Amon Alden Morse

1905-1989

Horse Trader of Northport, Maine.

“I never was lazy, I tell ya," so said Amon Morse in talking with a Republican Journal reporter in 1989, a few months before his death. And lazy, Amon was not.

He had been born in Belmont, Maine in 1905, the sixth child of John W. and Jennie (Levenseller) Morse, named after his mother’s childhood friend, Amon, son of Dr. Frank Brown of Lincolnville.

Amon was two years old, his brother Lester, age one year, when their mother, Jennie, died as a result of a premature childbirth.

Amon was raised in a household of many motherless siblings and cousins by their loving grandmother, Susan (Shea) Morse. There was never a dull moment in the busy household.

Amon was diagnosed with what was called polio when he was young. He was not able to keep up with his siblings. Grandmother was determined he would walk, having his older brothers, Clarence and Everett, and cousins, Charlie and Colby, walk him around, though it was painful.

He eventually did walk, though the leg bothered him much of his life. Once he was able to walk, he usually was on the run wherever he went.

Amon was very close to his older sister, Bertha, who read the Bible to him while he was laid up with polio. He attended the new Greer’s Corner School, which was built in 1908, where he was a janitor, starting the fires on cold winter mornings, keeping the firewood lugged in, and sweeping the schoolroom before he left for the day, for which he was paid a small sum.

Amon was a very smart student. Throughout his life, not many could out-figure him. When Amon was young, they could see the schoolhouse from the porch of the old home, and see the farmers cutting ice on Tilden Pond in the winter.

After Amon’s mother, Jennie’s death, Father married May, a young friend of the Morse girls in 1908. May was fifteen years old when they married. They had a daughter, Faustena.

In 1914, the John W. Morse home was destroyed by fire while Father and May were away. The neighbors brought teams of horses and oxen and pulled the shed away from the burning house. With much effort saved the barn.

During the fire, Amon, Lester, and Faustena were taken next door to stay with a crippled cousin, Dudley Howard. Father rebuilt the house with assistance from neighbors and Grangers.

Father John Morse had a hay press, which was hauled from farm to farm, pressing hay in barns. Often the crew stayed at a farm until the job was done. They were fed by the farmer's wives.

Amon recalled the meals years later. At one farm, there was a pile of molding bread in a corner. Bread pudding was served at each meal. When Amon realized the pudding was made from the molding bread, he lost his appetite for it.

At one farm a crock of salted dandelion greens was in the upstairs chamber, which a cat slept on. He recalled one farm that had bedbugs, making sleep nearly impossible. He would sometimes go without eating until they returned home. From those incidents he went though life with a taste for clean prepared food.

Amon also worked at the Chenery farm as a water boy in his youth. He attended school until the sixth grade, about 1916, when he ended his formal schooling to work full time, to pay his board to his sister, Susie, who had married Jephtha Buck.

Amon paid Susie to purchase material and make shirts for him. Grandmother had shown him how to draw around his hand and make a pattern to make mittens. He would take a piece of an old wool coat, cut them out from the pattern, and blanket-stitch around them, making warm mittens. [His daughter, Isabel, has the pattern that he drew.]

Each one in the household had to work as soon as they were able. Hazel worked for Dr. Simmons in Searsmont. Bertha had also worked for Dr. Simmons, and then at a restaurant in Belfast. Everett had gone to Lincolnville to work, living with their cousin, Georgie Dickey. Lester went to live with Aunt Etta Batchelder and her husband, Fred, doing farm work for his board.

Amon was offered chances to live on several neighboring farms to earn his board. Percy Tower gave him his first calf to raise. Amon was a born trader, inheriting the trait from his grandfather, Moses Morse. He dickered and traded even as a child, a trait that he carried on his whole life. He would bring home animals and furniture, once a marble-topped table which his sister, Susie, kept.

His stepmother, May died of tuberculosis in 1917, at age 23. A year later, Bertha became sick with the influenza. She came home for Grandmother to take care of, passing away at age 21. Amon was aged thirteen years old when Bertha died.

Amon joined Mystic Grange in 1920, with Marian and Marjorie Tower and the Jackson boy. They were active members, going to suppers, dances, and box socials at the Grange.

Amon had a girlfriend, Ethel O. White, a year younger than he. She contracted tuberculosis and was sent to the sanitarium in Hebron, where she died 2 Nov. 1923, at age seventeen.

Grandmother Morse died in 1924 at Aunt Etta’s. Grandmother had been an outstanding authority figure in Amon’s life. She gave sage advice, telling him once, “You have to love yourself before you can love others.” She would be sadly missed.

