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South Paris Maine

The Mysterious Death of Dr. James Littlefield

The death of Dr. James Littlefield on October 13, 1937 in South Paris was not the biggest crime story in the state of Maine. That distinction belonged to Bangor where the streets were filled with gunfire as the notorious Brady Gang met its demise in a shootout with police and FBI.

Three days later police around the country were still looking for any signs that members of the gang had gotten away. In Arlington, N.J., police noticed a car with Maine license plates pulled over beside the road with a young man sleeping in the front seat and a woman in the back. While they were wrong to suspect the two were connected to the Brady gang, they were very right to be suspicious.

Dr. James Littlefield

The woman in the backseat, Lydia Littlefield, was dead. Strangled. In the trunk they found her husband, Dr. James Littlefield, also dead. Bludgeoned and strangled. The man behind the wheel – 17-year-old Paul Dwyer – confessed. His extradition to Maine kicked off one of the most convoluted and lurid murder trials in the state’s history.

A Fantastic Tale

Before it ended, two men would be convicted of murder, launching a debate that continues to this day as to who did the actual crime and why.

Dwyer, a chauffeur with no criminal record, outlined the murder story in his initial confession. Though Dr. Littlefield had an addiction to morphine, he still had a reputation as a respectable physician.

Dwyer had suspected he had venereal disease and called the doctor. Littlefield treated him during a house call, but chastised the young man about the company he kept. Dwyer flew into a rage because the doctor had insulted his girlfriend, Barbara Carroll. He then attacked the doctor, killing him.

Dwyer then stuffed the doctor’s body into the trunk of his car and drove to the Littlefield home. He told the doctor’s wife, Lydia, that the doctor had left on a train to Boston. According to his fantastic story, the doctor had hit two pedestrians with his car, panicked and fled. He asked Dwyer to pick up Lydia and meet him in Boston.

For two days, Dwyer stayed on the road with Lydia as a passenger, explaining that at each stop he had received instructions from the doctor to travel to a new destination. The pair traipsed around from South Paris, to Boston, back up to Concord, N.H., and then back to Maine.

South Paris, Maine, in 1907

Dwyer finally strangled the increasingly suspicious Lydia and propped her in the back seat, as if sleeping, and went on his way to New Jersey. Oddly enough, two police officers stopped the car for traffic violations, but sent Dwyer on his way with only a warning—all while Lydia “slept” in the back seat.

Guilty, Not Guilty

Dwyer pleaded not guilty, but after two days of trial he changed his plea to guilty. The judge sentenced him to life in prison, but the public had doubts. The motive for the murder seemed slim, and Dwyer seemed an unlikely killer to those who knew him.

Behind bars, Dwyer took up pen and paper and wrote a very different version of events. In this second version, Dr. Littlefield had not come to the Dwyer home to treat Paul. Rather, he had come there to examine Paul’s sweetheart, Barbara, who feared she’d gotten pregnant. Barbara told the doctor that her own father, Deputy Sheriff Francis Carroll, might have impregnated her.

Barbara had told Dwyer of the incest and the two had turned to the doctor for help. Dr. Littlefield confronted Francis Carroll and threatened him. The deputy killed the doctor and bullied Dwyer into helping with the getaway. Carroll, Dwyer said, killed Lydia and sent Dwyer on his drive.

Dwyer had changed his plea, he said, because Carroll had threatened him. Police didn’t think the new account had any more truth to it than the old one, but the story rang true to one person: Carroll’s boss, the sheriff of Oxford County. He arrested Carroll on the incest charge in 1938 and began investigating the murder.

New York Times, Aug. 13, 1938

In short order, Carroll stood trial and a jury convicted him of the murder. Carroll privately denied the incest allegation, but did not do so in court. His lawyers feared that if he addressed it, his daughter would have to testify and add to the weight of evidence against him.

Carroll offered an alibi for the murder of Dr. Littlefield, but he couldn’t back it up. He was accused of trying to bribe a witness to support him. Another witness reported seeing him at the scene of the murder. In the end, the jury was persuaded that Carroll was guilty.

Two Men, One Crime

Now two men were in the state prison convicted of the same crime. There the matter would sit for 10 years while both Carroll and Dwyer proclaimed their innocence. In 1950, Carroll would finally win his release and the Legislature would order the attorney general to re-investigate the case.

At this point, prosecutors could not charge Carroll with incest. Nor could a court retry him for the murder of Dr. Littlefield. But the court could retry either him or Dwyer for the death of Lydia Littlefield, a crime that neither had so far been accused of.

In the end, the last investigation – published in 1952 – found reasonable doubt as to Carroll’s guilt. He should not face additional charges, the investigation concluded. Carroll went free. Dwyer would, himself, win his freedom on parole for good behavior.

