Fisherman Laurence Newman:
“Snow, Fog, Whatever, We Went Out and Set the Trawls”

by Laurie Schreiber

S.W. Newman Groceries and Post Office, Manset, circa 1900. From left, probably, S.W. Newman, Guy Hamilton Parker, Lyle Dennis Newman, Molly Newman, unknown. Courtesy The Southwest Harbor Public Library Collection of Photographs.

SOUTHWEST HARBOR – The Southwest Harbor Public Library has a nice trove of oral history cassette tapes recorded under library auspices in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s.

One of these voices is Southwest Harbor fisherman Laurence Newman, recorded in 1993, with asides by his wife Eleanor. He describes a bygone day of fishing off midcoast Maine, here transcribed, spliced for narrative flow, occasionally synopsized, and interspersed with explanatory information from other sources.

“I was born in Manset in 1905.

We lived on the Manset road, right on the side of the road. My grandfather had a grocery store on the other side. My grandmother had a dry goods department where she was busy all the time. My grandmother had to do post office work, too. They lived overhead in an apartment. That store was there from the late 1880s on up until about 1950.”

Laurence’s grandfather, Saunders Ward Newman, was called Ward. Ward and his father, Henry, along with Henry’s three brothers, built ships on Mount Desert Island and in Ellsworth. (One of Henry’s ships, the Kate Newman, was named after his wife, Catherine Ward Newman. The Kate Newman went down in a collision off the Jersey coast. The sole survivor was knocked, or jumped, onto the other vessel with the impact. Henry was later killed when he was thrown from his horse-and-sleigh one winter. This info is from Ralph Stanley, the subject of ten of the library’s tapes.)

Ward and Molly’s store was a busy place. Says Laurence, “There were a lot of fishing vessels in the harbor, and my grandfather carried a lot of fishing supplies and oil boots and things like that. He had a big barrel behind his counter that was full of corned beef. I remember he had a hook hanging over the side of tub, and he’d hook out a piece of meat for a customer. He had a big round of cheese on the counter, and he’d cut a wedge of cheese for them, and he’d grind the coffee for them.”

Ward had a racehorse that served double-duty to deliver groceries. He used to hire a trainer, and raced a sulkie at the state fair. Later, he had another racehorse called Baby Laurence, named for his grandson.

“My grandfather liked hunting and fishing and bird-shooting,” says Laurence. “He liked to go to fairs to race the horses. While he was doing all that, my grandmother was left in that big store to take care of it. She was alone all the time. But it didn’t bother my grandfather much. He still did those things he wanted to do.”

Ward also built model boats.

“S.W. Newman is putting the finishing touches to a beautiful model of a two-masted craft, with every tiny block and chain and rope complete to the last detail,” an old newspaper item reads. “The name, The Eagle, is painted in beautifully executed letters and the figurehead is a gilded eagle with outstretched wings. The little anchors are in place and the sails all set.”

Molly had storied forebears.

“Captain Hadlock, on Cranberry Island, was her great-grandfather,” says Laurence. “Captain Hadlock was married to this Prussian lady. He was a showman, and he used to go up to Labrador and collect Eskimo trinkets and seals. He brought back a pair of Eskimos one time. He took them and his collection to Europe to put on a show, in England and then over to the continent. He was quite successful. He started giving shows to royalty. He had to get permission to put on these shows. In Germany, one day, he went to get permission to put on his show. The official wasn’t home, but his daughter opened the door. When Captain Hadlock saw the daughter, he knew he was going to marry her. I guess she felt more or less the same way.”

This is the true story told in the 1934 book God’s Pocket, by Rachel Field. Captain Samuel Hadlock, Jr., born in 1792, was evidently something of a visionary (and neglectful father. His first wife died, and he left behind their three children when he sailed off to tour his show).

The official’s daughter was Dorothea Albertina Wilhelmina Celeste. They married in 1825, and had a daughter, Jane Matilda, in 1826, in Paris, while they were on tour with Hadlock’s show of curiosities, which was popular with royalty.

Hadlock made a fortune. The Inuit died. He lost a fortune. By 1827, the little family was back on the Cranberry Isles, where Dorothea Albertina Wilhelmina Celeste was referred to as The Prussian Lady. Captain Samuel called his wife Hanna Caroline, or just Caroline. He built a large house on a hill, with the help of his sister Abigail’s husband, Samuel Spurling. Captain Samuel and Caroline had a second child, a son named Epps. A year later, Captain Samuel was off again, leaving his second family behind to sail for Greenland on a sealing expedition. He and his crew never returned.

