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Maine

The Sensational Murder of Sir Harry Oakes, Bar Harbor Baronet

On July 16, 1943, two Miami police officers cruised into Bar Harbor, Maine, and down the long, tree-lined drive to The Willows, a Regency-style mansion on a bluff overlooking the ocean. Capt. Edward Melchen and Det. James Barker had traveled from Nassau in the Bahamas to visit Lady Eunice Oakes, The murder of her husband, Sir Harry Oakes, had left her a widow eight days earlier.

Police surrounded the house to keep away gawkers and the press, and the front gate was locked. The sensational story of Sir Harry Oakes’s brutal killing had made world headlines. Even a glimpse of a family member merited a mention in the press.

Harry Oakes

That morning Lady Oakes had buried her husband of 20 years in a simple ceremony near his birthplace in Sangerville, Maine. He had been killed at his home in the Bahamas, she wasn’t sure how, and the plane carrying his body home had turned around mid-flight. By the time Sir Harry Oakes’s remains finally arrived in Maine, his widow was in a state of profound shock.

As soon as she buried her husband, Lady Oakes returned to Bar Harbor and took to her bed. She had asked the detectives to call on her that afternoon. They had, after all, been asked to investigate her husband’s death by his friend, the Duke of Windsor.

The Murder of Harry Oakes

The police officers were admitted to the bedroom. They found Lady Oakes surrounded by several of her children, including her eldest daughter, nineteen-year-old Nancy de Marigny.

Nancy had learned of her father’s death when she was on her way from Miami to Martha Graham’s dance studio in Bennington, Vt. Her friend Merce Cunningham gave her the news. Nancy changed her plans and flew to Bar Harbor to join her mother at the funeral.

Nancy and her mother listened with rising hysteria to Melchen and Barker as they told their tale. The killer, they said, took a stick from the garage, climbed the outside stairs to Sir Harry’s bedroom and bashed his head in. Then the killer sprayed the unconscious baronet with insecticide and set the bed on fire. Sir Harry revived and tried to fight off his killer. He lost the struggle and died, probably in terrible agony.

And then the two police officers described how they intended to frame Nancy’s husband, Count Alfred de Marigny, for the murder of Sir Harry Oakes.

Westborough, the Bahamian mansion where Harry Oakes was murdered.

Mining for Millions

No one knows exactly how much money Harry Oakes had. But in 1943 he ranked as one of the richest men in the world and easily at the top of Bar Harbor’s wealthy summer colony. He owned the second largest gold mine on the planet. Some put his value at more than $200 million.

Quiet, stubborn, driven, generous, proud, short-tempered—all these could describe Sir Harry Oakes. At the time of his death, at age 68, some saw a mellowing multimillionaire finally relaxing into his wealth and status. Others saw a tyrannical drunk tilting at decades-old slights and insults and bent on self-destruction.

Before he was Sir Harry Oakes, Baronet of the British Order, he was just plain old Harry Oakes, son of a successful country lawyer from Sangerville, a small mill town in rural Maine. Born in 1874, Oakes had left the state in 1896, shortly after his graduation from Bowdoin College. Though he had no gold as yet, there was no shortage of brass in young Harry.

As a student, when asked what he planned to do after college, Harry was direct: “I plan to make a million dollars.”

Perhaps the glittering wealth on display in Bar Harbor and environs had fueled young Harry’s ambition. Newspapers of the day avidly reported the comings and goings of European nobility, Gilded Age millionaires, Boston Brahmins, and Main Line Philadelphians in the fabulous summer resort. Readers found no detail too small about the fashionable season just two hours from Harry’s home town.

No Fortune?

Harry was awkward and pugnacious as a college student. Not hated, but not well liked either. Harry’s friends and relatives didn’t know what to make of his boastful plans. His future brother-in-law bluntly said: “Harry Oakes is not going to make a fortune.”

After Bowdoin, Harry attended Syracuse University for two years, studying at its medical school. But the lure of gold caught up with him there, and he left the school to begin prospecting for gold in Canada in 1899.

What followed was a fourteen-year odyssey that carried Harry from Canada to Alaska to New Zealand to Africa to the Philippines and back to Canada. Along the way, he worked as a miner in other peoples’ mines, as a medical technician in hospitals, and for over a year as a flax farmer in New Zealand—his most profitable occupation up to that point.

But he continually returned to prospecting, making a study of what types of soil and rock indicated the presence of gold and the ways in which gold mines fanned out in veins. With each passing year, Oakes grew more determined to find his millions and angrier at any perceived slight.

He dodged all the typical barriers to success that tended to slow other businessmen. He didn’t drink excessively. Oakes had little to do with women, guiltily paying for prostitutes when he needed affection, and abandoning a pregnant woman in Australia. All in pursuit of gold.

Location of the Lake Shore Mine in Ontario.

Gold Fever

Why gold? He wanted to get rich without exploiting the work of weaker men—part of a personal code of honor. The year 1918 found Harry back in Canada in Ontario’s Lake Shore District.

Harry begged and borrowed money to operate. His brother and sister sent money religiously. He sold shares of the mine he knew he would one day own to pay for his tools. And along the way he built his enemies list of anyone who slighted him.

In 1912, Harry struck a rich vein of what would be the second-largest gold mine in the Americas—the Lake Shore. It would be years before he could fully commercialize it, though. He sunk shafts, invested in equipment, and pleaded with bankers and backers to fund him.

Harry Oakes built this chateau near his Lakeshore Mine in Ontario. Now the Museum of Northern History.

When success finally arrived, Harry liked to point out that other prospectors might be smart enough to find gold, but they almost always had to sell out because they couldn’t navigate the complicated process of getting a mine actually up and running. With the Lake Shore Mine on the way to producing what would become 266 tons of high-grade gold, Harry made millionaires of his backers—his family and merchants who had accepted his mine shares as payment for services.

Enemies List

Some shares that had been given out at 40 cents would one day be worth $64 each. Meanwhile, it didn’t pay to be an enemy of Harry Oakes. Harry issued an edict that no one connected with his mine should do business with one particular shop. Its owner had denied Harry credit and embarrassed him in the process. When the shopkeeper went bankrupt, Harry laughed.

When he needed the road improved to the mine—and local suppliers balked—Harry ordered that the road be paved by his own men with ore from the mine. He later gleefully scoffed that he could get a million dollars’ worth of gold out of that road if he wanted to.

In the mining business, he was a tyrant. A meddlesome and micromanaging boss, his top managers routinely quit within months of being hired. Those who managed to stay with him he eventually fired.

Bahamas, Ho!

In 1923, Harry met Eunice McIntyre, a bank clerk from Sidney, Australia, on a cruise to South Africa. Harry’s contemporaries joked that the only way he could get a girl would be to corner her on a deserted island. Eunice, though, looked past his rough exterior and manners. Just 28, she married Harry, now 50, and moved to Ontario. There the richest man in Canada and his wife began raising children.

