By Michael Davis

BN Columnist

Howdy neighbor!

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of enjoying a day spent at the World’s Fair out to North Waterford, and let me tell you, while the whole world wasn’t necessarily in attendance, we made a pretty good showing at the very least.

Now, I’ve been told the Waterford Fair dates back, in some form or another, to the year 1850, but I can’t vouch for it having been continuously held through all that time. We had fairs here in Bridgton in the 1850s too, but not annually until the Bridgton Farmers and Mechanics Club organized in the 1880s. Similarly, starting in the 1880s, the goings on of an annual fair over at North Waterford begin to appear here in The Bridgton News, and in 1928 the North Waterford Fair rebranded to its far more ambitious title, the Waterford World’s Fair.

Originally carried out just on the common before the North Waterford Congregational Church, it has since grown to occupy a large fair-field all its own with dedicated pulling rings and exhibition halls on a nearby hilltop back and to the left of the church, and roughly opposite the site of the late lamented Melby’s Market. (Incidentally, I realize I failed to note the closing of Melby’s back in September of ’22 in the midst of the pandemic. I and many others sorely miss it; one could buy almost anything one needed at Melby’s, and with few alternatives now left in that section of country certainly the whole region is poorer for their loss. It was there I ate many a day when first learning to drive, on my many rambles over and through the Oxford hill country.)

I have to confess, however, that while I am certain there are many hundreds of wonderful historical stories which one could tell of the Waterford World’s Fair, I personally do not have many of them in my repertoire to pull from. Of course, I could relate certain episodes from my own childhood, sure, but that’s not what our readers come here for. So instead, though it is not necessarily a happy one, today I will be telling the tale of old Jabez Hodgkins, his roll of $1,000 in cash, and one no good very bad day he had amongst a band of disreputable fortune tellers at the Waterford World’s Fair in 1928. But first, to set the stage, let me tell you a little something about Uncle Jabe.

Now to start off, Uncle Jabe was a drifter — a transient, a tramp by any other name who came to Bridgton sometime in the early 1920s; and like as not he came here over the railroad, for once here he always took care to maintain a firm connection with it. He was an old man, very old in fact, but broad and sturdy of build, with eyes like a hawk, a wide smiling face, and skin tanned to a leathery toughness from long years in hotter climates. He was a merry fellow of Irish extraction, and often went by the nickname Happy Jack. From everything I’ve heard of him, he was your classic, prototypical early-20th century hobo, with a bindlestick and all. He lived in a derelict tar-paper shack along Depot Street, formerly a blacksmith shop outbuilding, which he simply occupied and laid claim to fresh off the railroad one dim summer night. Somehow, he acquired an old, broken-down mule which he kept in his shack with him and never let outside in winter for fear it would catch its death of cold. It was said he didn’t trust banks, and that he fried his food in axel grease. He preferred Moxie over any other soda, and claimed he was over 100 years old. While he was never properly hired by the railroad, after establishing himself locally he soon took it upon himself to become the unofficial night watchman over the railyard, eventually earning a small stipend for his nightly watch, doing odd jobs, scaring away other tramps, and sounding the fire alarm if a wayward coal started a brush fire he couldn’t stamp out on his own.

It’s what he did before coming to Bridgton that really makes him interesting. For it was his long life, and the many tales he loved to tell of it, which really made him an object of intrigue hereabouts, and cemented him as one of wonder to all our local children. You see Jabe claimed to have been born on shipboard in May of 1833, somewhere in the English Channel, to an Irish mother who later died and was buried at sea. As a boy, he claimed the misfortune of having crewing aboard a slave ship, which eventually brought him to our distant shores. Coming to America, he’d been an altar boy in a Catholic church, likely seeking sanctuary, until eventually he went west to grow up within the country. Here, he did many outlandish things, all of which he loved to tell about; and though his stories were often wild, he had the knowledge and the scars to prove many of them. To hear him tell it, he’d lived a life of high adventure in the old West, serving in the Mexican War of 1847, and could recite anecdotes of Santa Anna and the details of troop movements and battles he claimed to have fought. He’d been a gold-rush 49er, prospected in Vancouver, served under the famed Col. Custer and witnessed his tragic Last Stand, and afterwards been hunted across the Montana plains by a desperate band of Sioux. And if this you doubted he’d wax poetic of Custer’s stirring speeches, recite quotations, and stripping off his clothes display the tomahawk scars he’d earned to prove it. Struck down and left for dead, he’d been nursed back to health in a mountain cabin by a band of outlaws who’d found him, Jesse James among them – who by the way he maintained wasn’t really so bad a guy — and under his tutelage became a crack shot with the old cowboy .44 he kept till his dying day, which he used to pop rats and threaten midnight thieves around the Bridgton railyard.

