NORWAY – He dragged it out of swamp muck off Main Street. But Peter Hammond of Norway would not have found it without a clue from a custodian at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School.
The custodian saw a faded photograph of a trolley hanging in Hammond’s classroom, and told Hammond he knew where it was buried.
It was in a boggy area where he used to dig worms for fishing, Hammond recalled in an interview last week. With help, he pulled out what remained of the trolley from the mud and pucker brush – just the metal truck bed with wheels and some gear. The streetcar it once held had rotted away or been used for something else, Hammond guessed.
“It would be nice to build a replica of the car,” he said. “I don’t think any towns in Maine have anything on display any more.”
The car was one of four that once regularly ran from Pleasant Street in Norway to Market Square in Paris, a distance of 2.13 miles, Hammond said. The trolleys would make the trip six days a week, 12 hours a day, costing a nickel a passenger.
The trolleys ran from 1895 to 1918, before being driven out by the automobile.
In the 10 years since discovering the trolley bed, Hammond, a former economics teacher, bus fancier and Portland bus driver, has nursed a small dream to reconstruct the wooden trolley and park it somewhere in town as a historical piece.
In downtown Norway, pretty much all that remains of the street railway industry is the town’s former trolley garage, which has been converted into the Trolley House Restaurant, Hammond said.
After being sandblasted and painted, the trolley has sat mostly untouched in a garage on Pleasant Street.
John Middleton, vice president of the Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunkport, said streetcars are rare. The museum has salvaged the last 13 intact cars in Maine.
If there is one left, “it is really hiding out,” Middleton said.
“Maine has been scoured,” he said last week. “Some many, many years ago, there was a search for existing streetcars. They found what they could.”
Debbie Wyman, Norway’s community development director, said the town has some funding that might be available to help rebuild the streetcar. “It’s certainly worth talking about. We have put it under the carpet a long time, and Peter Hammond has worked really hard on that.”
Middleton suggested that to reconstruct a streetcar would require a minimum of $100,000.
Hammond is not unrealistic about finances. He did once teach accounting, after all.
“It is not going to run, it is going to be static, so it could be done with a little less structural support,” he said. “It depends on whether labor is volunteer or paid, what it takes to get appropriate materials, how much would be donated, and how much paid. And you would need to have someone with a good woodworking shop.”
Streetcars have an allure for historians, for locomotive buffs, for people who remember riding them, and for tourists. Kennebunkport’s museum receives about 16,000 visitors a year, Middleton said.
Besides being interested in transportation, Hammond said he likes trolleys because they are massive, comely and they speak to a period when they dominated mass transport around towns and cities.
Like many new inventions, they also shaped the future. The trolley was responsible for creating suburbia, Hammond said. Before streetcars, people were crowded along main streets, but trolley lines allowed development beyond the immediate reaches of downtown.
Hammond, who has written a book on the history of fire departments, is also close to completing a book with another author on the Norway-Paris trolley line.
Hammond wrote the part on the social history of streetcars, and he seems to know everything about them, from how much conductors were paid ($1.50 per day), to how often they died from pneumonia (often, before the streetcars were enclosed).
“In the summertime, they would run special excursions,” Hammond said. “Just one round trip so people could cool off. At 5 to 8 miles per hour, they would generate enough breeze so it could cool you off in the evening.”
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