Harry and Eunice Oakes in the 1930s

Harry angled for a seat in Canada’s upper house of Parliament. He went so far as to renounce his U.S. citizenship, but he was denied by the prime minister. He became increasingly furious at Canada’s tax system, and at the failure of the government to appreciate the wealth he generated.

In 1935, he announced he was leaving Canada to become a citizen of the Bahamas, which was still part of the UK, but with no income tax. The uproar in Canada was instantaneous as its richest citizen decamped. Had he known his fate in the Caribbean, he might have stayed in Canada.

Who Murdered Harry Oakes?

Harry’s arrival in Nassau was no less cacophonous than you’d expect, as he continued to make enemies in the Bahamas. One would eventually kill him.

He bought huge swaths of the remote island at depressed prices and set to building houses, a golf course, a country club and an airport. He reshaped the place without restraint.

In the poor island nation, Harry was not only friends with the former King Edward VIII, he could be king himself. One day he stopped at the British Colonial Hotel for lunch. The maître d’ decided to seat Harry at the back of the restaurant because of his shabby clothes. Harry got up and left, bought the hotel, and fired the maître d’.

The British Colonial Hotel, now a Hilton

He decreed that only black employees could work in the hotel, infuriating many of the white employees. When he found out there weren’t enough black workers who knew how to run hotels in Nassau, he set up a training center to teach them to run his new business.

Determined to spite the Canadian politicians who had passed him over for friendship, Harry began a campaign to win a knighthood. A steady flow of charitable gifts to British institutions made the king take notice. He donated more than $1 million to charities in the Bahamas, and in 1939 Harry won a knighthood, 1st Baronet of Nassau.

The Baronet of Bar Harbor

Harry and Eunice now had houses in London, Florida, and Ontario in addition to their main homes in the Bahamas. But Eunice was not a fan of the sweltering Nassau summers. She wanted a cooler summer location for the family.

You can travel from Sir Harry’s birthplace in Sangerville, Maine, to Bar Harbor in two hours. But Harry Oakes definitely took the long way. Sixty years passed between Harry’s birth in 1874 and his arrival to buy a summer cottage in Bar Harbor. Sir Harry bought the gracious 27-room cottage called The Willows in 1938. That set the pattern for Harry’s life until his murder in 1943. The family would spend the cold months in Nassau, and Eunice and the children would return to Bar Harbor in the spring, followed by Harry later in the summer.

Map of Bar Harbor

In Bar Harbor, Harry continued to spread his money—and to show stuffed-shirted summer swells how his money insulated him from the customary requirements of polite society.

By this time, Bar Harbor was past its heyday as a summer resort for the wealthy families of Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Letters to the local newspaper complained of the number of empty cottages. Storefronts were vacant. A public solicitation was created to shame the Congregational Church on Mount Desert Street into cleaning up trash and debris that accumulated in the churchyard.

But vestiges of the robust summer colony remained. Two of the Oakes’s neighbors—the Atwater Kents and the Ned Stotesburys—happily squandered their millions on furnishing their mansions and throwing lavish parties during the Great Depression.

A Rough Side Show

Harry attended the Bar Harbor birthday parties, talent shows and dinners, occasionally letting his rough side show. He often ate using only a knife and spat pits and seeds across the banquet table.

Some said he simply spent too many years in rugged mining camps to knock off the rough edges he picked up. Others said he just didn’t care to.

Nevertheless, the Oakeses fit in at Bar Harbor. As America went to war in World War II, there was an intense interest in foreign affairs. And along with the usual fashion shows, charity soirees and concerts, the Malvern Hotel, where the Oakeses occasionally stayed, played host to a summer series of public affairs lectures supported by Harry Oakes.

He often gave generously to charities, demanding only anonymity in return. And he pursued his passion for golf when he visited Maine. A hole at the venerable Kebo Valley Golf Club is named in his honor.

As the war started, discussions of charity drives like Bundles for Britain gave way to investigations into who was abusing fuel coupons and the dangers of black markets forming. And the downtown Criterion Theater began featuring somber fare such as Guadalcanal Diary, Somewhere in France, and Hitler’s Hangmen.

But Sir Harry Oakes’s murder on July 8, 1943, literally knocked World War II out of the headlines.

When Harry Met Freddy and Eddy

It was in the Bahamas that Harry Oakes met the two European aristocrats who would play central roles in the scandal surrounding his murder and the aftermath: Count Alfred de Marigny and the Duke of Windsor.

When he arrived in 1935, the Bahamas were little more than a colonial backwater. But as World War II ravaged the cities of Europe, the Bahamas suddenly became very desirable. Wealthy Europeans looking for refuge from the war funneled into the islands. British wives, looking to escape the dangers of the cities, moved to the Bahamas where they could relax and play safely out of the range of German bombs—and their husbands.

Further adding to the intrigue, the Duke of Windsor arrived in 1940 to take on the role of colonial governor. The Duke had previously been Edward VIII, the king of England. He created a sensation when he abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Warfield, a twice-divorced American. The Duke had embarrassed the British government by showing sympathy for the Nazis and favoring appeasement before the war. He was stationed in the Bahamas—an unusual post for a royal—where he could be kept out of sight of the British people.

The Duke of Windsor in 1945

Though the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were admired as icons of style, the Duke would be found wanting on matters of law enforcement.

Upon arriving in the Bahamas, the Duke and Duchess immediately declared the governor’s residence to be uninhabitable. It needed a complete overhaul. Sir Harry Oakes rode to the rescue. He had several homes on the island, and he offered the Duke the use of his best house while the governor’s mansion was renovated. Sir Harry had bought island property for a pittance before the war, and soon found himself sitting on a gold mine of a different kind.

Alfred de Marigny

By then, another aristocratic European had already entered Harry’s orbit when Alfred de Marigny—or Freddy—landed in the Bahamas. He, too, left war-torn Europe for the peace and sunshine of the Caribbean.

Freddy had a title of his own and a reputation as a playboy. He was a count from his mother’s family. He had amassed some savings working in finance, divorced his first wife, and slept with, then married, his banker’s wife.

Freddy de Marigny

When Freddy and his new wife moved to Nassau, Freddy was in love—with the Bahamas, not with her. A brief and stormy marriage gave way to a quick divorce. In the fall of 1940, Sir Harry’s wife, Eunice, extended a dinner invitation to Freddy, then well known around Nassau as an eccentric, as well as an accomplished sailor.

Freddy dined with the Oakeses, including daughter Nancy. He was 30; she was 15. Later he said he noticed her beauty, but didn’t give her much more thought. She, however, had a serious crush. Later in the year, she visited him at the hospital in New York where he was being treated for stomach pains. And a year later she would again flirt with him at her coming-out party.

Nancy flattered Freddy by revealing she knew all about his sailboat racing, and he was smitten. A long-distance courtship ensued, with Freddy traveling again to New York in 1942. There, Nancy proposed. Freddy accepted.

