By Isabel Currier
Photos by Bruce Nett
From our April 1965 issue
When the annual town meeting is held on March 20 at Thorndike, Maine (population 472), its citizens may make appropriations with confidence that, for the third consecutive year, the local tax rate may again be lowered. This unique situation prevails in Thorndike because of a permanent bonanza that is known as the Farwell Trust Fund, and was deliberately designed to lower taxes.
Eventually, the town will benefit from 80 to 90 percent of the proceeds of the Farwell Fund, now amounting to almost half a million dollars, bequeathed to his neighbors by the late Oscar J. Farwell, a lifelong resident of Thorndike. At present, the income is divided almost equally between the town and funds earmarked for individuals so long as they live, with the residue always reverting to the town.
The size — and disposal — of Oscar (“Dick”) Farwell’s fortune astounded everyone in Thorndike when it was revealed at Christmastime in 1962, and the Farwell Fund is still the talk of the countryside. At the time of his death, on February 23, 1961, Dick Farwell was thought to be “tolerably well off, although you’d never guess it from his modest way of living.” But he had been a merchant in Thorndike all his life, along with an older brother, as their father had been before them.
Dick Farwell was one of the best known and most respected men in the area, having also been Thorndike’s town clerk for 30 years — a longer span than was ever accorded any other incumbent of the office. He was a quiet, homespun man with a fund of dry humor, and a gruff way of listening to a plea for credit or for a loan, which he invariably granted wordlessly, then said no more about it.
Nevertheless, he was popularly considered — in contrast to his more lavish brother, Bill, whom he survived — as being “a little near.” Probably only his housekeeper for many years, Miss Myra Tweedie, realized that Mr. Farwell’s reluctance to spend money actually sprang from his complete indifference to what most people consider the basic necessities of a comfortable life.
Dick Farwell liked to drive a high-priced and high-powered automobile just as, earlier in life, he had owned and driven fine horses. But he never enjoyed venturing so far away that he couldn’t get back home at night. He saw no reason to treat himself to a new suit of clothes when he already had a good one, and he habitually wore overalls to work in the store. His modest home remained unimproved throughout his life, because the thought of installing such conveniences as plumbing never entered his head.
“It wasn’t that he would have begrudged the money,” Miss Tweedie says. “He was just conservative, as his mother had been; he was very like his mother. He left his house the way she had left it because he was used to it and had always found it comfortable and he hated change.”
In addition to keeping his house, Miss Tweedie served, through the years, as Mr. Farwell’s deputy town clerk, and has held the office in her own right during 18 of the years since he surrendered it in 1945. She also helped in the Farwell store when needed, and ran it alone while nursing Dick Farwell through his last illness. And she was dumbfounded to learn that he’d left her his automobile, the lifelong use of his home, a comfortable income to maintain it, and funds for its immediate improvement with papering, painting, and plumbing. “He was close-mouthed about his business,” Miss Tweedie said. “Used to say that he didn’t trust anybody until, one day after his brother Bill died, he remarked that he guessed now he’d have to trust somebody, and he thought the one he’d pick to trust would be Claude Clement.”
Mr. Clement, manager-vice president of the Belfast branch of Depositors Trust Company, had known the Farwell brothers since 1912. The older brother, Bill, who predeceased Dick by several years, had been “the businessman of the firm” and an outgoing citizen — an active Mason, a long-term former chairman of the Waldo County Republican Committee, a director of the Belfast bank served by Claude Clement, a church member, and a married man, although a childless one. Farwell Brothers general store, established in 1872 by their father, was incorporated so that the surviving brother inherited the other’s share, and Claude Clement’s bank administrated William Farwell’s estate.
“Now that both Farwells are gone and the will is probated and has become a public document, I can tell this,” Claude Clement said. “Dick Farwell was all at sea after his brother Bill died. Dick wasn’t a practical man; he didn’t even know bookkeeping. In fact, although he was considered close-fisted, he was as indifferent to money as he was to material comforts. I guess he was a dreamer in a way, but he never told anyone his dreams. When I first went to see him about Bill’s estate, I found that Dick had no idea how much he — or his store — was worth. That’s when he said, ‘Well, Claude, I’ve been thinking things over, and I guess I’ve got to trust somebody, so it might as well be you.’”
