Sam Smith - Casco Bay, which once lay under a mile high pile of ice, is eighteen miles from headland to headland.
Maine has thousands of islands -- a survey in the 1980s found 2,000 of uncertain ownership alone -- and if its coastline were stretched taut it would reach the Panama Canal. But nowhere is it more jagged and idiosyncratic, nor its waters more jammed with the potsherds of glaciation, than in Casco Bay.
ROCKS
Our friend, the late Jack Rand, once the state geologist, explained to us in a letter:
"Well, Kathy Smith's bedrock, the 'ledge' where she plans to hang a new landing and float, is primarily closely foliated gneiss - metamorphosed felsic volcanic rocks - whose age may approach more than 500 million years, and whose original home, prior to being jammed into what they now call Maine, may have been west Africa."
These are some of the oldest rocks you’ll find visible anywhere in the world. The state park’s youngest rocks are about 200 million years old.
EARLY VOYAGES
AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY - About 11,500 years ago, the sea rose high enough to isolate the area, creating Georges Island. It was home to many large prehistoric mammals, including walruses, mastodons, and giant sloths, traces of which are sometimes found in fishing nets. They died out around 6,000 years ago, when the water level rose further to submerge the island and turn it into Georges Bank.
A mammoth tusk and teeth were found several decades ago in Scarborough, about 40 minutes from here
ARCHEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE
As early as 10500 years ago, as the glaciers melted, paleo Indians moved into Maine.
By 1400 there were about 20,000 Indians living here, part of the Algonquin language group.
1616-1619 – three years before the Pilgrims arrived, the “Great Dying” . . .a pandemic caused by European traders, fishermen and settlers from Cape Cod to Penobscot Bay killed as many as 90-95% of the Indian population. Diseases are believed to include smallpox, cholea, measles, hepititus and whooping cough.
Beginning in 1675 Indians retrieved much of the land along the western Maine coast from the European usurpers in a series of bloody clashes that were part of King Philip's War. By 1703 there were no European settlers east of York County. Although King Philip's War doesn't get much attention, it was actually the most costly American war based on the percent of male casualties among the colonists. Not until 1715 did Europeans return to these parts and reassert old land claims settled by a committee in Massachusetts.
As late as 1870 Indians summered on Great Chebeague Island.
The Basque
The first Europeans to discover these rich fishing grounds were the Basques, a fiercely independent people from northern Spain. They had salt, which they used to preserve the fish, and by the year 1000 they had established an international trade in salted cod. The Basques kept the location of their fishing grounds a secret for over 500 years, but in 1497 John Cabot, undertook a voyage for Henry VII of England. Searching for a northern spice route, Cabot instead found 1000 Basque fishing vessels, rocky shores ideal for salting and drying fish, and waters teeming with fish. He called it New Found Land
Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano discovered Georges Bank in the early 1500s and named it Armelline Shoals after a papal tax collector. In 1605, English colonists renamed it for St. George.
The first Europeans to visit these waters were probably Scandinavian fishermen, who could make the northern transit of the Atlantic and never be more than a few hundred miles from shore. John and Sebastian Cabot, five years after Columbus, passed through and charted Casco Bay on their way from Nova Scotia to the Carolinas. By 1602, when Bartholomew Gosnold arrived at Cape Neddick, his presence was considered by the Indians to be less than remarkable. John Bereton, the chronicler of the voyage, wrote:
One who seemed to be their commander wore a coat of black work, a pair of breeches, cloth stockings, shoes, hat and band.... They spoke divers Christian words and seemed to understand more than we, for lack of language, could comprehend...They pronounced our language with great facility; for one of them sitting by me, upon occasion I spake smilingly to him with these words: How now sirha are you so saucy with my tobacco, which words (without any further repetition) he suddenly spake so plaine and distinctly as if he had been a long scholar in the language.
As far back as 1524, Giovanni da Verrazano, arriving to the west of Casco Bay near Ogunquit, got a reception from the Indians that suggested possible previous contact with Europeans. The Indians insisted on standing on a cliff and trading with Verrazano's crew by use of a rope. "We found no courtesy in them," Verrazano complained. Worse they rounded out the transaction by "showing their buttocks and laughing immoderately."
Captain John Smith may have been the first person to put in writing the attraction the Maine coast would have to centuries of later arrivals:
Here are no hard landlords to racke us with high rents; no tedious pleas in law to consume us with their many years deputations for Justice; no multitudes to occasion such impediments to good order, as in the popuar States. So freely hath God in his Majesty bestowed his blessing on them that will attempt to obtaine them as here every man may be master and owner of his own labor and land; or the greatest part in a small time."