Trouble

There would be no Bar Harbor society wedding for Nancy Oakes. The day after she turned eighteen, they eloped in New York City. Lady Eunice Oakes collapsed at her summer home at The Willows when she learned of the wedding.

From Jacaranda House Nassau https://jacarandahousenassau.com/history/

Nancy Oakes

It’s easy enough to imagine how Count de Marigny, with his French accent and cultured deportment, would appeal to Nancy, who was horrified by her own parents’ manners. And it’s easy enough to imagine how a lithe and beautiful 17-year-old would appeal to the thirty-two-year-old Freddy.

It’s much harder to imagine what happened next.

By most accounts, Freddy and Harry’s relationship was neither especially friendly nor unfriendly. After announcing their elopement, Freddy and Nancy were invited to Bar Harbor for their honeymoon. There, the Oakes family welcomed them politely, if not warmly. Freddy got along well with Nancy’s four siblings, taking them sailing off the Maine coast.

A trip to Mexico ended badly, with Nancy contracting both typhoid fever and trench mouth. The marriage was then stressed by a pregnancy, which Nancy, at the urging of her parents, terminated.

Further trouble soon arrived in the form of a letter from Freddy’s second wife, Ruth. It accused him of being unscrupulous and immoral. The letter turned Lady Oakes against her son-in-law, and a feud ensued between mother and daughter. Nancy demanded that the family welcome Freddy.

The Final Chapter

On July 8, 1943, the final crisis was to occur in Sir Harry’s life. He was ticketed to fly to Bar Harbor the next day to join Eunice and the children at The Willows. He never got the chance. That night during a torrential tropical storm, someone killed him, bashing him on the head and then setting him on fire.

The crime scene

The murder made international headlines—that is, after the Duke finally let the news out. Faced with the sensational crime on his turf, Edward, Duke of Windsor, proved to be at the least incompetent and perhaps unscrupulous. Rather than rely on the local police or Scotland Yard, the Duke invited a Miami detective he knew to come to the island and handle the investigation.

The Duke first thought Harry had killed himself. Sir Harry had been riding around his golf course recently on a bulldozer, toppling trees. He seemed more than usually unhinged. The Duke pondered: Eunice wanted to leave the Bahamas, so perhaps Harry had gone insane.

Disabused of this notion by the gruesome facts surrounding the death, the Duke then came to suspect Freddy, whom he loathed.

Alfred de Marigny had, in fact, argued several times with Sir Harry. But so had almost everyone who knew him. Freddy didn’t have an airtight alibi for the murder, but no one had seen him around Sir Harry’s house the night of the murder. The question arose: Didn’t he and Nancy stand to inherit millions if Sir Harry died? Police pounced on Freddy and charged him with murder.

Framed

The case against Freddy went to trial. It was a gift to the tabloid press, with the elements of private investigators, crafty lawyers, and beautiful young Nancy against a backdrop of an island paradise where the wealthy fled to avoid the war.

The case unraveled fast. Freddy testified that he had renounced any claim to Nancy’s future fortune. Further, under the terms of her father’s will she would only receive $1,000 a month until she was thirty-seven, when the residue of his estate would finally be distributed among his children.

Then under questioning, the validity of the single piece of physical evidence the police had against Freddy—a fingerprint from a screen next to Sir Harry’s body—was crushed.

The two police officers had blundered. When they made that unforgettable visit on July 16 to Lady Oakes in her Bar Harbor bedroom, they told her about the fingerprint. But they testified in court that they didn’t identify the print until July 19.

Atlantic Oakes, once The Willows, Harry Oakes’ Bar Harbor mansion

Unable to present a clear picture of how and where the fingerprint was found, the defense created the impression that the police lifted the print from a drinking glass and fabricated the evidence. The detectives, Freddy’s lawyers suggested, pretended they had found the print on a shade in Sir Harry’s room to frame him.

In truth, it appears the detectives believed Freddy was guilty and would confess if confronted with enough “evidence.” But Freddy, in his memoirs, said he simply knew the lie would have to surface because he had not been anywhere near the bedroom on the night of the murder.

The aftermath of the case was probably inevitable. The jury found Freddy not guilty, but he was thrown out of the Bahamas as an undesirable. He fled to Cuba and spent a few months palling around with his old chum Ernest Hemingway. Nancy, meanwhile, had more interest in Ernest’s young son Jack, and the two began a brief, torrid affair.

While able to match Nancy’s appetite for sex, Jack said he couldn’t match her funds, and so the two parted. He headed off to Montana and college.

Nancy traveled to Montreal, and Freddy pursued her there. He wound up sleeping with a journalist who splashed his name across the newspapers. She reported his pillow talk that the Canadian government soon planned to deport him.

Nancy announced she planned to have their marriage annulled. He announced he would fight. He lost and spent the next 20 years trying to find a country that would take him in, finally securing US citizenship in 1975.

Still an Unsolved Mystery

For Sir Harry Oakes, there was no tidy ending. His body was flown back to Maine and buried. His death remains unsolved to this day. He had many enemies, but none seemed likely—or able—to kill him. Freddy speculated that Harry’s real estate partner killed him upon learning that Sir Harry planned to leave the Bahamas. He also alleged the Duke of Windsor deliberately muddled the investigation. He thought the duke feared that if Freddy were cleared, investigators would begin looking elsewhere. The Duke, Freddy found, had illegally squirreled money away in Mexico in violation of currency control laws. The Duke planned to use the money after the war—assuming the Germans would win.

With numerous theories floating around, there is to this day no definite answer to the question: Who killed Harry Oakes?

He did leave a legacy of sorts in Bar Harbor. Eunice—Lady Oakes—donated The Willows to Bowdoin College as a conference center. The college sold the Oakes Center to a developer, who turned it into a hotel now known as Atlantic Oceanside Hotel & Event Center.

Harry Oakes finally came full circle, buried in a cemetery near his birthplace in Sangerville. Lady Eunice Oakes died in Nassau in 1981.

His story has appeared in film and books, including Bar Harbor Babylon, by New England Historical Society writers Leslie and Dan Landrigan. This post is an excerpt from that book.

Images: Sir Harry Oakes Chateau By KALM1986 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88953293. Alfred de Marigny By Georgeismahname – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38224507. British Colonial Hilton By Mike Miley – https://www.flickr.com/photos/mike_miley/4217031380/ Flickr], CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15012669. Map of the Lake Shore Mine By NordNordWest – NordNordWest, usingUnited States National Imagery and Mapping Agency dataWorld Data Base II dataStatistics Canada/Statistique CanadaAdded File:Ontario, Canada.svg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7873011.

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Old Town Canoe, Inspired by the Penobscot People

The Old Town Canoe Company couldn’t have started in a better place when it built its first canoe more than a hundred years ago. Old Town, Maine, is a small city located on the fringe of the Great North Woods and next to the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation. The Penobscot River runs right through Old Town.

The Penobscot people had been making birch bark canoes for hundreds of years. They provided the inspiration – and many employees – for the Old Town Canoe Company’s original wood-and-canvas canoes.