Mr. Clement’s first advice to Mr. Farwell was that he should make a will, listing his assets. “Why bother about that?” Dick Farwell said. “I don’t care what I’ve got, and when I’m through with it, I don’t care what happens to it.”
Although he had married in his youth, the marriage shortly ended in divorce, and there were no children, so that Farwell’s only living relatives were several cousins, comfortably situated in life. “The first thing that will happen to what you have,” Mr. Clement told him, “will be that your Uncle Sam will claim, as nearly as I can figure, around $100,000 in inheritance taxes.”
“Over my dead body, he will!” retorted arch-conservative Dick Farwell in anguish.
“Precisely,” Mr. Clement agreed affably, “especially if you die intestate.”
“Can’t you fix it?” Farwell wanted to know. “I’d like people to benefit by anything I leave — and I don’t mean Uncle Sam and our top-heavy, tax-heavy government.”
“So that’s how I talked him into making a will,” Mr. Clement continued, “and I believe that, in the process, Dick had the time of his life. Like many another man who has accumulated money, without really caring much about it or what it can buy, once he started giving it away, he was like a kid blowing his savings at a circus. Except that the conservative in him kept his sense of proportion. He didn’t want to leave the bulk of his money to hospitals or standard charities. ‘Everybody does that,’ he’d say. ‘I’d rather do something different.’ He was delighted when I suggested, almost by accident, ‘Well, Dick, you’ve made your money here in Thorndike; why don’t you give it back where it came from?’”
“That’s more like it,” Mr. Farwell agreed. “But how much would be taken out in inheritance taxes?”
“Nothing,” Mr. Clement assured him. “In fact, it would probably result in lowering the local taxes of the people who live here.”
Mr. Farwell chuckled gleefully. “And won’t it surprise the daylights out of the folks here who know me,” he wanted to know. “I’d give anything to be around to see their faces!”
The making of the will was a long-drawn-out, laborious task. The two men concerned with it — and the only people who knew about it until after Mr. Farwell’s death — fell into a strange relationship that went on for almost two years, during which the younger man, Mr. Clement, suggested ways for Mr. Farwell to bestow his worldly goods, and Mr. Farwell either agreed or dissented.
“He usually objected before he agreed,” Mr. Clement recalled, his cordial liking for Dick Farwell evident in the warmth of his voice and his reminiscent smile. “For instance, I suggested that he might want to leave something to the Thorndike Congregational Church, and Dick growled that he’d never been a church-going man. I reminded him that his parents and his brother had been close to the church and he might wish to honor their memory. Again the idea pleased him — his face would light up as he thought it over. The upshot was that he left a yearly income to the church and provided for an electric organ to be installed, dedicated to the memory of his parents and his brother. All told, he provided for two other electric organs — one for the Union Church at Unity (in memory of another brother and nephew, who had been merchants in that neighboring town) and one for the Masonic Temple in Thorndike. He also established a scholarship fund of $1,000 a year for the benefit of students from Thorndike, Freedom, Unity, or Knox, and left bequests to the Freedom and Knox churches, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and Shriner’s Hospital for Crippled Children.
It developed that Mr. Farwell held heavy mortgages on a number of farms and owned others outright. His will provided for the occupants of half a dozen or more of these farms to be forgiven their debts, and to be given free tenancy, with taxes paid, for their lifetimes, after which the property will revert to the town of Thorndike. He also gave Mr. Clement authority to cancel, at his discretion, other debts owed to Mr. Farwell and, in some instances, he himself wrote “Forgiven” across the face of promissory notes. “These people have always been my friends and customers,” he said, “and I don’t ever want them bothered about anything they owe me.”
Farwell considered his customers friends and canceled many of their debts.
He took so much secret pleasure in personal bequests — of which he left a total of 41 — that on one occasion, when a lady relatively new to the town came to present Mr. Farwell with a home-baked cake, he said to Mr. Clement, who happened to be present, “Chase that woman, will you, Claude, and find out her name. I want to put her in my will for $100 for being so thoughtful as to bake me a cake.”
The will was finally completed, signed, and witnessed. Depositors Trust Company was named trustee and Claude Clement executor of the will. And not long after, it became evident that Mr. Farwell’s health was failing.
