By BETTY ADAMS
Staff Writer Monday, May 07, 2007

Like many of his neighbors on Northern Avenue and surrounding streets, he left school young -- about age 14 -- to go to work, first at the state hospital, then to the cotton mill at the base of Northern Avenue.

"I didn't like it too much," he said of the mill. "It left too much grease in your hair."

He found his true calling across the Kennebec River and spent 49 years at the paper mill on the east bank as a mechanic and trouble-shooter, first for Hudson Pulp and Paper and later for Statler Tissue.

"When they had a problem some place, they used to call me," he said, his voice reflecting the strong French accent of his childhood.

Today, federal authorities are cleaning up hazards at the former plant, later known as Augusta Tissue, in preparation for redevelopment efforts.

Lambert is the only one of the five surviving Lambert boys who still lives in the Sand Hill neighborhood of Augusta.

Sand Hill, which today runs from lower Water Street and along Mount Vernon and Northern avenues, became populated in the 1900s. First, the neighborhood housed the workers building the dam across the Kennebec; later, it served as home to those residents who worked for the factories powered by the dam. Lambert finds things have changed dramatically in his formerly Franco-American neighborhood.

"You used to know all the people in the neighborhood," he said. "Now we don't even know our neighbors."

A LOSS OF CULTURE

Most of those who lived on Sand Hill had Franco-American backgrounds. "Now it's a mixture," said Lorraine Robichaud, 79, who still lives on Northern Avenue.

Robichaud is active in the community, and plays golf four days a week in the summer.

She and a group of women were playing cards recently at the Cushnoc Senior Citizens, which meets Mondays in the cafeteria under St. Augustine's Church. They miss the French-language Masses at their church. And they said they fear losing more of their cultural identity.

Augusta has three Roman Catholic churches and two parochial elementary schools. The churches are now joined together in a cluster, which shares pastoral services, and the two schools are merging into St. Michael School.

Robichaud worries about the effects of the change.

"You're coming up the hill and the first thing you see is the (St. Augustine) church and now St. Augustine School is closing," she said. "That's a big change."

Robichaud, who retired in 1989 from Key Bank (formerly Depositor's Trust), welcomes the redevelopment of the mill site as a park. "I think it's nice," she said. "I saw kids playing ball there the other day. It's big enough."

'AUGUSTA HAS GROWN'

The public school education landscape has changed, as well. Joan Comeau Breton, 68, went to elementary school in the one-room Ballard School on West River Road -- "where the KV Federal Credit Union is" -- and even recalls her teacher's name: Mrs. Cecile Beaulieu Burns.

She graduated from Cony High School in 1956, and recently went to the 50-year reunion of her class. For higher education, she went to Gates Business College on Water Street and then worked for Central Maine Power Co. for 39 years, retiring in 1995.

"It was like one, big, happy family," Breton said. "I thoroughly enjoyed working there."

The one thing she misses downtown, she says, is a women's clothing store. Years ago, downtown Water Street offered a choice of women's clothing stores: D. W. Adams Department Store, Chernowsky's, and Sisters.

Today, she shops at The Marketplace at Augusta and likes it. "I think that probably has been good," she said. "I think Augusta has grown and it's been good growth."

Wallace Paquette, a Fairfield native, offers a different perspective. Compared to his companions at the senior citizens center, Paquette is a newcomer, arriving in 1957 to work in the laboratory at the Togus veterans hospital, which had 1,000 patients in medical and psychiatric wards.

"When I came, I was single and there were very few restaurants if you wanted to eat out," he said. "There was the Hotel North and Foster's, but it didn't serve dinner. Now we have more restaurants and fast-food places than we can patronize."

He points, too, to the changes along Western Avenue. "When I first came here, Western Avenue had stately homes and trees. They've gradually become fast-food restaurants, gas stations and motels.

"Personally, I have no objection," he said. "I think it's all for the good since we no longer have manufacturing. We had shoe shops, the cotton mill, the paper mill, and they're all gone."