Old Town, Maine, in 1907

For centuries, natives and non-natives in Northern Maine had used canoes as workboats. But then canoes evolved into recreational craft — wildly popular recreational craft. Decades later the canoe-like kayak became all the rage.

The Old Town Canoe Company has ridden those waves ever since 1898. Today it makes more kayaks than canoes. But it has, remarkably, survived as an American company that still makes something. Here’s how they did it.

Penobscot

The Penobscot people built their community on and near the Penobscot River and Bay. For centuries they have lived and worked on the river as hunters, fishermen, log drivers, craftsmen, trappers, guides and stewards.

Penobscot Bay

Their birchbark canoes are sometimes called “one of the greatest inventions in human history.” It takes 500 hours to make one.

A Wabanaki birchbark canoe from the 19th century on display at the Pejebscot Historical Society in Brunswick, Maine.

To do it, the Penobscot used one piece of birchbark from stem to stern. They used ash and cedar for the gunwales, spruce root and sap to plug the cracks and cedar strips for the thwarts. Then they’d sink the canoe in the fall and raise it in the spring to keep the bark pliable.

In 1857, Henry David Thoreau took a canoe trip with his Penobscot guide, Joseph Polis, from Bangor to the Allagash Lakes and back.

He recounted a discussion between Polis and a St. Francis native about the kind of spruce root to use in a birch bark canoe.

Our Indian said that he used black spruce roots to sew canoes with, obtaining it from high lands or mountains. The St. Francis Indians thought that white spruce roots might be best. But the former said, “No good, break, can’t split ’em.”

I told him I thought that I could make a canoe, but he expressed great doubt of it; at any rate he thought that my work would not be “neat” the first time.

Industrial Highway

Going without a boat in 19^th century Maine would be like not having a car or a truck today.

The Penobscot River near Bucksport, Maine.

When Thoreau took his canoe trip, the Penobscot River functioned as an industrial highway. Schooners hauled wood products from Bangor, the world’s largest lumber port, to international destinations. River drivers used bateaux to maneuver along the logs they drove.

With strong demand for schooners, bateaux and canoes, boatbuilding thrived in the Bangor region.

Rivermen on the Mooselookmeguntic Lake in Maine during the spring 1943 pulpwood drive. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Sometime after the Civil War, the birchbark canoe inspired canoe makers in and near Old Town. They began making wood and canvas canoes. Evan H. Gerrish may have been the first, selling them from his shop in Bangor, 12 miles from Old Town. Edwin M. White saw one of Gerrish’s canoes and started making his own in Old Town. Alfred E. Wickett worked for him, and later for the Old Town Canoe Company. C.B. Thatcher of Bangor, B.N. Morris of Veazie and G.E. Carleton in Old Town also made canoes.

Old Town Canoe

By 1898, 15 factories reportedly made canoes in the Old Town area. That year, George Gray hired A.E. Wickett to build a wood-and-canvas canoe behind his hardware store. George and his brother Herbert didn’t build boats, but they hired people who did. In 1901 they bought a former shoe factory on Middle Street and began making canoes out of it. Some of those survived for a hundred years.

A postcard highlights one of the benefits of owning a canoe.

Their wood-and-canvas canoe sold quickly, bolstered by a craze for canoeing. Young people especially liked courting canoes. The young man would paddle from the back thwart. The young lady would face him, sitting on a pillow on the bottom and enjoying the ride.

The video below, by Thomas Edison, gives you an idea of just how popular canoeing had gotten by 1904.

By 1910, Old Town Canoe had 60 employees, many of whom were local Penobscot. The Grays bought one of the other Old Town canoe companies, Carleton, and began making bateaux as well. A Canadian canoe maker tried to lure the Old Town boat builders away, and the Old Town Canoe Company brought suit against its northern competitor.

Old Town Canoe Rebounds

In 1917 they introduced the motorized canoe with a square stern to which an outboard motor could be attached. In 1940, Old Town Canoe made its first kayak – a wood-and-canvas model. It was then the biggest canoe maker in the world. By the mid-1940s, the company ran five logging operations to get enough wood to meet demand.

But after the war, Old Town Canoe faced increasing competition from aluminum and fiberglass canoes. The Grays’ descendants, who still owned the company, thought aluminum kayaks were ugly and refused to make them. And Deane Gray, George’s grandson, had a sign on his desk that said, ““If God wanted fiberglass boats, he would have made fiberglass trees!”

By the early 1960s, the company’s sales dwindled to 200 canoes a year.

By then, the company also made motorboats and sailboats. In 1965, a Cleveland Plain Dealer copyeditor named Robert Manry sailed alone from Falmouth, Mass., to Falmouth, England. He did it in Tinkerbelle, a 13.5-foot Whitecap sailboat made by Old Town Canoe.

A Change of Heart

By then Old Town had finally begun experimenting with new materials, and in 1965 it built its first fiberglass canoe. Other innovations – especially the Discovery canoe – allowed it to return to profitability and regain its title as the world’s largest canoe maker.

The 1972 film Deliverance used seven Old Town canoes.

Corporate cash also helped the company rebound. In late 1974, Johnson Diversified, a Racine, Wisc.-based conglomerate, bought Old Town Canoes in December 1974.

Old Town Canoe ad for a war canoe

By 2000 it made more kayaks than canoes, and more of both than anybody. It still makes wood-and-canvas canoes, along with tens of thousands of kayaks, and it employs about 150 people.

In 2002, Steve Cayard, a non-native, self-taught birchbark canoe builder, led a canoe-building workshop on Indian Island. Passamaquoddy, Maliseet and Penobscot attended. Barry Dana, then chief of the Penobscot Nation, had invited him in order to revive the craft of birchbark canoe building.

In 2016, Harvard’s Peabody Museum staged an exhibition called “The Legacy of Penobscot Canoes: A View From the River.”

Images: Group in canoe By Virginia State Parks staff – YR- Waiting for the rest of the groupUploaded by AlbertHerring, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29217331

1934 Old Town kayak By Squirrelwhisperer – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43483254.

Birchbark canoe By Paul VanDerWerf from Brunswick, Maine, USA – Wabanaki Canoe, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70766856.

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Ashley Bryan, the Maine Man Who Showed the World Black Is Beautiful

Ashley Bryan was not what you’d expect living in the Cranberry Isles, a fishing community off Acadia National Park. Born in Harlem during the Great Depression, he came to the islands in the 1950s after surviving World War II. From that tiny Maine island, he spread a message of hope and joy through his art, his books and his puppets.

Bryan won many awards for his work, inspired theatrical productions and starred in a documentary about his life. In 2020, Maine Gov. Janet Mills named July 13 — his 97th birthday — “Ashley Frederick Bryan Day” for his contribution to the state.

Ashley Bryan

He wrote and illustrated books well into his nineties. His editor at Athenaeum Books, Caitlyn Dlouhy, explained his appeal.

“I just love that man,” she told Columbia Magazine. “He never has an unkind or negative word. It’s always, ‘Look at this beautiful thing. Look at this beautiful day. We’re alive’.”