He continued to run the store, with Miss Tweedie to help him tend it and Mr. Clement to serve, from time to time, as his accountant. “He never wanted the store to be closed,” Miss Tweedie said. “He felt that it was an institution.”
Farwell Brothers general store was, indeed, an institution which, because of its unchanging Maine character, had achieved a measure of both national and international fame. The first Oscar J. Farwell had purchased it two years before his younger son and namesake (always called Dick) was born. There were four Farwell brothers, including the merchant at Unity and another, well known throughout Maine as a horse-race starter and trainer. Bill Farwell became his father’s partner in 1899; Dick was given an equal partnership in 1907 and, following the father’s death, in 1912, the corporation was formed under the name of Farwell Brothers.
The store literally sold everything from needles to plows; the inventory of well over 4,500 items included the standard merchandise of grocery, drugstore, hardware, feedstore, and harness establishments. Three warehouses were attached to the store, as well as a gristmill which ground 7,000 to 10,000 bushels of grain a year. Until Dick Farwell’s death, in 1960, his store was one of the few left in Maine where farmers could buy such items as horse collars and buggy whips from available stock. Farwell’s never stopped trading, either: a farmer would bring in apples, eggs, potatoes — even pelts — and trade them for such needed items as logging chains, sheathing, barbed wire, or metal roofing.
The atmosphere of the store was deliberately “moderate” in the Maine manner. The iron stove always was surrounded by benches (planks supported by empty barrels), upon which the philosophers of the area sat, debating world affairs or telling tall tales. An inexhaustible supply of free soda crackers was provided, but checkers and cards were banned, as was the traditional sawdust box for tobacco chewers.
This atmosphere so enchanted the Maine writer Henry Buxton, that he did several columns about the Farwell Brothers’ free-and-easy forum during the 1930s. In 1947, the late Kosti Ruohomaa was assigned to do a picture story for a West German publication, Heute (Today), as part of the government’s denazification program. Several American publications also ran features about the Farwell store. And in 1952, TV cameramen went to Thorndike to photograph the brothers and their “forum” for an interview on the Arlene Francis Show.
“The forum wasn’t quite as lively after Bill Farwell died,” Miss Tweedie said, “but it still went on.” After Dick Farwell became ill — he was unable to go to the store after August 1960, six months before his death — the regulars continued to come in. “I suspect it was partly so I could tell Mr. Farwell who’d been there and what they talked about,” Miss Tweedie said. “Everybody knew that the only thing in life that mattered to him was the store. He never complained during his illness, except to say that he wished he could go to the store. I kept it open at the regular hours, after making him comfortable for the day at home. Then I came home and got his dinner at noon, and brought papers home to him after I’d closed the store at 4 o’clock. I was in the store the day, four years ago, that Claude Clement phoned me from Belfast to say that Mr. Farwell had just died at the hospital there. I hurried to close up and go to Belfast, and the store never reopened.”
Miss Tweedie was met in Belfast by Mr. Clement, who said, “I have to read Dick’s will to somebody, and since you’re immediately concerned, I wish you’d let me read it to you. Others concerned in it will learn about it in due time.”
Miss Tweedie still refers to the home she inherited as the Farwell house, although she has cared for it for over 40 years, since long before Mr. Farwell’s mother died. “I never dreamed that Mr. Farwell would leave it to me. He asked me once what I wanted of his after he was gone, and I said, ‘Nothing! I’ll find another job and maybe live with my nephew.’ He said, ‘That’s what I supposed you’d do,’ and never mentioned it again. But the truth is that I’m so used to this house that when I went, two summers ago, to spend the night with my sister in Portland, I couldn’t wait to get home.”
At the Congregational Church, diagonally across from the old Farwell home, Miss Tweedie displayed the Farwell electric organ and its memorial plaque. She said that once she had overcome her surprise at the size of Mr. Farwell’s fortune and the way in which he left it, she had realized that it was completely in character. “And I think that everybody who knew him feels the same way.”
Claude Clement, who regards the Farwell will as the most interesting one he was ever privileged to assist in drawing, also feels that he justified his friend’s decision to trust.
“His estate at present is appraised at around $435,000,” Mr. Clement said. “Had he died intestate, the federal inheritance tax would have been about $96,000. But when we paid the estate taxes under the terms of Dick Farwell’s will, they amounted to exactly $3.37.
