Portal
Home
Calendar
Gallery
FAQ
Search
Register
Log inThe luck of the Irish
Page 1 of 1•
The luck of the Irish
by Outspoken on Tue Jan 22, 2008 5:20 pm
The luck of the Irish
Fortunate finds reveal a previously overlooked chapter in Old Fort Western's history -- its years as a rough-and-tumble tenement.
By Meredith Goad
Staff Writer Portland Press Herald
AUGUSTA — Late last summer, Patti Violette, clad in jeans and a T-shirt, gingerly crawled behind a wall in the north attic of Old Fort Western. She wore only latex gloves for protection as she made her way through 200 years of dust, bird bones and feathers, old shingles, and corn cobs stored by squirrels.
It was dark and claustrophobic behind the knee wall, a small wall near the eave that helped square off the room.
"It was very hard to maneuver," recalled Violette, a historian and office manager at the 18th-century fort. "You're on your knees or on your belly most of the time. You literally had to inch in on your belly, and you couldn't lift your head up, because the nails were coming out of the roof. Some of the corners were very difficult to maneuver.
"It was a little scary. I couldn't breathe, because once you stirred all this stuff up, it was in your eyes, in your nose, in your skin."
But then she saw it -- a discovery that made all the discomfort worthwhile.
Lying near some metalwork was a gentleman's beaver top hat from around the 1820s or 1830s. Other artifacts found nearby included a pile of late Victorian shoes, an 1890s Marine Corps uniform coat, a piece of broken pottery, some tobacco tins and a broadside urging the restless to move to southwestern Kansas, "where the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad has for sale 2,500,000 acres of the finest farming lands."
All are remnants of the rough-and-tumble years from the mid-1800s through the 1920s, when the fort, perched on the banks of the Kennebec River, served as a tenement that housed Irish immigrants.
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=163099&ac=Audience
Photos by Jack Milton/Staff Photographer
Fortunate finds reveal a previously overlooked chapter in Old Fort Western's history -- its years as a rough-and-tumble tenement.
By Meredith Goad
Staff Writer Portland Press Herald
AUGUSTA — Late last summer, Patti Violette, clad in jeans and a T-shirt, gingerly crawled behind a wall in the north attic of Old Fort Western. She wore only latex gloves for protection as she made her way through 200 years of dust, bird bones and feathers, old shingles, and corn cobs stored by squirrels.
It was dark and claustrophobic behind the knee wall, a small wall near the eave that helped square off the room.
"It was very hard to maneuver," recalled Violette, a historian and office manager at the 18th-century fort. "You're on your knees or on your belly most of the time. You literally had to inch in on your belly, and you couldn't lift your head up, because the nails were coming out of the roof. Some of the corners were very difficult to maneuver.
"It was a little scary. I couldn't breathe, because once you stirred all this stuff up, it was in your eyes, in your nose, in your skin."
But then she saw it -- a discovery that made all the discomfort worthwhile.
Lying near some metalwork was a gentleman's beaver top hat from around the 1820s or 1830s. Other artifacts found nearby included a pile of late Victorian shoes, an 1890s Marine Corps uniform coat, a piece of broken pottery, some tobacco tins and a broadside urging the restless to move to southwestern Kansas, "where the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad has for sale 2,500,000 acres of the finest farming lands."
All are remnants of the rough-and-tumble years from the mid-1800s through the 1920s, when the fort, perched on the banks of the Kennebec River, served as a tenement that housed Irish immigrants.
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=163099&ac=Audience
Photos by Jack Milton/Staff Photographer
"Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything."
Plato (427-347 BC)
Plato (427-347 BC)