His neighbors viewed him as a kind of holy man. But he didn’t think so.

“The artist is not a special person,” he once said.

Ashley Bryan

He was born July 13, 1923, the second of the six children of immigrants from Antigua. He grew up in a crowded apartment in the Bronx with his parents, siblings, three orphaned cousins and injured birds that his father rehabilitated.

As a child he drew on the walls, on the furniture, everywhere. His father worked as a printer of greeting cards, so he brought home paper for Ashley to draw on. As a kindergartner he made a book illustrating the letters of the alphabet. After that, he never stopped making books, he said.

His parents couldn’t afford art lessons, but sent him to free classes by Works Progress Administration artists. In 1940 he won acceptance to the Cooper Union School of Art and Engineering. There he studied sculpture, calligraphy, design, book illustration and painting. Then war broke out.

Untitled by Ashley Bryan

World War II

In 1943, Bryan got called up into the segregated 502nd Port Battalion for training as a stevedore. White Southern officers treated the black soldiers worse than the German prisoners of war. Bryan continued drawing, hiding his sketchbook in his gas mask. He unloaded supplies and ammunition from the ships that landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day.

Soldiers Playing Dice

Bryan sketched throughout his time in the military. Fifty years after the war, he took out his sketches and based paintings on them. He wrote.

Fifty years ago, those paintings would have been dark — grays and blacks. But in really looking at those sketches now, I saw a beauty there — the beauty of share human experience … so I would paint them in full color, filled with the vibrancy and life I had put into my garden paintings … This was a world they created, sheltered from the segregation and racism they endured.

For decades he had locked away his World War II drawings along with his memories. He finally dealt with the war — the most painful part of his past — in his art and in his book, Infinite Hope. He published it in 2019, at age 96.

Pablo Casals

After the war, he attended Columbia University’s School of General Studies, graduating with a degree in Philosophy. He then won a Fulbright scholarship to study art at the Université d’Aix-Marseille in Aix-en-Province.

In the summer of 1950, he travelled to the French town of Prades, where Pablo Casals ended his years of musical silence to protest Francisco Franco. Casals did it with a concert on the 200th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach’s death.

Bryan had to draw quickly to capture the musicians’ movements, he later wrote.

The intensity of this type of drawing gave me a sense of the rhythm of the hand … the spring from which my art grows.

He returned to Europe again to study art for two years at the University of Freiburg in Germany. He’d always loved German poetry, and memorized English translations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems. He wanted to go to Germany to hear the poems in their original language.

Ashley Bryan in Maine

Bryan was studying at the Cooper Union Art School when he won a scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Central Maine. He returned 10 years later, part of a group of artists chosen to paint murals on the South Solon Meeting House nearby. Bryan likely painted Skowhegan Pines during that visit.

Skowhegan Pines

Bryan went to Acadia National Park and the Cranberry Isles during his stay at Skowhegan. Then in the 1950s he moved to Islesford on Little Cranberry. During the school year he taught art in New York City.

He then joined the faculty of Dartmouth College in 1974, and spent summers in Islesford until his retirement in 1988. Then he moved there full time and began a period of intense productivity, inspired by the sea, the sky and the wildflowers.

He created stained-glass windows from sea glass, which hang in the Islesford Congregational Church. And he made puppets from papier mache and found objects like fishermen’s gloves, mussel shells and peach pits.

Ashley Bryan also painted — mostly the flowers that grew in profusion on Little Cranberry. “There was beauty to be joyfully captured,” he said. “Beauty to sustain me.”

Bryan’s studio in Islesford

Beautiful Blackbird

Bryan began publishing in the mid-1960s by illustrating books: Fabliaux: Ribald Tales from the Old French and Black Boy by Richard Wright. In 1965 he read a magazine article about the dearth of books featuring black children. It inspired him to celebrate black heritage through children’s books.

Bryan pioneered the children’s book genre based on African and Caribbean folk tales. He based many of his stories on a 1933 book, Folk-Lore of the Antilles, French and English. He also illustrated volumes of poems by Rabindranath Tagore, Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Christina Rossetti, Nikki Giovanni — and himself.

“I love to celebrate the artistry of people around the world in whatever material or form they work,” he said.

Bryan found a story from Zambia about a beautiful blackbird. Different colored birds get together to decide which is the most beautiful. They decide on the blackbird, which reflects all colors. The other birds then want some black. So Blackbird marks them with his black feather, but tells them beauty comes from within.

“i had grown up with black as a lousy color,” Bryan said. “Here was a story celebrating black.”

Beautiful Blackbird remained one of Bryan’s favorite books. It also won the Coretta Scott King Award.

In his nineties, Ashley Bryan published seven more books.

Recognition

Bryan’s house in Islesford

The town of Islesford named its one-room schoolhouse after him, the first in Maine named for a visual artist and for an African-American. But he won many other awards, including the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal and the Carter G. Woodson Book Award. The New York Public Library named him a Literary Lion and the Broward County Library named a children’s book author and illustrator series for him. A library in Kenya is named after him.

Ashley Bryan died on Feb. 4, 2022 in Sugar Land, Texas, at the home of his niece.

Images: Paintings courtesy the Ashley Bryan Center via The Farnsworth Art Museum.

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St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the London Model for the New England Meetinghouse

New Englanders visiting Trafalger Square in London often get a shock when they see the façade of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The famous parish church of the Royal Family looks a lot like a New England meeting house both inside and out.

James Gibbs had some very different ideas when he designed St. Martin-In-The-Fields. He shaped it like a Greek temple, added a portico and columns to the front and put a steeple in the center, just behind the portico.

St. Martin-in-the-Fields

Gibbs, a Scottish architect, laid the cornerstone in 1722. It was finished in 1726 and then criticized. No matter. Gibbs included the design of St. Martin-in-the Fields in a pattern book he published in 1728. His Book of Architecture traveled across the Atlantic into gentlemen’s libraries and then onto colonial greens.

“In the end it became the model church throughout New England and much of North America,” wrote HRH Prince Charles, in a fundraising letter for the church. Charles, like the rest of his family, rarely attends church services.

Gibbs, a Catholic, designed the church as an Anglican parish. But Puritan New England adapted it for their meeting houses. Then other denominations did, too. From the Church of Saint-Joseph in Madawaska, Maine, to St. Catherine of Siena in Greenwich, Conn., columned portico, rectilinear shape, steeple, weathervane — Even into the 20^th century, American country churches had the elements Gibbs introduced in St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

James Gibbs

St. Martin-In-The-Fields

James Gibbs broke the mold when he designed St. Martin-in-the-Fields for Anglican worshippers. Most English churches were Medieval and suited more to the Catholic Mass than the Anglican service.

Inside the church, Gibbs shrunk the Catholic altar and stuck it in a shallow apse. He designed built-in box pews along a central aisle facing the pulpit. He then put side and rear balconies halfway up giant columns. That made it easy for parishioners to see and hear the centerpiece of the ceremony: the sermon.

