This coming Saturday (May 3), the Museums of the Bethel Historical Society will host a walking tour of West Bethel’s Main Street. We will meet at the West Bethel Post Office at 2:00, rain or shine. We’d love to have you join us!
This is the second year in which MBHS has participated in Jane's Walk, a global festival of free, volunteer-led walking conversations inspired by community activist Jane Jacobs, which takes place annually in over 200 communities around the world. Our walk this year is entitled, “A Walk Through West Bethel History, With a Bit of Poetic License,” and will feature the history of local buildings and former building sites, interspersed with reading of poems penned by West Bethel citizens of the past.
Here’s a little something you may not know: West Bethel’s village was once known as “Gander Corner,” because, the story goes, a pair of village blacksmith’s once stole a gander from a local farmer, roasted it over the forge fire, and feasted upon it in a blacksmith shop nearby. The following poem, originally published in the Gorham Mountaineer in 1884 was inspired by the story.
Gander Corner Song
By Elias Grover
In Bethel’s fair town of fame and renown
For Learning, and morals and grace,
Some little affair sometimes happens there
Which does not much honour the place.
They say on the flat they wickedly chat,
They buy, and cheat, and deceive;
Were it not for a Wheeler and Old Captain Peter,
The place would be sunk, I believe.
There is a vile place, which to their disgrace,
Is called we well know, Gander Corner,
A little affair of late happened there,
Not much to their credit of honour.
One man, it is true, had bid them adieu,
And moved off his goods and his stock,
Except one old gander which he left there to wander,
And him they soon bought to the block.
Oh! Gander, forlorn, Oh! had you but known
Of this sad, this fatal disaster,
How soon you’d have speder across the great meader.
And escaped unhurt to your master.
But, alas! ‘twas too late to escape the sad fate,
The ax was already drawn,
When, with one fatal blow, alas! and I trow,
And the poor gander was gone.
Ye lawyers define the horrible crime,
And tell where the laws do forbid it,
Goose slaughter or no, how far it may go,
And hang up the rascals that did it.
(Copied from The Gorham Mountaineer of Feb. 8, 1884.)