November 2011

The Casco Bubble

From 1860 to 1900 Portland was the undisputed “Chewing Gum Capital of America” and founder John B. Curtis ( 1827-1897 ) was its uncrowned king. In 1848, Curtis, a Maine-born traveling salesman and stove top experimenter, perfected mixing paraffin, sugars and flavorings with spruce gum–the pungent and pitchy resin from Maine spruce trees–into the long-lasting chewable treat we all know and love. In 1852, Curtis opened the Curtis Chewing Gum Co. in Portland, just in time to provide Civil War soldiers with tongue-teasing flavors like “American Flag,” “Yankee Spruce,” and “Licorice Lulu.” (Legend says Abraham Lincoln was a fan of all flavors.) Until the end of the century, 200 women workers at Curtis’s Portland factory turned out 1800 boxes of Maine Pure Spruce Gum a day for the waiting world. He died in 1897 a rich man. His factory at 13 Deer Street (now 291 Fore Street) closed in 1920. But his all-American treat lives on; the Clark Chewing Gum Co. still making kids happy and baseball players content. Chew on, America.

City of the Kiln

Where schoolboys now bag groceries and cars whisk upon the Interstate once stood the largest stoneware factory in New England. Just north of the Portland Post Office on Forest Ave., buried beneath the Interstate cloverleaf and parking lot for a mega-supermarket, lies forgotten Deering Point. Here for 140 years stood the Portland Stone Ware and Winslow Pottery companies. Massive kilns fired countless sturdy crocks, pipes, pots, tiles, spittoons, vases, jugs and more–the convenience containers for a pre-plastic world. As early as 1836 Gorham’s Distillery and Orcutt & Crafts Pottery Factory stood here on a two acre thumb of land jutting into open Back Cove.  In 1847 John T. Winslow joined the firm, soon burning 300 tons of clay and 500 chords of wood a year to meet the busy New England crockery market. By 1875, Portland Stone Ware Co. boasted its own 200-foot wharf along Marginal Way and busy landings along Back Cove to take in 2000 tons of yellow clay (mined in New Jersey) carried in on its own coast-cruising fleet of barges and multi-masted schooners flying the Winslow flag. By 1882 the renamed Winslow Pottery Co. had 250 employees, electric arc lights for night work, and 26 multi-ton kilns that roared round the clock. “Anything capable of molding from clay” was made by Winslow: glazed jugs, sewer and drain pipe, fireproof tile, terra-cotta statues, cemetery vases, creamery crocks, and beer bottles. The Great Depression–and the coming of plastics–spelled the end. After World War II, Winslow became a dealer in goods made elsewhere and closed its doors in 1969. The schooners cross Back Cove no more, and in the 1970s new highways buried the stone ware site forever for the wheels of the all-conquering auto. Look carefully: do you have a Portland Stone Ware beer bottle on the back shelf?

From Pool Halls to Casinos

In 1895, Portlander Alonzo Burt, at a Morrill’s Corner factory, began using compression molding to shape rosin, ivory dust, and binders into the smooth, numbered spheres beloved by players of billiards, the “game for perfect gentlemen.” Burt’s Portland Billiard Ball Corp. balls were popular, but pool hall owners lamented that police raids too often caught guilty gamblers with piles of cash atop the billiard tables. What to do? Burt reworked his compressors to make wafers–symbolic cash–and the celluloid poker chip was born. Until 1985, when it bowed to cheaper competition, the re-named Burt Company shipped casino chips nationwide for the booming American gaming industry made at its quiet, publicity-shy location. CHIPCO International bought the Burt assets that year and continues producing the Burt basics today, but now embeds its chips with RFIDs–tiny micro-transmitters–as an anti-theft feature. Casino computers can now talk to their chips 24/7 and 365. Alonzo Burt might smile: His chips still speak the language of Lady Luck.

By Herbert C. Adams