Sam Smith, 2012 - Essential to the spread of agriculture in America were educational
institutions to support it, ranging from land grant colleges to one room school
houses.
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 Neck in 1860, according to the book "Tides of Change," there were 38 children and 20 farmers. Most of the children probably went to the schoolhouse on Wolf Neck Road that now houses the Wolfe's Neck Club. But there was also a schoolhouse on Litchfield Road and another further up the road to Brunswick. One town in Maine had 14 schools in the 19th century. Typically such schools were placed about three miles apart, and were hardly an oddity in the rural landscape.
The 1860 census lists the names of the farmers and a few of them became familiar to this young boy a century later; there were still Brewers and Manns on the neck. My guess is that by then there were no more than six or seven farmers along the road; migration to the west and industrialization had taken its toll. In fact, something like two thirds of Maine's farmland had return to woods. You can find evidence of it still in the stone walls in the woods of Recompence Campsites or the few remaining "field pines," identifiable by horizontally expansive branches unlike the normal trees one finds in a Maine forest.
But that's changing now. The National Agricultural Statistics Service reports that from 2002 to 2007, the number of farms in the state jumped by nearly 1,000, to 8,136.
By the time I got there, the white school house on Wolf Neck Road had turned into the local chapter of the Farm Bureau. Farm Bureaus gave a collective voice to farmers helping them get things like county agents who advised them on good agricultural practices.
But they were also social clubs, and I looked forward to their suppers as much as any grown up farmer. For one thing, there was usually a big tin bucket filled with a large piece of ice and gallons of home made root beer, a treat for a kid raised in family that strictly limited access to soda pop.
Usually, there were two sittings. If you were scheduled for the second, you came early and stood outside talking with others on the list. If you were scheduled for the first, you hung around afterwards with your neighbors.
The meals were usually quite good but I also credit one of them - decades ago - introducing me to the concept of climate change.
Two farmers were standing outside trading stories. One was Horace Mann - the straw hat bedizened father of James Mann, first manger of Wolfe's Neck Farm. One said to the other, "Ayah. . .I remember that winter of ought eight. . . We had our first snow October 15 and come May 1st we were still on runners."
They don't make winters like that anymore.
Sam Smith was a member and former president of the Wolfe's Neck Farm Foundation board and an ex-farm hand.
