WHEN BAYSIDE MEANT BUSINESS

These two scenes taken on a summer's day show how many of life's needs were once served by proud Bayside businesses. The first, taken from the corner where today the Public Market Parking Garage stands, looks southwest to the corner of Preble Street and Cumberland Avenue sometime around 1875-1885. There, the E.M. Thompson Monument Works stands behind a tidy picket fence, tall white family cemetery monuments displayed thick as a forest on its tiny front lawn, and white marble headstones stacked against the shop wall on the right. From the late 1860s to 1890 Enoch M. Thompson's premier stone shop stood here, where a team of six skilled stonecutters shaped and cut many of Portland's most distinguished funeral monuments. Portland's Eastern, Western, Evergreen, and Cavalry cemeteries still feature the magnificent monuments once fashioned here. Hundreds of Portland's Civil War soldiers came home to rest beneath humbler headstones also cut here in Bayside.

Thompson's shop was demolished in 1890 for Horation N. Jose's 3-story brick office building, which still stand there today. But in the late 20th century, city road crews digging near here were startled to find unfinished tombstones buried in the street--reminders from a century ago that Baysiders leave their footprints in the sands (and stones) of time.

Looking to the left (up Preble Street toward Monument Square), behind the waiting wagons, stands the Presumpscot Shoeing Shop, run by Messrs. McKusick and Kennard at 26 Preble Street. Once, scores of such establishments dotted Portland, like today's filling stations. Then, Portland was home to more horses than people, and convenient blacksmiths’ hammers rang in many a neighborhood. (Note that behind the roof of the shoeing shop rises the steeple and clock tower of the Casco Street Baptist Church.) In 1927 the Portland Sunday Telegram lamented their passing: “In 1900 when the automobile came into vogue, there were 44 stables, large and small, in the city from St. Lawrence Street to St. John Street. The largest of these were those of Charles N. Jewell on Preble Street [in 2008 near the Salvation Army shop] and Whitman-Sawyer Stable Company, rear 697 Congress Street [in 2008 the big parking lot behind the Rite Aid near Mellen Street]. Today [1927] there are only seven small stables in Portland, and that . . . is probably more than is needed. . . . The horses kept for pleasure driving may be counted on one's fingers. The auto did it.”