A MENTAL STROLL

Elsie Pike Viles, 92, has lived in the Cony/Manley House on Stone Street since 1955.

She grew up on Flagg Street, just a few steps from her family's South Parish Congregational Church -- which had a formal garden. She walked to Smith School (site of Rodrigue Eye Care on State Street) and slid down the unpaved street on her Speedaway sled during winter. Later, she walked to Cony High School, graduating in 1931 when the flatiron building was a year old.

The family grocery store was Webber & Hewitts on Water Street, and Viles' mother, like most, paid the bill on a monthly basis.

Another grocery store -- Merrill's -- was in the middle of the block. As she took a mental stroll down Water Street, Viles talked of the families who ran the stores downtown.

"We had the Colonial Theater," she said, as she sat in her living room with her dog Otto on her lap. "You went to the theater every week, and the Opera House (also known as the Capitol Theater and Granite Hall) was a movie theater that had stage shows on the weekends."

Today, the city's movie theater is Regal Augusta 10 at The Marketplace at Augusta. The largest venue for live shows is the city-owned Augusta Civic Center. Both are located in north Augusta. A new bridge -- Cushnoc Crossing -- links Interstate 95 with U.S. Route 3 and the coastal areas. Some of the major public buildings around the city are more than a century old: St. Mark's Episcopal Church on Summer Street, Lithgow Public Library at State and Winthrop streets, the Masonic Hall on Water Street and Kennebec County Superior Court.

Other landmarks, such as the once-famous Augusta House and the downtown train station with the domed waiting room and stained-glass windows, have disappeared.

BUILDING A CAPITAL

"The leaders of Augusta realized that to keep the state capital here, they had to have modern accommodations, so they built the Augusta House and the Cony House for legislators and others to stay in," said Anthony Douin, Augusta historian. "These were great testaments to the vision of what they thought Augusta was going to be."

They also had another motive: "They had to do all these things because this was an area where Augusta could lose being a state capital," he said. "Every year, representatives from Portland would come in (to the Legislature) and try to move it back to Portland."

The Kennebec Valley YMCA was built at Winthrop and State streets in 1915. Last year it was sold, replaced by a new KV YMCA on Union Street.

Vivian Dennett, of East Winthrop, who lectures about the history of the area and Central Maine Power Co., credits Walter Wyman -- CMP cofounder -- with having a large influence on the development of Augusta. In 1910, when Wyman moved to the former John L. Stevens home at Western Avenue and South Chestnut Street, he established CMP's headquarters at 9 Green St.

"He felt Augusta was closer to the larger population that he was trying to serve," Dennett said.

The Great Depression hit Augusta with less impact than other communities, Dennett said, because Wyman set up a holding company and kept Edwards (cotton) Mill running, as well as a number of others.

In 1949, the public face of Augusta became more rounded with the introduction of the traffic circles at each end of Memorial Bridge, which opened as a toll bridge in 1950. While the toll booths are long gone, the traffic circles remain, engendering fear in people unfamiliar with driving etiquette.

Downtown, former public and private buildings have been converted into apartments. The former City Hall is now the Inn at City Hall, and on Water Street, a former factory warehouse is being converted into apartments for people with lower incomes.

The Edwards Mill site is now an expanse of green, with a paved road leading to a canoe and kayak launch, all on a site where hundreds of people -- almost all of them from Sand Hill -- once toiled in the factory.

Lambert is saddened by the end of the manufacturing era.

"It's too bad," said Lambert. "Many people earned their living there. They had good-paying jobs."

"In the cotton mill, I'd say about 99 percent of the people come from Sand Hill," Lambert said. "At Statler Tissue, I'd say we had 20, 25, 30 percent of the people that worked there."

Things have changed for Lambert, too. He recently moved from his longtime Northern Avenue home, but remains on Sand Hill.

He's happy to show off his new, bright, cheery, third-floor apartment where last week he was repairing a wooden lamp his grandson made years ago.

Betty Adams -- 621-5631

badams@centralmaine.com