Outside, he made one big innovation, the one that would define what a church looks like. He put the steeple in the center, just behind the pediment.

Interior of the church

He also simplified the exterior and gave it the classical lines of a Greek temple.

Anglicans, like the Puritans, abhorred religious symbolism. So Gibbs put a weathervane, not a cross, on top of the steeple. Instead of statues of saints, Gibbs put a clock on the steeple – useful in a day when people didn’t have wristwatches. The royal coat of arms went onto the pediment rather than more saints.

In England and France, people just hated it, especially the steeple. Americans loved it. St. Martin-in-the-Fields, they thought, was exactly what a church should look like.

Gibbs’ suggested steeple designs

“With hundreds of derivatives of Gibbs’s London landmark, Americans became imbued with the idea that a proper church should be vaguely classical and have a portico and steeple no matter how basic,” wrote architectural historian Calder Loth.

Patterning St. Martin-in-the-Fields

The colonies needed new churches in their burgeoning cities and towns. But trained architects were few and far between.

Gibbs’ pattern book told them how to build them. (what is a pattern book. Describe pattern book)

He wrote the book for” gentlemen concerned in building.” He especially targeted toward those in “the remote parts of the Country, where little of no assistance for Designs can be procured.”

The book included “useful and convenient buildings and proper ornaments.” The buildings could be executed “by any Workman who understands Lines, either as here Design’d, or with some Alteration, which may be easily made by a person of Judgment.”

New England colonists ate it up. The book earned Gibbs a 1,900 profit and became a must-have for the colonial gentleman’s library.

Center Church on the Green

Center Church on the Green

New Haven’s Center Church on the Green is one of the most famous offspring of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. It’s also one of the most lavish.

Asher Benjamin, who wrote his own pattern book, designed it. Ithiel Town, who bequeathed to New England the lattice truss covered bridge, supervised construction, which went from 1812 to 1815. It has all the basic elements: a steeple, a portico, a classical (read relictilinear) shape, a clock and a weathervane.

The Congregational Church in Guilford, Conn., borrowed its conical steeple from Benjamin after he’d borrowed from Gibbs. It added an American innovation, clapboard construction, to which the colonies’ abundant forests made a sensible contribution.

North Yarmouth and Freeport Baptist Meetinghouse

North Yarmouth and Freeport Baptist Meetinghouse

Known as the Old Baptist Meeting House, the St. Martin-in-the-Fields-style building has a claim as the oldest Baptist Church in Maine. Built in 1796, it functioned as a Baptist meeting house until 1889, when the congregation moved. It has since served as an antiquarian society, a library, a World War II observation tower, a Town Meeting hall and a wedding venue.

Arlington Street Church

The Arlington Street Church

Builders finished the Arlington Street Church in 1861, the first public building erected on the fill that made up Back Bay. It sits on 999 pilings pounded into mud. Its architects, Arthur Gilman and Gridley James Fox Bryant, deliberately modeled the building on St. Martin-in-the-Fields. It’s always been a Unitarian-Universalist Church. In 2004. It held the first state-sanctioned same-sex marriage in the United States.

Church-on-the-Hill

Church-on-the-Hill in Acworth

The Acworth Congregational Chursh, also known as The-Church-on-the-Hill or Acworth Meetinghouse, was built in 1821. Though modeled on St. Martin-in-the-Fields on the outside, its interior has a decidedly Victorian look and feel.

Built in 1821, its design mimics the Congregational Church of Templeton, Mass., which of course gets its idea from St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

A nonprofit now owns the building.

First Baptist Church

First Baptist Church

The church that Roger Williams founded met in several plain, boxy meeting houses until 1774. Then, the Baptists wanted to bring respectability to their denomination. What better way to do it than with a steeple, a portico and a bell.

Work began on the building in the summer of 1774, at the time the largest building project in New England. The Port of Boston had closed in retaliation for the Boston Tea Party, so workmen flocked from Boston to Providence to find work on the church.

John D. Rockefeller paid to restore it in 1957, but one thing he didn’t restore: a gallery set aside for free and enslaved black parishioners.

Marlboro Meeting House

Marlboro Meeting House

The people of Marlboro, Vt., liked their St. Martin-in-the-Fields-style Congregational Church so much they replaced it in 1931 after it burned down. The first church was built in 1820, but then moved to the town common. Even before the famous Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields got started (see below), Adolf Busch and his son-in-law, Rudolf Serkin, started the Marlboro Music Festival.

A Little More about St. Martin-in-the-Fields

St. Martin-in-the-Fields got its name during the Middle Ages, when it was located well outside of London — in the fields. It didn’t move; London just grew.

The church holds 20 services a week, runs the award-winning Café in the Crypt and has a brass rubbing, shop. Every year it houses 400 homeless people.

You may also have heard the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields under the direction of Sir Neville Mariner. It’s a chamber orchestra founded by Mariner and John Churchill, master of music at St.-Martin-in-the-Fields. It gave its first concert in the church in 1959. The ensemble, which later included woodwinds, is credited with reviving Baroque music in England.

Yarmouth Meeting House By NewTestLeper79 – Visit, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107297726. Arlington Street Church By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58886179. First Baptist Church By Beyond My Ken – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=104511048. St. Martin in the Fields (side view) By Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107268575. By Diliff – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32215421. Center Church on the Green By Farragutful – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79676674. St. Martin-in-the-Fields front view By Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net)., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11327834. Arliington Street Church side view By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10003248. Center Church with banners By Smuconlaw. – Own work., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19269291.

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The Vanceboro Bridge Bombing: Germany’s Secret War on America

On a wretchedly cold Maine night in 1915, a lightly dressed German army lieutenant walked from his hotel and placed 60 pounds of dynamite on the Vanceboro Bridge. The bridge spanned the St. Croix River, which separates Maine from Canada. With frostbitten hands, the German lit a cigar and touched it to the fuse. Then he ran back to his hotel, desperate to get warm.

Werner Horn, undated

The attack on the Vanceboro Bridge was a comedy of errors involving a hapless spy, a German diplomat, a sleepy deputy sheriff and a small Maine town where little went unnoticed. But it turned into an international incident when four governments, three of them at war, argued over what to do with Lt. Werner Horn.

The attack on the Vanceboro Bridge belonged to a larger German campaign of sabotage against the United States. Before the U.S. entered World War I, it supplied the allied powers with munitions, foodstuffs and military supplies. Despite official neutrality, the United States allowed Canadian Pacific trains to carry Canadian soldiers across its soil.

So Germany tried to interrupt the supply of munitions to Allies with a spy network inside the United States. Over a year after Werner Horn attacked the Vanceboro Bridge, German spies blew up 2 million pounds of arms and ammunition on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor. The explosion killed four and injured more than 100.

A shattered pier on Black Tom Island

Werner Horn didn’t hurt anyone.

German Sabotage

Horn served in the German army for 10 years until inactivated. He then went to Guatemala to manage a Guatemalan coffee plantation. There he learned Spanish and English.