Everett had met and married Callie, one of the daughters of Richard and Annie Lermond of Lincolnville. Rich Lermond had hired Amon to help on the farm, where he met middle daughter, Mary Lermond. Amon recalled the night that they were married. It was early spring with muddy roads. Rich hitched up the team and drove Amon and Mary out the Belmont Road to the Dickey Mills Road, across to Halls Corner, on to Belfast. The mud was up to the hubs of the wagon. Amon always thought well of Rich Lermond, being like a father to him.

Amon and Mary moved to the Mahoney Ranch in East Searsmont, where they worked for Ernest Mahoney, a Boston businessman, on his farm.

Three sons, Richard, Bernard, and Alton were born while they lived there. Amon and Mary raised dry beans on the ranch, living very frugally, and saving $900. Bernard and Alton died twenty-one months apart, each as an infant, while they lived on the ranch. After the babies’ deaths, Mary did not want to live there in the secluded neighborhood.

With the money earned by raising beans, Amon and Mary purchased the J. R. Hurd farm in Northport, from his brother-in-law, Roscoe Hurd Dean. They moved onto the farm on Christmas day 1928.

In Northport, they raised farm crops, using horses to plow, harrow, mow and rake hay, and to pull the hayfork loaded with hay into the mow. He was well-known as a cattle dealer and horse trader. He worked on the town roads in Northport to pay off his taxes. He worked in Camden in the building of the Town Library following the Depression.

In Northport, they raised their children, Richard, Janette, Isabel, Raymond, Annie, and Sylvia, where they attended Brainard School, and later Amon Jr. and grandson, Ricky. In 1941, Amon and Mary endured some sorrow and hard times. That year, two-year-old Annie was playing in the shade under the big dump truck with dual tires. The truck rolled ahead and crushed her leg under the tires. She was in traction for many weeks, though she was saved from permanent damage by a sand pail that partially protected her legs.

In September of that year, eleven-year-old Janette developed a very high fever resulting from a rare sinus disease. Her fever did not come down after surgery, and she died Oct. 2, 1941, twenty-one days after her eleventh birthday. Six months later, in April of 1942, Amon’s younger brother, Lester died a mysterious death, he was found in a burning barn. He was thirty-eight years old.

Two months later, while Amon was working on the town roads, and could not be contacted, his nephew, John Dean, drove Mary to Bradbury Memorial Hospital in Belfast, where she gave birth to a baby boy in a premature C-section. He died shortly after birth.

During World War II, Richard was drafted into the U.S. Army. Mary worked with Amon, doing outside chores, milking cows, gardening, raking hay, as well as keeping house and raising children.

During that time, many items, such as sugar, rubber tires, and gasoline were rationed. Horsepower was still used in farming. During that time, Amon sold fifty horses in one year. He would drive to Clinton where "green’"untrained horses were sold, brought by rail from the West and Canada. He would work with the horses until he could sell them to local farmers at a small profit.

Amon and Mary had never taken a vacation until the early 1950s when they went to Florida with relatives. They enjoyed wintering in Florida so much they purchased a small place there in Glenwood.

Amon had a large garden in Maine and a garden in Florida during the winter, the envy of many. After putting up the food for their use, he gave most of the produce away to anyone who stopped to visit.

On a bitterly cold night in January 1955, while Amon and Mary were in Florida, the farm buildings in Northport burned Members of their family, Isabel, Bob, baby Julie, Raymond, Annie, Sylvia, Bub, and Ricky all escaped without harm, but nineteen head of cattle, two pigs, and a dog perished in the fire. The cause of the fire was determined to have been electrical, starting in the barn under the haymow.

Amon rebuilt the farm buildings with the help of his brother, Everett, and friend, Ralph Knight. He restocked the farm with cattle and machinery.

Amon eventually retired from farming, spending each winter in Florida until 1988. He had a garden every summer until that year also. He received a “Golden Sheaf” certificate from the Grange in 1974, also fifty years as a member of the Masonic Lodge.

Amon was a staunch Republican who was outspoken in his beliefs. He made no bones about speaking out about what he felt was wrong in the government and town politics.

Amon died at the age of eighty-four years at his farm home in Northport, with his family surrounding him. He lived a long fruitful life, instilling in his family the fruitfulness of hard work and honesty.

He was well-spoken of by those who knew him. His last ride to the Union Cemetery in Lincolnville, Maine, where he is buried was followed by a mile-long entourage of mourners, showing the esteem with which he was held in life.