Sam Smith, 2015 - You’re lucky to be living in Maine now. If you had chosen to be born or move here 12,000 years ago you would have found yourself under a mile of ice.
Today Maine has thousands of islands 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.
Our friend the late Jack Rand, the state geologist, explained to us in a letter:
"Kathy Smith's bedrock is primarily 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.
And as the park’s director, Andy Hutchinson put it, Glaciers were the world’s largest bulldozers.
You can still find the remains in random large rocks known as erratic boulders. They moved down here from as much as a hundred miles away during glacial period.
As early as 10500 years ago, as the glaciers melted, paleo Indians moved into Maine, but 500 years later they were gone, followed by various serial migrations
By 1400 there were about 20,000 Indians living here, part of the Algonquin language group.
1616-1619 – three years before the Pilgrims arrived, there was 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, 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. But they were long gone by the time we arrived although you could still see shell heaps they had left. If you look carefully you can find remains of middens opposite Googins Island in the state park and down by the stone pier at the end of Wolfe’s Neck
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. Among other things they found on this voyage were 1,000 Basque fishing vessels working the coast of Newfoundland having kept it a secret for about 500 years.
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.
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."
And 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 popular States. …Here every man may be master and owner of his own labor and land; or the greatest part in a small time."
ooooooooo
POST WORLD WAR II
The Maine I first came to as an eight year old was quite different from today.
It was right after WWII, for example, when the Atlantic coast had been far more dangerous than Americans still realize. Only years after the war would it 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 here - one five miles southeast of the Portland sea buoy, one off Small Point and the other seven miles off Halfway Rock.
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 to 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 took 40 years for the crew to get its proper credit.
And the U boats came even closer. Emily Rhoades lived part of the war on Bowman's Island off the end of Wolf Neck. One night, around midnight, she went out to get some water at the well. Standing by the well was a man all dressed in black including a black hood and mask. He put his finger to his mouth and pointed her back to the house. There was little doubt about how he had gotten there. And there was even a U boat spotting station on the Haraseeket River
When the Navy left, the economy around Portland went bust. I remember going to numerous auctions of farmers and others who had gone bust.
In 1954 there were 23,000 farms n Maine; by 1987 there were only about 6,000…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.
You could not have had Maine agriculture without rural schools. They were inseparable. One study reports, "During the 1930s about one-half of all children in America went to school in rural areas, where the proportion of children to adults was higher than in the cities."
One of my parents first efforts was an experiment in tree farming. They parents 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 the late fifties, inspired by Louis Bromfield's Malabar Farm, they began an organic beef operation.
Then, 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 agreeing not to spray any property in the state if the owners’ objected. This was two years before Silent Spring.
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.
Charlie DeGrandpre ran the operation and at one point, Wolfe's Neck Farm had some 600 head of cattle, using only feed grown on the farm and from leased fields nearby.
The farm also experimented with a number of different approaches to silage. One early experiment involved "open" silos. With mounds of chopped hay covered with black plastic, the air would be sucked out using an vacuum cleaner. The process proved disastrous to my mother’s vacumn cleaner and was discarded after one season.
Trench silos were also used for awhile. As a handy auxiliary to my parents’ imagination – who as a boy had been sent deep down into wells under construction to help finish them, I now found himself driving a tractor back and forth 12 feet above ground with nothing to prevent me going over the side. But then how many pre-teens get to help move a house on skids pulled by a model A tractor?
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.
Before she died, my mother gave the farm to
the USM. During this period The 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 became 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. Pineland is now linked to about 300 farms.
Today, Wolfes Neck Farm is an natural campus providing education,
recreation, and agriculture. It is not just a farm , it is a community farm. For
example, our teen ag program has provided 12,000 pounds of food to local low
income food kitchens over the past three years.
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.
Now the farm is on yet another course. It has received a $1.7 million grant from Stonyfield to start a training program for dairy farmers. We’ve just hired a new director of this program. We now have a director, dairy operations director, teen ag director, and education director all in their thirties and the collective excitement, skill and enthusiasm is like nothing I’ve seen here before.
