The tantalizing thing about primary source archives, even fairly well-catalogued ones like this one, is that you never really know what you're going to find. You can take educated guesses from the titles of the folders—for instance, I was fairly sure the minutes of the first 20 years' worth of stockholders' meetings would be useful, and I was right—but there are always going to be surprises. Staying on task can be difficult. You can find yourself, for example, reaching the end of a half-hour spent reading a document about the development of the chemigroundwood process in the 1950s that has absolutely nothing to do with what you're trying to work on.

There's also the fun synthetic process of reading between the lines, trying to get inside the heads of the long-dead protagonists of the company's story based on the records of what they did. For instance, in one of the boxes, I found an index to topics discussed at directors' meetings in the early-to-mid 20th century, and while I was looking through a list of matters voted on by the company's directors in relation to what GNP always called the Townsite (that is, the town of Millinocket), I noticed an interesting pattern.

From the 1930s through the 1950s, the company had a recurring habit of giving land in town to the municipal government and other local organizations—the community hospital, for instance, and the relevant Catholic diocese—for the construction of various institutions. These were all either gifts or nominal sales, the classic one-dollar transaction.

For example, on May 11, 1949, "Deed to the Town of Millinocket for $1 - [lot coordinates] as a site for a new municipal building." Said municipal building still stands, and is still the seat of the local government. Similar transactions provided the land for the town library, the airport, a new hospital building, the new high school built in 1954, and so on.

However, on November 13, 1935: "Sale to U.S. Government - [lot coordinates]. Site for a new post office. Price $6750." Great Northern, it seems, was generous with the company town and its institutions. Uncle Sam? Uncle Sam pays cash. :)

Anyway, today I had a completely different experience. It may or may not be useful—I don't know yet—but I found it very striking. See, the mill at Millinocket came online in 1900, with the town incorporating the following year. By 1905, the company was so successful that its management was looking at building a second mill on the West Branch of the Penobscot about 10 miles east, that is to say downriver, of Millinocket, at a place that was then called the Burnt Land Rips. The river took another useful drop in elevation there ("rips" was a local term for rapids), so it was a prime spot for another facility. This second mill, initially referred to in company documentation as the Lower Mill, would naturally entail a second town to serve it, which the company imaginatively named East Millinocket.

In Box 6 of the GNP archive, Folder 10 is labeled "East Millinocket mill correspondence, 1906-1915". I knew from its title that this would probably be interesting, but I wasn't expecting what I found. The folder is largely full of letters to, and replies from, the Company's land agent, the Hon. Judge George W. Stearns (namesake of the high school I graduated from), written before/during the actual establishment of East Millinocket—letters from people who had heard of the plan for the new mill and accompanying town, and hoped to get a piece of the action. Dry goods merchants, druggists, doctors, barbers—they knew that to be permitted to set up shop in GNP's new company town, they would need the Company's imprimatur, and they wrote to Judge Stearns in their dozens inquiring as to the expected timing of the mill's construction, whether there would be a bidding process for the various roles to be filled in town, and so on.

Some of them included preliminary bids just in case, such as the pharmacist in Millinocket, who wrote in on beautifully engraved letterhead to bid the engagingly specific sum of $350.06 for the exclusive right to open a store in East Millinocket. (Unbeknownst to him, he'd already been outbid by a druggist from Island Falls, who slapped a flat $500 on the barrel.) There are carbons of politely worded replies from Stearns, such as one to a prospective barber noting that the Company did not envision permitting more than two barber shops in town for at least the first three years, and inviting the correspondent to bid on one of the slots if he was so inclined, very sincerely yours, Geo. W. Stearns.

(As an aside, I suspect you can tell where Judge Stearns was dictating his replies and where, for whatever reason, he was typing them himself. Sometimes his letters are beautifully, professionally typed, and sometimes they look like they were typed by, well, by a judge in a hurry. :)

This was all fascinating stuff, but the very first thing in that folder was a little clipped-together bundle of ruled letter-writing paper—much smaller, in those days, than the standard size used in typewriters. The letter on those sheets is written in a neat, roundish cursive hand, and what it says is... well, not what I was expecting in a sheaf of correspondence from the records of a just-barely-post-Victorian paper company:

Scrawled in the upper left corner of the first page are the words "Referred to Mr. Stearns to ans by [illegible signature]". Unfortunately, the folder does not contain a reply from Judge Stearns; I have no way of knowing whether he didn't send one, or he did and it didn't find its way into the folder. I also have no way of knowing what he made of this remarkable missive.

I mean, I don't know about you, but this lady sounds pretty baller for 1906. By the standards of her time she's probably been given up as a spinster by the advanced age of almost 32, but she's clearly still a young and ambitious woman. She's bored stiff teaching school in the southern part of the state and yearns to set up for herself in business—pretty much any business—in the northern wilderness, which must have seemed like a more conveniently located Wild West to people in Auburn in those days.

She seems confident that she can do just about any (respectable!) business that's going up there, too, if she can just get a tipoff or two from the man in charge. Her tone has this odd admixture of assertiveness and timidity—note the paragraph where she's self-consciously aware that she might've gone too far—with more than a dash of a palpable need to escape from the structure of her stable life as a teacher in Auburn and do... anything... somewhere more interesting.

I think this letter is amazing, it was far from what I was expecting to run across today, and I kind of want to drop everything I was doing and just find out what became of (Miss) Clara M. Bigelow now.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Search for "Clara M. Bigelow" in this page:
<https://archive.org/stream/graduatecatalogu00farm/graduatecatalogu00farm_djvu.txt>

The reference to "Lamont H. Appleby" ties in with this next reference, to "CLARA MAY APPLEBY", though much of the detail is paywalled:
<https://www.myheritage.com/names/clara_appleby>

I entirely understand that impulse. I'd take a delay on the next fiction piece you write if it meant finding out a little more about Miss Bigelow, and her future husband. I imagine we'll never know how he came to propose, but it would at least be interesting to know what he did for a living.

Peter Eng
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Insert humorous comment here.