Machias telegrapher announced the news

A century ago, hundreds of Mainers had recently installed telephones in their homes. The Bangor Daily News regularly published short stories and photographs of the Hello Girls, the operators who greeted all callers and made the proper connections.

For example, the trio of Houlton Hello Girls in 1905 included Mrs. J. E. Dickinson, chief operator for the White Mountain Telephone Co., and Miss Mabel Dow, assistant operator. The third “girl,” however, was not a girl. Arthur E. Bubar, a student at Ricker Classical Institute, was the night operator, a job in which he doubtlessly had lots of time to do his homework.

But while the telephone was causing all the excitement, an older form of mass communication, the telegraph, remained an important part of the nation’s communication network. A troop of messenger boys still gallivanted through the streets of Bangor and other cities delivering important epistles containing the vicissitudes of mankind transmitted from around the world through the skill of operators tapping out the code invented by Samuel F. B. Morse on a single key.

One of these wizards of the wire was Flavius J. Moore of Machias, a pioneer of telegraphy in Maine. After 50 years over the key in Washington County, he had retired two years before. The Bangor Daily News finally got around to sending a reporter Down East to interview him, doubtlessly thinking the telegraph operator might be driven into extinction by the Hello Girls.

The result was a feature story and a photograph in which Moore glared austerely at the camera from under a derby hat, a high starched collar separating his large head from the rest of his thin, loosely draped body. A pair of spectacles hung casually from his right hand.

Telegraphy was in its infancy when Moore began working at the Cherryfield office in 1852. There was just a single wire strung between Portland and Calais, but it was enough for the little business that was done then. Moore was soon transferred to the Machias office.

In the beginning, the line was owned by the Maine Telegraph Co, which soon became the American Telegraph Co. and then Western Union Telegraph Co. In the beginning, the only offices east of Bangor were in Ellsworth, Cherryfield, Machias, Calais and Eastport.

The business sounds like what we would call “laid back” today. “The operators were not expected to remain constantly at their desks, and in those early days, it was not uncommon for them to close their offices for an afternoon to go berrying or to make a trip to the woods in search of gum for recreation,” Moore told the BDN reporter. Evidently he had simpler tastes than the many young men then who were leaving the area for Bangor and points west.

In those days, the operators maintained the wires. One of Moore’s most important duties was keeping up his section of line, more than a 30-mile stretch through the woods from Cherryfield to Marion. When problems developed, it was his job to walk the line until he found the problem and fixed it.

“Climbers were then unknown, and a rope ladder was carried for use in ascending the poles. This was placed over the top of the pole by means of a long rod that was carried as a part of the outfit. Under the most favorable of circumstances, this ladder would be far from steady, but in very windy weather, the repairer was sure to get a swinging that required the most skillful efforts on his part to enable him to make the ascent successfully,” Moore told the reporter.

Business remained slow until the outbreak of the Civil War, when the office became a center for news of important, sometimes tragic events.

Items of general news that were sent over the wires were taken off by Mr. Moore and placed on a public bulletin board. When it was known that a great battle was in progress, people would throng his office and eagerly await the news from the front. It was not always the desire to learn who had been victorious and who had suffered defeat that sent the people so anxiously to the telegraph office, but often it was to get news of those who had fallen in the fight.

The hardest part of his job was to answer these inquiries, and more than once, he had to tell some mother or wife or father of the death of a husband or son, he told the reporter.

Moore announced to townsfolk the surrender of Lee and the assassination of Lincoln. After that, happenings slowed a bit. The biggest events became the presidential elections.

“It has been his privilege to announce to the people who invariably crowded into his office on the eve of election, the early returns of every election from the time that Franklin Pierce was elected to the second election of William McKinley,” the reporter recounted.

Moore became a respected citizen of Machias. He was elected town treasurer for 25 years. He was considered a man of culture.

“He had studied the best authors, and to the literature of the day, he had contributed a volume entitled “Treasure Trove and Other Poems.” You can still see it in some libraries. Sitting at the lonely key for many years had enabled Moore to rhapsodize on many sprightly or melancholy topics in a manner that belied his austere demeanor in the Bangor Daily News photograph.

After reading about Moore, I decided to see if I could still send a telegram. I found a toll-free phone number in the yellow pages. I was hoping to find at the other end of the line a man very much like Flavius Moore, a poet perhaps with insight into all that has happened since he retired more than a century ago. But instead I got a man with a very deep, gravelly voice, definitely not that of a poet, in an arid western state far from the blueberries and spruce gum that occupied Flavius Moore. He told me telegrams were no longer sent using a key with Morse code, but over a computer. When my questions began to press the limits of his knowledge and his patience, he referred me to a Web site on the Internet for information.

As I pondered this Web site, finding little on it to help me understand the role of the telegram in modern society, I decided it would be easier to send an e-mail or make a phone call.

Wayne E. Reilly has edited two books of Civil War era diaries and letters including The Diaries of Sarah Jane and Emma Ann Foster: A Year in Maine During the Civil War. He can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.