Werner Horn around 1910

In August 1914, shortly after World War I broke out, Horn received a telegram saying he’d been reactivated. It also said he had to return to Germany.

Horn could travel freely to New York, as the United States hadn’t entered the war. There he found himself stranded, unable to book passage home. So he went to the German consulate for help.

Franz von Papen

Capt. Franz von Papen, then a German diplomat, had also received a telegram. It read:

The General Staff is anxious that vigorous measures should be taken to destroy the Canadian Pacific in several places for the purpose of causing a lengthy disruption of traffic.

The Vanceboro Bridge

With the arrival of Werner Horn, von Papen had a willing operative. He also had a target: the Vanceboro Bridge.

The Canadian Pacific moved troops and materiel through Maine and across the Vanceboro Bridge to the Port of St. John, a major shipping entrepot for Allied men and materiel during World War I.

Port of St. John around 1898

The Germans complained, correctly, that by doing so the U.S. violated international neutrality law.

But neither the U.S. nor Canada seemed to understand that the iron railway trestle in remote Washington County was a key link in the wartime supply chain. They had left it unguarded since October.

Von Papen persuaded Werner Horn to blow it up. But he did it on one condition: No one would be hurt.

Maine Bound

Von Papen sent Horn to the tiny Maine town of Vanceboro with a train schedule, a .38 revolver, money, small German flags and a suitcase full of explosives. When Horn arrived at Grand Central station on March 31, he bought a first-class train ticket on the New York-New Haven.

For his mission the Germans dressed him in workingman’s clothes: torn pants, work boots, a brown overcoat and a woolen cap. That didn’t make him inconspicuous. He was tall, at six feet two inches, with short blond hair, a military bearing and a heavy German accent.

When he boarded the 1 am train to Boston, passengers took note of his shabby clothes, out of place in a first-class car.

In Boston, he switched to a train bound for Bangor and, ultimately, Vanceboro.

Nosy Neighbors

At 6:40 pm he arrived in Vanceboro. Perhaps not realizing how little goes unnoticed in such a small place, he hid his suitcase in a woodpile. Jean and Charles Hunter saw him do it. They then watched him traipse over to the bridge. The Hunters also noticed he wasn’t dressed warmly enough for the subfreezing temperatures. Charles went to see the local immigration officer, Inspector Carr Horn.

The Vanceboro Bridge before Werner Horn got to it.

Inspector Horn and Charles Hunter then returned to the bridge, where they saw Werner Horn walking back and forth, inspecting it. They confronted him, and Horn explained he was a Dutch farmer looking to buy land. The inspector suggested he check into the local hotel, the Exchange. Then several townspeople watched him retrieve his heavy suitcase from the woodpile.

Horn checked in to a first-floor room at the hotel. He spent the next day in his room, studying the railroad timetable. Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t very reliable.

Horn knew he’d have to walk a fine line. If he got caught blowing up the Vanceboro Bridge on the American side, he’d face criminal charges. If he got caught blowing it up on the Canadian side while disguised as a Dutch farmer, he could be hanged for espionage. So as darkness fell, he pinned his German flags to each arm of his overcoat and headed toward the Canadian side of the bridge. Von Papen had told him the flag would prove he wasn’t a spy.

But first he checked out of the hotel, telling the proprietor, Aubrey Tague, he planned to take the 8 pm train to Boston. He then walked to the train station in the snow, underdressed for the gusty wind and subfreezing temperatures. When the Boston train left the station he hid in the woods, planning to wait until the 11:30 from Montreal to St. John passed.

Blowing up the Vanceboro Bridge

Having studied the timetable, Horn expected he’d have an hour until the next train came through. He’d use a 50-minute fuse, which would give him enough time to blow up the bridge without hurting anyone. That would also allow him to make his escape. He planned to walk to the next town, 30 miles through the Maine woods, and get on a morning train.

Horn probably would have frozen to death walking 30 miles through the Maine woods

As he cased the bridge, two railyard workers spotted him and asked what he was doing there. He replied he was “an officer.” They believed him, figuring he was guarding the bridge, and left him alone.

When the Montreal-St. John passed he stepped onto the bridge with his suitcase, but he hadn’t gotten far when he heard another train whistle. He rushed off the bridge and waited for it to pass. Unnerved by the railyard workers and suffering from the cold, he now had no idea when the next train would come rumbling over the Vanceboro Bridge.

Horn picked his way across the bridge and heard another train coming. He flattened himself on Canadian ground, and he decided he had to act quickly.

He placed his explosive next to an iron post and, with his frostbitten hands, cut the 50-minute fuse down to three minutes. Then he lit the fuse and rushed back to the American side.

The Vanceboro Bridge Explosion

The explosion woke the residents of Vanceboro and St. Croix and broke windows on both sides of the river.

The blast woke Aubrey Tague, who then heard water running from a bathroom. He opened the door and found Horn shivering over a sink, running hot water over his frozen hands. Tague told him to put snow on them, opened the bathroom window and handed him a handful. Then he told him he could sleep in an attic room.

The sound of the bomb also woke Deputy Sheriff George Ross, who thought a boiler had exploded or a train had crashed, neither of which concerned him. He went back to sleep.

The explosion did little damage and delayed trains only slightly. Trains could still make it over the bridge.

X marks the spot where Horn placed his bomb. Canada decided to guard the bridge after the attempt.

Caught

At 5:30 the next morning, three railroad police knocked on Deputy Sheriff Ross’s door. Tague had spoken to railyard workers the night before about the stranger. The four police went over to the hotel and found Tague. “German, upstairs,” Tague said to them.

They found Horn in his room and took him into custody. He answered their questions honestly. He later explained to a U.S. intelligence agent,

I really did it for my country. I did not want to kill anyone. We wanted only to stop traffic of British supplies over that bridge. I would have done a better job but for the cold. I froze my fingers and my face and ears and I thought I would freeze to death before I made all my arrangements.

He pointed out he had planted the dynamite in enemy territory, since Canada was at war with Germany. That meant he’d committed an act of war. And the U.S. couldn’t have him extradited to Canada or Britain because it had declared neutrality.

The Canadians and the British wanted him extradited, but since America was neutral, Horn argued, he couldn’t be extradited for committing an act of war.

10 Years

Ross was at a loss. Feelings ran high against Horn on both sides of the river, and he feared a mob might gather and lynch the German. But he didn’t know what to do. The crime had happened in Canada, where he had no jurisdiction.

Nor had state or federal or authorities contacted him, just railroad police.

Finally, federal authorities got in touch with the Washington County sheriff, Ross’s boss. They told him to take Horn into custody for safekeeping in Machias. The sheriff said he didn’t have any grounds for arresting him. The feds told him to charge him with malicious destruction – those windows broken in Vanceboro.

A county court sentenced him to 30 days in jail. But Horn had also transported explosive by rail, which made him vulnerable to federal charges.

