Chichester Historical Society - Towle and Mason Roads
By Walter Sanborn
In my last article I wrote about the history of the Towle
Road. The title of this article is “Towle and Mason Roads” which
is the same road I previously described but now has acquired two names
which I will explain later.
After the two Mason sisters had died, the farm changed ownership of
whose name I do not recall.
I stated last time there were two stories related to the Towle Road
of which I described one last time about the demise of the Mason sisters
Lizzie and Hannah.
This is the second story about the Mason place after their death and
is titled “The Fire” as told to Jim Towle by his father Edgar Towle who
lived on the Towle farm.
During Prohibition, there was a “still” in the woods behind the home
where Hannah and Lizzie Mason had lived in the early 1900s, on Towle
Road in Chichester.
On September 28, 1918, the Mason barn caught afire. Several people
showed up to help put out the fire before it destroyed the whole barn.
Edgar Towle (11 years old) was one of them. He located a large keg
in one corner of the barn, filled with what he thought was water.
He also found a couple of buckets. He dipped one of the buckets
into the keg and passed the brimming bucket up the ladder to the loft.
It was passed to someone else, who threw the liquid onto the fire which
had started spreading to the roof. Bucket after bucket was
dispensed. But much to everyone’s surprise, instead of putting out the
flames, it intensified them. The barn quickly became engulfed in
flames and burned flat! The “water” was really moonshine!!
It was stored there, so the owner of the stills “customers” would have
easy access to it.
Edgar said one good thing came of all this. He had a bum left
elbow when he started dipping buckets into the keg, but with each
submerging into the moonshine, his elbow felt better. When it was
all over, his elbow no longer ached and hasn’t ached ever since—that was
over 75 years ago.
The accompanying photo with this article is a picture of the Mason
farm showing the barn which burned in this story.
After the Mason farm burned it was never rebuilt and the road from
the Towle farm to the turnpike or now the Dover Road as discontinued by
the town and became impassable. Some time later a barn or shed was
built on the Mason property and accessed from the Dover Road end.
In 1986 several lots were subdivided on this road and the town voted
to reopen 700 feet of the Mason Road, so called. Today the road is
town maintained for 2440 feet lacking 200 feet from being one half a
mile. There are now 14 houses on this road and is now called the
Mason Road and joins the Dover Road near the Atlantic Trading Post.
The Towle Road leads from the Horse Corner Road to about 200 feet
beyond the Towle Road for about a total of 2540 feet and now serves 11
residences.
There is about 160 feet of discontinued road connecting the two
roads that is not maintained by the Town this creating two separate dead
end roads called the Towle Road on one end and the Mason Road on the
other end.
The Town has tried several times in recent years to open the short
distance in the middle to connect these two roads but have failed.
From the Town’s viewpoint, it would be less expensive to maintain one
through road than to maintain two dead end roads.
The residents on both roads have opposed this as they do not want
the through traffic it would present and have so far been able to get
the votes to keep the roads as is.