NEWS

How Dover once got from here to there

Tony McManus
Dover was once serviced by a trolley line that followed Central Avenue to Garrison Hill, then extended first to Burgett Park at Willand Pond, then on to Somersworth, convenient only for that limited route. [Courtesy City of Dover]

In drafting an earlier article on Dover hospitals I began to wonder how medical services had been provided prior to the start of the 20th century. Local doctors maintained offices which, in addition to offering exams and dispensing medicines and advice, would have been the emergency rooms of the day: bones reset, wounds sutured, even minor surgeries. But it was also the day of the "house call" and then I wondered — how did they get there? There were no automobiles, yet on a regular basis local physicians would arrive at a patient's home to treat injuries, infections, and other serious medical conditions.

The answer is apparent if we look at some of the older homes around the city and note that we now see as garages and former barns — some now divided into condos — were, in the late 19th century, "carriage houses." They housed actual "carriages" and the animals to pull them. There were stables, constructed so that hay could be stored on the second floor and fed into receptacles built into stalls on the ground floor for at least one, sometimes two horses.

Look at 61 Silver Street, for example. At one time it was the home (described in one local history as "pleasant and commodious") of Dr. Miah Sullivan, a well-known physician and local leader. To the rear of the house is a large attached building in which he kept his means of transportation.

Back then, as I've mentioned in the past, many people lived close enough to their employment that they could walk to work. Dr. Sullivan's office, for example, was in the Bracewell Block by the Central Avenue bridge, in good weather an easy 10 minute stroll. (Some years later 61 Silver was also the boarding residence for a time of Dr. Bernard Manning, who was an important contributor to the growth of the Wentworth Hospital and overall medical care in the community.) But for house calls there were no "motor cars," no Ubers. There was a trolley line from Sawyers that followed Central Avenue to Garrison Hill, then extended first to Burgett Park at Willand Pond, then on to Somersworth, convenient only for that limited route.

But — and here's where I'm going with all this — originally the trolleys were pulled by horses, and the wagons to and from the mills, the railroad station, and the wharves at the Landing on Cochecho Street were all horse-drawn. If there was a fire, the response would have been by horse drawn pumpers. Home deliveries of all sorts — wood, coal, ice, local produce, provisions to the neighborhood stores — were all made with wagons of various sizes. There was no other way.

To meet this demand, and to house and care for animals where there was no carriage house, there were seven livery stables in Dover's downtown: 10 Chapel Street, 12 Chapel St., 5 Pierce St., 103 Broadway, 112 Washington St., 17-23 St. Thomas St., 517 Central Avenue. At the corner of Central and Kirkland Street. Charles Smith offered carriages furnished for weddings and funerals "at short notice". Most of the hotels in town advertised tie-ins with one of these establishments for temporary transport, the Hertz and Avis of the time.

There were carriages, sleighs, pungs and wagons manufactured at 6 Grove Street (a pung was a small box-shaped style of sleigh). And hay and straw were available from J.S. Abbott at 35 Atkinson, Fred Bunker at 67 Fifth, J.M. Bunker, Broadway near Oak, George Page at 6 First Street and 10 Broadway (also selling coal and wood), Mathes & Sons at 121 Washington Street, and E.J. York, office at 10 Third Street, and their "yards" at 255 Locust, offering "coal, grain & groceries, feed & fertilizers." (The latter two remained in business for many years into the 20th century.)

Then there were horseshoers: T.W. Atherton at 110 Broadway, C.F. Furbish, 10 Kirkland in close proximity to J.W. Spinney at 5 Kirkland who also offered carriage repairs, and C.W. Hull at 5 New York Street. There was Dr. F.L. Farnham, offering "elastic hoof ointment" and other suggested cures from his premises at 32 Grove Street, and finally, "horse clothing" could be purchased from William Hacking at 306 Central Ave., J.T.W. Ham & Co. (also known as Ham the Hatter) at 400 Central, and D.M. Howard at 495 Central, manufacturers of light and heavy harnesses.

But horses were not the only large animals within close proximity to the downtown. On the South End there was Middlebrook Farm, part of the Sawyer Mills Sawyer properties, with both beef and dairy cattle. At one time in the North End was the dairy maintained by the Cochecho Printworks from which the manure was collected and used in the dyeing process to help make the textile colors permanent. This herd was located in a large area north and west of Mt. Vernon St., storage and distribution being centered in a building at the corner of Mt. Vernon and Milk streets, the latter obviously named for the product.

We tend some times to think of history in terms of what we see around us in the present, but it was a very different time with very different conditions and, getting back to Dr. Sullivan, picture a call for service on a freezing, snowy early January morning, getting the horse in harness, heading out in a one or two-person wooden carriage, traveling on still unpaved, possibly unplowed roads to attend to a birth, or a sudden seizure, or other medical calamity, and this would have been repeated often by other doctors in town, emergency deliveries of wood or coal. Think of the challenges to the City Public Works Department with the large number of horses coming and going on our streets and roads — where did they put that stuff?

And going back to Dr. Sullivan, he was born in 1857, one of 10 children, arrived in Dover in 1881, was 40 years of age at the time of his marriage. He was active in both the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization, and the Elks, which was a prominent and active organization in the early 1900s. In November of 1913, Dr. Sullivan's teenage daughter, Marie, was chosen to unveil the Elks monument which still stands in the newer section of Pine Hill Cemetery.

Dr. Sullivan died on Christmas Day, 1916. Chances are good by that time he, and most of the other doctors in town, owned an automobile.

— Tony McManus is a Dover native. He is a former trustee of the Woodman Institute and an amateur student of Dover’s past. He can be reached at mcaidan73@gmail.com