Rumford Memories

(Mr. Robinson requested information about Clark’s Pond which was located where the now defunct Nyman Manufacturing Company sits.)

When I had a paper route in 1954, one of my customers was a family by the name of O’Connell who had a very large strawberry patch on Newport Avenue, Rumford. Mrs. O’Connell paid us kids five cents a basket to pick for her. She sold from a little roadside stand in front of the house. Five cents a basket was good money back then. The O’Connell house was a few hundred feet from the old McManus house owned, at the time, by Bill and Theresa McManus who were brother and sister, also on my route. Their house is listed in the East Providence Historical Society book. Both houses are long since gone.

My mother attended Union Primary School in the 1920″s and so did my stepfather. One of my best childhood friends attended Union Primary School and I wanted to go there too but the authorities that be at the time shipped me off to Roger Williams, Wilson and Carl Thompson schools and back to Wilson again.

Thank you (Edna Anness) for helping me with my memorabilia concerning Clark’s Pond. I miss what I consider the old Rumford of my youth. There were so many fields and wooded places for a child to ramble in back then. I knew the Ten Mile River and Two Ponds like it was the back of my hand. One time, my friends and I swam from Two Ponds, behind the old Narragansett Race track, all the way to the Hunts Mills falls, portaged the falls and swam to the Hunts Mills bridge and spent the day jumping from it.

P.S. Up here in the boonies of Fort Kent, Maine, my wife and I have been members of the Fort Kent Historical Society for about eighteen years. The society is operated out of an old train station that is chock full of historical goodies. One of my duties for the past nineteen years has been to mow the lawn at the station.