If you present the facts of the case in Oxford County today, you can still get a good argument going over who murdered Dr. James Littlefield and why.

This story was updated in 2022.

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John Alfred Poor Takes a Sleigh Ride, Steals a Railroad

In February 1845, John Alfred Poor made an epic five-day dash through a blizzard in the White Mountains to snatch a railroad from under the noses of Boston’s powerful capitalists.

John Alfred Poor

He was bedridden for two months after his sleigh ride through Dixville Notch. The journey haunted him for the rest of his life, he wrote, ‘as a lurid dream.’

But if his sleigh ride was a tormenting nightmare, the outcome was a dream come true. Poor envisioned Portland, a backwater, as a booming winter seaport for Montreal. The Canadian city needed a way to ship goods when the St. Lawrence River had frozen over.

There was one big hitch: Plans were drawn for a railroad from Montreal to Boston, and that city’s wealthy businessmen were prepared to back the venture. Boston then was six times the size of Portland, and growing fast. Portland, with only 15,000 residents, was barely growing at all. People called it ‘the deserted village,’ after it lost the state capitol to Augusta in 1832.

John Alfred Poor

John Alfred Poor was born in Andover, Maine, on Jan. 8, 1808, the son of Sylvanus and Mary (Merrill) Poor. His brother, Henry Varnum Poor, founded the company that became Standard & Poor’s rating service.

John Alfred Poor grew into an imposing figure. At 6’2”, 250 lbs., he had a deep booming voice, prodigious energy and a hot temper. He studied law, married Elizabeth Adams Hill and joined his uncle’s law practice in Bangor, serving as counsel to family friend Daniel Webster.

In 1834, John Alfred Poor happened to see new England’s first locomotive while visiting Boston. “It gave me such a shock that my hair seemed to start from the roots rather than to stand on end,” he recalled.

But all was not rosy in the life of John Alfred Poor. Elizabeth died after only 3-1/2 years of marriage. Three daughters by his second wife, Elizabeth Orr, died, though one survived. Then Elizabeth died suddenly.

John Poor’s Dream

John Alfred Poor grew obsessed with Maine’s economic decline, as his state was losing population to the workshops and factories of Massachusetts. By 1844, he decided to throw his energies into promoting a railroad from Montreal to Portland to reverse that trend.

He believed a railroad would spark an industrial boom, put people to work and connect the city with the waterfront.

It was an audacious plan. A 250-mile, international railroad would cost more than the aggregate of all the wealth in the city.

But it made some sense: Portland was 100 miles closer to Montreal and a half day closer to Europe than Boston. Casco Bay had no ice when Boston Harbor froze over.

John Alfred Poor went to Portland in the fall of 1844 to pitch his idea. He created a sensation. Many of the town’s leaders supported the idea. A survey of the route was made before December, while Poor organized a company and worked on getting a charter for the road. In early February 1845, he learned agents from Boston were appearing before the Montreal Board of Trade arguing their case.

A Portland Company locomotive

The Sleigh Ride

On Feb. 5, 1845, five days before the Maine Legislature granted the charter for his railroad, he set out from Portland in the most terrific snowstorm of the winter. Shortly after midnight, John Alfred Poor stepped into a horse-drawn sleigh as the driving snow cut his face like a knife and the temperature hovered at 3 degrees below zero.

The wind and snow made it hard to follow the road, and he covered only 7.5 miles to Falmouth in three hours. He had breakfast at a tavern, and continued for another 40 miles until stopping at nightfall in South Paris. By then his nose and ear were frostbitten.

On February 6 he reached Andover, then encountered snowdrifts higher than his horse in Rumford. Residents of the town helped him break a path through the snow. He rode another 40 miles, reaching Colebrook, N.H., at midnight. Passing through Dixville Notch, he wrote, was ‘the great feat of the expedition.’

Sleigh Race on the St. Lawrence at Quebec, by Cornelius Krieghoff

“The terrific howl with which it sweeps down those giant cliffs eight hundred feet high,” he wrote. “The huge mountain bank of snow that is piled in the bottom of the gorge, at the summit line of the road, made one shudder at the recollection.”

No Trifling Task

“Our experienced guide, known as the “Notch-Tender,” led the way with shovels, others soon made a foothold for the horse; the sleigh and baggage were carried over by hand, until we came to the principal barrier, a mountainous drift twenty feet high, rising directly across the gorge.

“Two young men of Erroll, N.H., by the name of Bragg, assisted by three others enlisted on the way, after two hours’ labor, opened a cut, through which my horse was pushed. The fearful thing to the uninitiated is the danger of being smothered in the snow. Every few steps we had to turn round to catch our breath. The wind blew through the Notch a fearful gale, so continuous as hardly to exhibit a lull or pause, and the air was dark with the drifting snow. The place is over two thousand feet above the level of the sea, and the biting sharpness of the cold can hardly be described. Slowly and toilsomely we made our way onward, shifting horses as we could find them, keeping an outrider ahead to engage relays.”

