CASCO BAY
Sam Smith, 2013 - Casco Bay, which, hundreds of thousands of years ago, 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.
Old tourist material referred to "The Calendar Isles," a reflection of the alleged island count. This count goes back at least to 1700 when an English document cautiously reported that
Sd bay is covered from storms that come from the sea by a multitude of islands, great and small, there being (if report be true) as many islands as there are Days in a Yr.
The US Coast Pilot doesn't tally the rocks and says there are only 136 islands and ledges. And a 1992 computer-aided study found 763 islands and ledges appearing at mean high water.
In any, case there are a lot of islands, rocks and ledges. It is why, perhaps, that the lobsterman, upon it being proposed that he undoubtedly knew the location of all the rocks, replied, "Nope. But I know where they ain't."
The bay is also home to an unusual variety of wildlife. The Casco Bay Estuary Project reported in 1995 that 850 species had been identified in local waters. The density of organisms in the bay is more than ten times that of Delaware Bay. Included are over 30,000 water birds of 150 different species, over 2,000 harbor seals, and over fifty pair of nesting osprey and even a few eagles.
Many of the islands are uninhabited. The country's oldest mail boat service plies among the largest of the others,. In the lower corner of the bay is Portland, one of the east coast's great natural harbors, with a channel deeper than that of Boston, Philadelphia or New York.
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
FIRST EUROPEANS
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."
Recent archeological work suggests that the Indians first came to these parts as early as 8,000 years ago. Beginning in 1675 they 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. But they were long gone by the time we arrived although as late as my youth you could see a couple of shellheaps they had left.
POST WAR
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.
On May 5, the captains of U-boats received word from Berlin that they were to surrender. The commander of U-853, however, either did not get the word or chose to ignore it. That afternoon he sank a freighter off Point Judith, RI commencing a chase that ended with the sub on the ocean floor with all crew members dead.
FARMS
In 1954 there were 23,000 farms remaining in Maine; by 1987 there were only about 6,000, climbing slightly to 7100 over the next 20 years. 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.
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 Mrs. and Mrs. LMC Smith of Philadelphia. 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 had some 600 head of cattle, using only feed grown on the farm and from leased fields nearby..
The farm experimented with a number of different approaches to silage. One early experiment involved "open" silos patterned after those on English farms. With mounds of chopped hay covered with black plastic, the air would be sucked out using an vacuum cleaner. The process proved disastrous to the vacuum cleaners and was discarded after a few seasons. Trench silos were also used for awhile.
Wolfe's Neck Farm introduced Maine to the notion of cafeteria feeding of cattle. Hay was chopped in the field and blown into a trailer with a conveyor belt. The trailer would than be pulled past specially designed feeding stalls at the edge of each pasture, depositing the feed into long bins. For many years, it was common to see the cattle gather at the stalls upon hearing the distant sound of the tractor and trailer.
One of the least successful experiments involved a hybrid called Sudax (a cross between corn and sorghum that looked like corn without a cob). Sudax was designed as a supplement and winter grain substitute and the initial yields (15 tons per acre) were impressive. But then, during a particularly rainy season, fourteen cows died in one day. An autopsy and subsequent analysis found that Sudax under extremely moist conditions could produce arsenic.
In 1988 the farm developed an inexpensive, portable livestock watering system so that cattle could be easily moved to any of farm's 17 paddocks. A report found that benefits included the fact that "manure is not concentrated in a few places, vegetation is not beaten down in a few places, [and] the animals expend less energy in obtaining their drinking water." Later the farm would engage in a rare yuppie to rural technology transfer, as it received 2,000 pounds of used mash from Gritty McDuff's brew pub each week to help fatten the cattle.
* The farm also ran a test program in which a plot fertilized with sludge and another supplemented with cement plant tailings were compared with the growth results from a control plot. The plot using stone dust outshone the others.
* Jensen and Cox 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. 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.
Today the farm is a 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 program, 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. No 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.
