by Isabel Morse Maresh
BELFAST, Me. Aug. 26 _ “Who is the strongest man in town?” asked the correspondent of some workmen at noontime. “No one knows,” was the reply.
A farmer, a stableman and a milkman came along and the conversation became general. “I am not so stout as some,” said Ira Flanders, “but at my work of wheeling brick, I once took away 300 weighing 1800 pounds, on an ordinary barrow, and think that I can do it again, although it don’t do a fellow any good.”
“Silas Beckwith,” said the milkman, “shouldered a barrel of pork and carried it from one truck to another about 20 yards away. He said that he felt relieved when he put it down, a great burden off his shoulders, so to speak.”
“The greatest feat of strength within my knowledge,” said the farmer, ‘was when Si Wentworth shouldered the 700-pound anchor and carried it out of the company’s shed. Si had to step down one step, and though no one knew it, he was hurt, the jar injured his back, and he has never lifted heavy weights since.”
“Probably the strongest man in this vicinity today,” said the stableman, “is Alf Ellis of Prospect. Alf got a reputation for lifting up on the quarry, and was pestered nearly to death by people who wanted to get up some kind of a trial with him.
“So he rigged up some straps to a big rock that lay under his shed, and lifted it with ease in the presence of a large company. ‘There is my load,’ says Alf, ‘and when you bring a man who can take her up I will try again.’
“No one has ever lifted it, and it is safe to say that no ordinary man ever will, for it weighs somewhere between 1100 and 1200 pounds.”
“Speaking about feats of strength,” said the blacksmith, “puts me in mind of a contest we had in front of my shop last fall. We put out a big plank on blocking about breast high, and all the strong men up and down this street had a try at lifting the plank with a big box of old iron on top of it.
“Freeman Batchelder, who works in the shop at the head of the street, came down to look on, and was invited to take a try, although no one supposed that he could budge the load. Well, sir, Freem lifted it as easy as an ordinary man could have raised the plank.
Then two men and a boy got on, and he lifted the lot. The interest among the other fellows seemed to die out after that, and there hasn’t been any lifting round here since.”
Inquiry among the police force shows that the city marshal, William H. Sanborn, has been and is yet, one of the strongest men in the place. On one occasion he was known to lift 985 pounds.
There have been frequent trials of strength by lifting on scales and lifts on a bar that is attached to a rope tied under the scales. The contestant stands on the scales and lifts on a bar that is attached to a rope tied under the scales. Weights are added until the limit of the competitor's strength is reached.
Welman Hanson, a foreman in the shoe factory, tipped the beam with 1200 pounds opposed to him in a trial of this kind.
At the shipyard there are many strong men, but the lifting is now done mostly by power. Abner Jipson, a former employee there, had remarkable strength. He could lift as much on one end of a stick of timber as three or four ordinary men could on the other. On one occasion he lifted the weight of a pile driver that weighed, or was said to have weighed, 1800 pounds.”
As my late wise mother used to say, “They’ll pay for it someday!”
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