It was ‘no trifling task,’ he noted, to break a track 60 miles to Sherbrooke, Canada, through 18 inches of snow.

Frozen

Poor rested in Sherbrooke and set out for Montreal in 18 below zero weather. At 5:30 on the morning of February 10 he reached the city and checked into a hotel for a few hours. The mercury reached 29 below zero.

Over five days he had changed his clothes twice and slept a total of seven hours. At 10 a.m. he appeared before the Montreal Board of Trade and persuaded its members not to adopt a resolution in favor of building their railroad to Boston.

Ultimately they agreed to the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad to Portland.

Portland in 1845. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

John Alfred Poor returned to Portland with frostbitten feet and pneumonia. It took him two months to recover. He said he’d never do it again. “The terrors of a Canadian winter are too fearful to encounter in this way a second time,” he wrote.

He got his railroad.

Explosive Portland

Work began at Fish Point in Portland in 1846 and was finished in 1854. The 298 miles of the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad (later the Grand Trunk) fueled an industrial boom based on shipping, shoes, textiles and machine ships. Portland became a major port and a cosmopolitan city.

From 1840 to 1848, Portland’s population grew by less than 800 per year; from 1848 to 1850, it grew at the rate of 4,000 per year.

Portland, 1856

“By the 1850s southern Maine was experiencing an industrial boom of hitherto undreamed of proportions,” wrote James H. Mundy in Hard Times, Hard Men: Maine and the Irish 1830-1860.

The fruition of John A. Poor’s dream, linking Portland and Montreal by means of the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad, caused that explosion, wrote Mundy.

“Portland became an entrepot, shipping grain to Canada, importing raw materials and exporting finished goods,” he wrote. “Huge quantities of molasses were moved across Portland’s docks to be converted into sugar at J.B. Brown’s state-of-the-art-factory, or to become New England rum ‘for strictly medicinal and mechanical purposes’.”

John Alfred Poor also organized the Portland Company in 1846 to produce railroad equipment and rolling stock, with works at the foot of Munjoy Hill. He then negotiated a deal that made Portland an international port with regular steamship service to Liverpool.

John Alfred Poor died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 63.

This story was updated in 2022.

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L.L. Bean, Merchant of the Maine Woods

L. L. Bean liked to hunt and fish more than he liked to work, and his first attempt at running a clothing store failed miserably.

He was pushing 40 when he had the idea that would make him a household name. He came off a hunting trip in the Maine woods that failed because his boots got wet, leaving his feet cold and sore. A local cobbler helped him graft leather uppers to a pair of rubber work boot bottoms. He then got hold of a list of non-resident holders of Maine hunting licenses and produced a three-page flyer with a proclamation.

You cannot expect success hunting deer or moose if your feet are not properly dressed. The Maine Hunting Shoe is designed by a hunter who has tramped the Maine woods for the last 18 years. We guarantee them to give perfect satisfaction in every way.

That failed too.

Ninety of the first 100 pairs were returned because the leather separated from the rubber.

Bean made good, though, on his ‘100 percent money back guarantee,’ and perfected the boot.

L.L. Bean Himself

L.L. Bean

Leon Leonwood Bean was born Oct. 13, 1872, in tiny Greenwood, Maine, the son of Benjamin Warren Bean, a farmer and horse trader, and Sarah Swett Bean. His parents died within four days of each other when he was 12. He and his five siblings went to live with relatives in South Paris, Maine.

After his locally made boots failed, L.L. Bean borrowed $400 in 1911 and went to Boston to persuade the United States Rubber Company to improve the quality of the shoe. The company agreed and, in another stroke of luck, the United States Post Office introduced parcel post service.

Maine Hunting Shoes were so popular that L.L. Bean opened a store to sell them on Freeport’s main street in 1917. The shoe, according to Bean, saved an outdoorsman from lifting 2,310 pounds in the average seven miles he took a day.

When his brother was named postmaster in Freeport, Maine, L.L. Bean opened a factory on the floor above the post office.

He continued to come up with new outdoor products, such as the Maine Auto Sweater, designed for duck hunting and automobile riding. He created the Deer Toter to transport a dead deer more easily; the Bean Sandwich Spreader; the Bean chamois shirt; and the down vest. In 1944 L.L. Bean introduced its iconic tote, the ‘Ice Carrier’ made of heavy canvas designed to carry ice. It’s now called the Boat and Tote.

L.L. Bean appealed to frugal Yankee customers by advising them to return their Maine Hunting shoes for reworking.