The Prussian Lady left Great Cranberry, remarried in 1839, and had two more children. She died in 1889 and is buried in Southwest Harbor.

In the meantime, there was Captain Samuel’s sister, Abigail. About four years after she lost her brother at sea, she lost her husband, Samuel Spurling, to the same fate. In 1839, Abigail married a man named William Preble, the son of a Mount Desert Rock lighthouse keeper, who arrived on Great Cranberry Island as a schoolteacher, became a church elder, selectman, justice of the peace, notary public, gentleman farmer, tax appraiser, postmaster, storekeeper, shipbuilder, ship owner, and shipwreck appraiser. (Preble information is from the Great Cranberry Island Historical Society.)

Preble moved into the Hadlock house, which is today called Preble House. Abigail died in 1874. A year later, Preble married Captain Samuel’s daughter, Jane Matilda, who by then was a widow herself. Jane’s first husband, George Epps Sanford, was a cod fisherman who died in 1873 and left her with three children. One of them was Samuel “Sammy” Clark Sanford (1852-1933), who inherited the European exhibition journals recorded by his grandfather, Captain Samuel. Sammy was at odds with his stepfather and lived the rest of his life in a one-room cabin on the Preble property.

Rachel Field visited Great Cranberry Island a number of times, and noticed Sammy, by then “a gaunt, spare” old man. One day, he hailed her and began to tell her about his grandfather’s journeys. She returned many times to learn more. Two days before his death, Sammy entrusted her with his grandfather’s journals.

Sammy, says Laurence, also had a gold snuffbox, jewelry that had been given to his grandfather by King Frederick Augustus of Saxony, and a signet ring; “Sammy was getting old and he wanted to make sure that was taken care of. So he gave the snuffbox, the jewelry and the signet ring to my father, Lyle Newman. Lyle gave them to me. I turned over the snuffbox and jewelry to the Hadlock Museum on Cranberry Island. The snuffbox, they gave me a receipt for $2,000, for exemption for income tax. I think the jewels are in a safe because they’re too valuable to be left out in a case.

“The signet ring, I wore that. It was a nice ring. I was out fishing one day, and I heard on my radio that a load of herring had been shut off up on Marshall Island [off Swan’s Island], so I went right from lobstering up there and got 50 bushels, and filled up the cockpit of the boat, to bring home for lobster bait. On the way home, I cleaned three or four of the larger herring. When I got through, I washed my hands in a bucket of water. It’s slippery when you’re cleaning herring. I slapped my hands, and out springs that ring overboard. So some codfish had it in his belly.”

Laurence’s father, Lyle, was born in 1876.

As a young man, Lyle had a little barbershop on the side of his parents’ store.

“Then one summer,” says Laurence, “he bought some lobsters. He had a lobster car built, and he kept those lobsters for the summer. When he sold them in the fall, he made more money doing that than he did barbering. So he gave up barbering and learned the lobster business. From then on, the rest of his life, he was in the lobster business. He had one of the first powerboats in the harbor.”

Laurence was an only child. He liked to fish. One spring, he returned home from prep school and found his grandfather had built him a 24-foot square-stern fish boat with a six-cylinder universal engine.

“That was a dandy. That was perfect! So I spent the next six years, vacations, three months each summer, going fishing and lobstering, having the time of my life, healthy work, and doing pretty well financially. I’d go back to school, oftentimes, with a thousand dollars made, compared with the other boys, three hundred or four hundred dollars doing caddy work or hotel work or something. Some of the professors asked me why I wanted to go to college, when I could make all that money. I sometimes wondered myself. I’d go out in that boat and come back loaded. That was fun. That was real fun.

“In those days, the shorefront was covered with fish wharves and coal wharves. One was Parker, loaded with salt fish. Vessels would go seining and they’d come in loaded with pollock, herring, shad, or mackerel. All those species, they’d catch off Mount Desert Rock. When they’d come in with a load of pollock, they’d hoist them on the wharf and we kids would get a job dressing the fish. They’d be full of shrimp. If you left them in the pollock for three or four hours, they’d spoil the pollock. They were hot. Our hands, when we dressed those fish, would be all sore, just raw. We’d get 30 cents an hour. When the herring came in, they’d come into Stanley fish wharf, where they had a big cold storage. We would go down there and wheel those herring up to the cold storage, hoist them up and freeze them for bait for the trawl fishermen in the winter. Mackerel and shad the same way. Now you don’t see a fish of any kind at all out there.”

Next Month: Part II – Laurence Goes Off to MIT