POST WAR II
The Atlantic coast was far more dangerous than Americans realized. Years after the war it would be revealed that in the first months 46 merchant ships were sunk off the east coast. Another 126 would be sunk before the war was over. And Portland was among the first targets for U-boats after war was declared. At least three U-boats were sunk near Casco Bay - one five miles southeast of the Portland sea buoy, one off Small Point and the other seven miles off Halfway Rock after being spotted by shore gunners on Bailey's Island.
During World War II, the Navy formed transatlantic convoys and moored as many as 60 vessels off Portland including the USS Missouri The islands provided a natural barrier to storms and enemy subs, with anti-submarine netting strung between them completing tto complete the task.
On April 23, 1945 the 200 foot USS Eagle was sunk less than five miles southeast of Cape Elizabeth by U-853. Thirteen of the crew survived only to be informed by Navy officials that the sinking had been caused by their ship's boiler having exploded and thus they were not entitled to the Purple Heart. It was not surprising the Navy wanted to cover up the cause; after all the war was almost over and no naval vessel had yet been lost off the New England coast. It took 40 years for the crew to get its proper credit.
FARMS
- In 1954 there were 23,000 farms remaining in Maine; by 1987 there were only about 6,000.
The dairy industry did even worse: in 1950 there were almost 5,000 dairy farms; by 1998 the number was less than a tenth that.
This decline has contributed to a state anomaly: Maine has the highest percentage of its land in forest but the smallest average diameter of trees.
From Maine Farmland Trust
- By 2002 Maine was #1 in New England agricultural sales, up from behind Connecticut and Vermont.
- 48% of our farmers are in it fulltime
- 29% of farmers are women up from 25% in 2007
FARMS AND SCHOOLS
Schools were once a prolific part of the rural landscape including near here.
One town in Maine had 14 schools in the 19th century. Typically such schools were placed about three miles apart.
You could not have had American agriculture without rural schools. They were inseparable. One study reports, "During the 1930s about one-half of all children went to school in rural areas, where the proportion of children to adults was higher than in the cities." On Wolf's Neck in 1860, according to the book "Tides of Change," there were 38 children and 20 farmers.
In 1946, the farm was bought by my parents. One of the first efforts was an experiment in tree farming -- an effort spurred by the random felling of some 200 trees during Hurricane Carol.
As part of the tree farming effort, the Smiths introduced the first wood-chipping machine to the state. The device was so novel that a field day was held to show it off to local farmers and woodlot owners.
In 1953, the Smiths bought nine cows at $175 each and one bull for $300 at a Pennsylvania agriculture fair.
In the late fifties, inspired by Louis Bromfield's Malabar Farm, the Smiths began an organic beef operation called Wolfe's Neck Farm. By this time the herd had about 40 head.
In 1960, the Smiths sued the central Maine Power Company to stop the utility from using pesticides on their land. The owner company settled the case, which the Brunswick Times Record called a "first of its kind," writing that the "legal action taken by a Freeport man last week to protect his farmlands from pesticides may well prove historic."
The Smiths gave 200 acres of their farm to the state of Maine in 1969 for the park now known as Wolf Neck Woods.
In 1973 Wolfe's Neck Farm brought the first round hay baler to Maine. A single farmhand could now put up 100 tons in one day compared to 15 tons of standard bales.
Under the direction of Charles DeGrandpre, Wolfe's Neck Farm hundreds of head of cattle, using only feed grown on the farm and from leased fields nearby.. Charlie had formely run a farm in Massachusetts owned by a man who got interested in natural farming as far back at the 1940s.
WN Farm developed a Maine marketing alliance for natural beef that started with 10 farmers in the state but soon exploded to around a hundred as far west as the Mississippi and as far south as Virginia. The Farm had become the largest supermarket supplier of natural beef in the greater Northeast.
But the farm was like an internet startup. It didn’t have the capital to carry out its great idea, so WNF worked out a long term license for its brand and leased its land to the much larger Pineland Farms Natural Beef. In September 2009, Pineland Farms removed its cattle from the farm.
While it took several years to recover from this change, under a new farm director – David herring – things have been moving fast. We have established a dairy intern training program, our canmpsites are doing better than ever, and about 600 kids enroll each year in our summer camp program. We have a Teen Ag program that among other things provides thousands of pounds of food to local soup kitchens and are working on a program for doing scientific research on the farm.
Today the farm is an natural campus providing education, recreation, and agriculture. It is not just a farm , it is a community farm. With thousands of children and adults visiting it and many participating in its programs, it is helping to redefine the relationship between the urban and the rural. For a century we increasingly separated the two and it didn’t work. Now we’re looking for ways to help more Americans grow food, learn about nature, do less damage to the natural, become smarter about ecological issues, and redefine our relationship to our environment.