During World War II, Bean designed military wear, and in 1973 the Israeli military rush-ordered boots and heavy shirts direct from the company for duty on the Golan Heights.

Shake His Hand, Get a Catalog

His company continued to grow along with the number of pages in his promotional flyer.

L.L. Bean fixated on building his mailing list. So much so that Maine writer John Gould said, “If you drop in just to shake his hand, you get home to find his catalog in your mailbox.”

Most of L.L. Bean’s sales came through the catalog. The store in Freeport, however, had a bell by the door that sportsmen could ring to summon a watchman or, sometimes, L.L. Bean himself. They rang at all hours of the day and night to buy last-minute hunting or fishing gear.

L.L. Bean hit $1 million in sales in 1937.

In 1951, L.L. Bean opened the store round the clock 365 days a year. “We have thrown away the keys to the place,” he said. Today the Freeport store has no locks. Families stranded in blizzards over the years have camped in the camping section — with permission.

Famous customers included Ethel Kennedy, John Wayne, Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Cronkite, Jack Dempsey and Gregory Peck.

Merchant of the Maine Woods

Time magazine hailed him as the ‘Merchant of the Maine Woods.’ In 1967, the magazine called L.L. Bean ‘an efficiency expert’s nightmare’:

It stashes incoming mail in shirt boxes. Once it lost $125,000 in business when a list of 40,000 would-be customers was mistakenly destroyed. Under a garish, multicolored letterhead, its owner once answered a formal appointment request by advising “I am personally away more or less.”

In January 1967, 94-year-old L.L. Bean checked the galleys of the now-100-page catalog. He died a week later, on Feb. 5, 1967. The company received 50,000 cards and letters of condolence.

With thanks to Maine Icons: 50 Classic Symbols of the Pine Tree State by Matthew P. Mayo and Jennifer Smth-Mayo and The Grand Emporiums by Robert Hendrickson. This story was updated in 2022.

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John Calvin Stevens, Designer of Maine (Especially Those Shingle Style Houses)

John Calvin Stevens left an indelible mark on Maine by designing more than a thousand buildings in the state over his six-decade career.

The Brown-Donahue House in Cape Elizabeth, designed by John Calvin Stevens. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The Brown-Donahue House in Cape Elizabeth. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

He made major innovations to the Shingle style of architecture so characteristic of coastal summer cottages like the Bush compound in Kennebunkport.

John Calvin Stevens

He was born in Boston on Oct. 8, 1855, the son of a cabinetmaker. His family moved to Portland when he was two.

He wanted to go to MIT, but couldn’t afford it. So he apprenticed to Francis H. Fassett, an influential Portland architect. Stevens began designing buildings when he was 18 and didn’t stop until he was in his 80s.

His houses still stand along the Maine coast, especially Cape Elizabeth and the Casco Bay islands. You can also find them n Portland’s West End and suburbs.

Winslow Homer studio

He designed the Winslow Homer house and studio, transforming the latter from a carriage house. Like many of his buildings, the Homer studio connects organically with the Maine landscape and incorporates historical motifs. Stevens’ style was described as having a ‘primitive simplicity and wholesome vigor.’

L.D.M. Sweat Memorial Galleries, Portland Museum of Art

L.D.M. Sweat Memorial Galleries (at the rear of the building), Portland Museum of Art

Stevens also painted landscapes and collected art. He donated Homer’s painting Afternoon Fog to the L.D.M. Sweat Memorial Galleries, which he designed. The galleries now belong to the Portland Museum of Art.

His own painting, Delano Park, Cape Elizabeth, hangs in the Blaine House, which he did not design, in Augusta.

John Calvin Stevens House. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

So Many Buildings

He designed nine buildings for Hebron Academy and the Psi Upsilon Fraternity House on the Bowdoin College campus. The National Park Service lists his own home, the John Calvin Stevens House, on the National Register of Historic Places.

Charles M. Bailey Library in Winthrop, Maine

He also designed many public libraries, municipal buildings, hotels, and churches. John Calvin Stevens’ libraries can be found in in Buckfield, Clinton, Rumford, Houlton, Waterford, Limington, Winthrop, South Paris and Bethel.

Biddeford City Hall

Stevens designed buildings like the Biddeford City Hall (above) in the Colonial Revival style.

Bay of Naples Inn

Sadly, some of his grand Shingle style hotels like the Belgrade Hotel in Belgrade Lakes and the Bay of Naples Inn in Naples are no longer with us.

He had a son, John Howard Stevens, also an architect. John Howard joined his firm in 1898 and when he made partner in 1904 they renamed the firm Stevens Architects.

Stevens died on Jan. 25, 1940. The City of Portland declared Oct. 8, 2009 ‘John Calvin Stevens Day’ in his honor.

Image: Winslow Homer studio by By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28901158. This story was updated in 2022.

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