Another thing he picked up through his association with Jesse James was a government bounty on his head, so soon leaving that illustrious company he fell in with a travelling showman named P.T. Barnum, maybe you’ve heard of him, doing trick-shooting and driving the leopard wagon for him for many years. It was here he supposedly acquired a love of fairs and circuses and would always save up his money to see them whenever one came near. After many years of this, he drifted, finding varied work as a charcoal burner, a mason, and finally coming up to Maine, he took a job digging bricks in the claypit quarry where Portland Station was built in 1890.

He came to Bridgton upon the old B&SR railroad, a spur line off the Maine Central from Portland to New Hampshire and beyond, and when he arrived in the 1920s it was to put down roots and live out, among our pleasant rural hills, the last years of a long and uncommonly misspent life.

That’s the story he told anyways, told to amaze all the summer tourists who’d file past his shack fresh from the railroad each day, and often they’d pitch him quarters to hear him tell it, or he’d bet them a dollar to demonstrate his skill shooting at some far distant mark he never failed to hit. One could almost believe all that he told, and the mix of enthusiasm and facts he doled out at every sign of doubt were very disarming – that is if you didn’t stop to hear him tell his life over and over each day. For in that case you’d discover that, while most of the time the key details stayed mostly the same, there was yet enough variance in his tradition to incline one to doubt, at least strongly, the full measure of all he claimed to have done. I am further informed that, of all the incredible stories I’ve only touched on in this brief abstract, these were not even the half of all the adventures he’d supposedly lived through. Who can say now, almost 90 years since his death, just how much of it was true?

But one thing certainly was. In October of 1928, while attending the first of the North Waterford fairs which aspired to a “Worldwide” standing, he had been inveigled into the tent of a couple of fortune tellers, as he put it “a Gypsy woman and an Indian Fakir,” who in the process of reading their crystal ball had picked his pocket and, from a roll of over $1,000 in life-savings he kept hidden in an old tobacco pouch, surreptitiously riffled off some $430 before he noticed. Not having his six-shooter to hand and being a former carnie himself and wise to their tricks and misdirection, he called loudly for assistance and eventually succeeded in alerting men to his aid, but not before the woman had vanished into the crowd with his money. A posse was at once summoned, and soon the woman and her accomplice were hauled before the authorities, but by then Jabe’s money had naturally vanished. As we find from the News of February 1, 1929, this case was actually prosecuted and brought to trial before Maine’s small claims courts, for of course the fortune tellers claimed they’d only been paid their lawful fee, and though eventually the judge did rule on Jabe’s behalf, it was only a ceremonial victory. The carnies simply did not have the money to pay, so the woman was soon incarcerated in the state penitentiary while the fakir was ultimately deported for lack of documentation back to his native India. As for poor old Jabe, he lamented the loss of that money all his days, and year by year the sum he claimed to have lost grew bigger, first $500, then $1,000, then $1,500 and upwards — and year by year the donations made to him by piteous tourists who heard his stories grew, until at last, he had a decent sum of money saved up once again. Not about to make the same mistake twice, he resolved to put his trust in banks and promptly placed all his money in a safe bank account – one which, in 1933, failed when the bank went under in the Great Depression, once again leaving him with nothing but his empty tobacco pouch.

By this time, age was catching up with him, he was getting sick and had been dismissed from service to the railroad, and pleading poverty at town meeting he was soon obliged to leave his hovel on Depot Street and move onto the Town Farm in South Bridgton, living there as an inmate pauper through the last years of the local Town Farm system in the 1930s. I cannot learn what became of the mule, but I hope for the best.

Though he claimed to be 104 at the time of his death, he never received the town’s Boston Post Cane either – because to be honest he couldn’t prove his age with any documents, and by this time the town selectmen had given up believing in most anything he said. Thanks to the work of local hero Walter A. Hawkins’ arguing on his behalf, Jabe was in 1935 awarded Maine’s Centenarian Gold Medal, winning a letter from the governor and a shiny golden pin he proudly wore on his breast for the last year and half of his life. While there, he sang songs and danced to cheer up his fellow paupers, swept out the poor house, and of course kept right on telling his famous stories until death finally came for him on July 7, 1937, taking him in his sleep at the possible age of 104 years two months. The town paid for his funeral services at Potter’s Parlors up on Elm Street, and they also paid to bury him, but sadly even I don’t know where. Pauper’s graves were never marked.

What I love best about history is that, despite it all, the stories live on. Jabe saw to that, each and every day he did his work mythologizing his life for passing tourists and generations of our youth, ensuring in his own way that he’d never be forgotten here in this town he loved, and adopted as his last and final home.

This past weekend when I went to the Waterford World’s Fair and took out my own “roll” to buy a bison burger from concessions, I thought again of Uncle Jabe and, casting my eyes cautiously around for fortune tellers, peeled off an extra two dollars to buy myself a big old can of Moxie. Without ceremony, without outward word, but with a good deal of emotion welling up inside, I drank a silent toast to the memory of one man, long dead but ne’er forgotten, and dear reader let me tell you; it couldn’t have tasted better. I don’t even like soda.

Till next time!