It was a port not only for its own merchants, but the ocean-doorway to all that great region in New Hampshire, Vermont and western Maine, which so rapidly filled up when liberty was ensured to all Americans; and though the Embargo measures of 1812 did the city great harm, yet she has gone on steadily until now,—would have gone faster, of late, in fact, had not the war of the Rebellion been so disastrous to the merchant marine in which lay the foundation of her wealth. And then came the great fire of July 4th, 1866, which for fifteen hours swept diagonally across the wealthiest and busiest portion of the city; and with such swiftness that people knew not where to fly for safety. In a few hours it had destroyed 1,500 buildings, laid in ashes eight mites of thoroughfare closely built, thrown 10,000 of the inhabitants houseless and homeless upon the charity of others, and consumed ten millions of property.

There had been a certain obscurity in the west, which had almost hid the long notched line of the New Hampshire hills, but as the sun neared the horizon its rays dissipated or rendered this transparent, and we could pick out scores of peaks with which a few weeks later we were to make an intimate and joyful acquaintance. Then the rich sunset effect began around and over the sierra; and while we watch it, Prue repeats for us those verses of Whittier's, made for this very scene,—perhaps on this very hill:—

You should have seen that long hill-range, With gaps of brightness riven,—How through each pass and hollow streamed The purpling lights of heaven,—

Rivers of gold-mist flowing down From far celestial fountains,—The great sun flaming through the rifts Beyond the wall of mountains.

The next day was Sunday. In the afternoon we hired a carriage and took a long and delightful ride about the city not only, but outside of it. I do not propose to describe Portland,—that would be superfluous,—further than to say that her public buildings, and especially the City Hall, are stately, and her streets beautiful and interesting. All those in the older part of the city, spared by the fire, are shaded by elms and maples of mature and graceful growth, and one street has four rows of these great elms, so that its long colonnades of leafage are like a continuous park.

Portland was the early home of the poet Longfellow, and every tourist takes interest in seeing his birth-place, and identifying Deering's Oaks and the other localities which he mentions in his local poem, My Lost Youth. "At the corner of Hancock and Fore streets is the 'old, square, wooden house, upon the edge of the sea,' where the poet was born in 1807. The dwelling next to the Preble House, on Congress street, and known as the 'Longfellow House,' was not occupied by Stephen Longfellow until after his son Henry's birth."

Only a few miles away, on the shore of Lake Sebago (Portland and Ogdensburg Railway, 17 miles), Nathaniel Hawthorne lived when a boy. This lake is now one of the pleasure resorts of the city, especially for fishing parties. A steamer runs upon it, and the scenery, with Kiarsarge and the White Mountains for a dim, blue background, is said to be very charming. The steamer crosses the lake, and wriggles its way up the tortuous Songo river, through ever-varying scenes, until admitted by locks to the upper part of the Songo, the Bay of Naples and finally to Long lake. Bridgeton and Harrison are villages near this farthest water, and in summer both are filled with city boarders, anglers and excursionists. Lovewell's pond is not far away.

On Monday we devoted ourselves to the hay, going the rounds of the excursion boats that run to the various headland and island pleasure-resorts, and enjoying the day immensely, Baily had picked up a forgotten book, which we read, a bit at a line, and agreed to be one of the brightest tales of summer-travel ever penned. It was styled A Summer Cruise on the Coast of New England. The date was 1858 and the author, Robert Carter. The voyage was made in a fishing-sloop from Boston to Mount Desert, and this is what the writer (who is not inclined to gush) records of Casco bay:—

"Scarcely anywhere in the world can you find a more varied or more lovely commingling of land and water. The shores of the islands and the promontories are mostly covered with woods of maple, oak, beech, pine and fir, growing nearly to the water's edge and throwing their shadows over many a deep inlet and winding channel. It is impossible to conceive of scenery more charming, more romantic, more captivating to the eye or more suggestive to the imagination. No element of beauty is wanting. Many of the islands are wildly picturesque in form,—and from their woodland summits you behold on the one hand the surges of the Atlantic, breaking almost at your feet, and on the other the placid waters of the bay, spangled by multitudinous gems of emerald, while in the dim distance you discern on the horizon the sublime peaks of the White Mountains."

From Portland, the Grand Trunk Railway runs to Gorham, N.H., one of the portals of the White Mountains; and to several interesting manufacturing and summering-places in Maine, sch as Lewiston, South Paris, Bryant's Pond and Bethel. At the distance of only twenty-five miles, and reached by either the Grand Trunk or the Maine Central Railways, is Poland Springs. This is the source of the celebrated Poland mineral and medicinal water, and the springs have become a fashionable resort, not only of invalids, but of pleasure-seekers. A great hotel, with cottages, baths and all the modern appurtenances of such a place, has been built, and during the warm months a gay crowd makes it the centre of every species of mid-summer recreation.