Dorchester Penitentiary

On March 2, 1915, he was charged with three counts of “the conveyance of explosives on passenger trains.” He was sentenced to 18 months in prison and sent to the U.S. Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta.

von Papen later admitted it hadn’t been his shining hour. “Not a particularly intelligent piece of work on my part,” he wrote.

Horn expected to go home after his release from prison. Instead, he was extradited to Canada, where he spent 10 years in Dorchester prison. Upon his final release, doctors certified him as insane.

Vanceboro Bridge

The Vanceboro Bridge has since been replaced.

Images Vanceboro Bridge today: By THE CENTER FOR LAND USE INTERPRETATION – http://www.clui.org/section/united-divide-a-linear-portrait-usacanada-border, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47474541. Washington County Jail By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28029643. Dorchester Penitentiary By Verne Equinox at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4230825. Werner Horn 1910 Bain News Service, P. (ca. 1910) Werner Horn. , ca. 1910. [Between and Ca. 1915] [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2014697286/. Horn and Ross By McAdam Senior Citizens Historical and Recreational Club (1979). The History of McAdam 1871-1977, p 180., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20059952.

With thanks to German Sabotage at Vanceboro 1915 by the St. Croix Historical Society and Burn, Bomb, Destroy: The German Sabotage Campaign in North America, 1914–1917 by Michael Digby.

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A Brief, Mostly Nonmusical History of Baked Beans

Do not mess with a New Englander over the proper way to cook baked beans. You soak them, you parboil them, you add a few things from the pantry and then you bake them for a very, very long time.

But within those limits you can find many variations, depending on where you live or where your family comes from. A church lady in Brewer, Maine, will use a different kind of bean than a fisherman Downeast. A Franco-American in Vermont won’t use the same sweetener as a Boston Irishman.

Massachusetts Baked Beans

How you cook your baked beans also varies with your latitude. The Penobscot people in Maine will probably tell you to cook your beans in a bean hole. But in Connecticut, Jacques Pepin prefers his oven.

History of Baked Beans

Food historians liked to quibble over the origin of baked beans. The traditional story has indigenous people teaching the Puritan settlers how to bake beans in an earthenware pot.

Then the Puritans, who wouldn’t work on the Sabbath, baked beans for Saturday night supper, along with brown bread. On Sunday morning the beans came out of the still-warm oven for a breakfast without toil.

Antique beanpots

Some food historians say they can find no direct evidence that indigenous people baked beans in earthenware pots. Kenneth Roberts, a Maine novelist with strong opinions about ketchup, argued against the legend of the baked bean. Instead, he said, baked beans had been a traditional Sabbath dish among North African and Spanish Jews.

Whatevs. Today the baked bean is unquestionably linked to Boston and the rest of New England, especially Maine. There they bake beans in a hole in the ground.

The baked bean tradition probably has to do with New England’s long winters back in the day. Game was scarce and fresh produce long gone. Dried beans helped keep people alive.

Three Sisters

The baked bean belongs to the Three Sisters of the indigenous tribes of the Northeast: corn, beans and squash. Together they provide unequaled nutrition and soil enrichment.

Three Sisters

Along with corn and squash, baked beans contain all nine amino acids, complex carbohydrates, fatty acids, protein and Vitamin A.

Today, baked beans have a side benefit, especially when oil prices rise. They keep drafty New England kitchens warm on a winter day.

Beantown

Baked beans are the reason Boston is called Beantown. They’re the reason four college hockey teams compete in an annual tournament called the Beanpot. And they’re why a tourist slogan from the 1920s claimed, “You don’t know beans until you’ve bean to Boston.”

An old bit of doggerel goes:

And this is good old Boston,

The home of the bean and the cod,

Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots,

And the Cabots talk only to God.

The Boston version of the baked bean uses molasses, as the city was the epicenter of molasses (and rum) production in the United States. Bostonians bake their beans in a beanpot, once sold as souvenirs. They prefer the Navy bean to the yellow eye or the kidney. On June 23, 1993, the Massachusetts General Court determined the Navy bean had been the original bean in the venerable Boston Baked Bean recipe. Thus the baked Navy bean became the official Massachusetts State Bean.

Wayne Turner holds the Beanpot, 1980

See below for a recipe from Boston’s venerable, but now defunct, Durgin Park restaurant.

Baked Beans with Syrup

The farther north from Boston you go, the more likely you are to find your baked beans sweetened with maple syrup. In Hopkinton, N.H., you can actually get baked beans at Breakwind Farm. Breakwind makes traditional beans with molasses, maple syrup, onions and garlic. It also makes a version with Kombu (edible kelp), but takes it out after boiling to reduce the gas. Those beans come with a catchy slogan: “No more need to avoid beans before weddings and long flights!”

Vermonters have their own version of the baked bean. It uses bacon instead of salt pork and maple syrup instead of molasses.

Maine Baked Beans

Tread carefully when discussing baked beans with an old-school Mainer. Do not even suggest baking beans with other than State of Maine beans, made by the Kennebec Bean Company in North Vassalboro.

Mainers prefer the bean-hole bean, cooked over hot coals in a hole in the ground (seriously). That’s the way the Penobscot people did it back in the day. Adding bear fat and maple syrup used to make for a sublime winter dish.

Today churches hold bean-hole dinners as fund raisers and the Common Ground Fair has one going in August.

Beans were ideal sources of protein for hungry lumberjacks, and every Maine lumber camp featured a bean hole.

Breakfast at a Maine lumber camp in 1943, They also get pancakes, syrup, scrambled eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, biscuits, molasses cookies, gingerbread, pie, coffee, bread and butter.

According to the Maine Folklife Center,

In the logging camps, beans were served at every meal. The bean hole is a stone-lined pit in which a fire is built until a good bed of coals forms. A cast iron bean pot (holds about eleven pounds of dried beans) is lowered into the pit, covered over with dirt and allowed to cook, usually overnight. Several bean pits could keep beans cooking at all times.

Regional Preferences

But which beans? Depends on where you live. According to the Folklife Center, Yellow-Eye beans, with a clean, mild flavor, rank No. 1 in Maine. But certain places have certain preferences. In Lewiston they prefer the white Navy bean, but the Jacob’s Cattle bean is the one for people just west of Fryeburg and North Conway.

You’ll find the old Marafax bean – dense, chewy and flavorful — Downeast in Jonesport and Addison. St. Joseph Church in Brewer prefers the Pea bean, though Brewer itself is Sulphur, or China, bean territory.

Opinions are strongly divided, however, on the addition of baking soda to cut down on the musicality of the fruit. Some say it ruins the taste; others say it doesn’t, and it’s definitely worth it.

The Tragedy of B & M Beans

Portland’s B & M Baked Beans for a century slow-cooked baked beans in brick ovens, the way they’re supposed to cook. Tragically, the parent company sold the factory in 2021 and moved production to the Midwest. A nonprofit planned to turn the iconic factory into a digital life sciences center. B & M Baked Beans’ 86 employees had to find new jobs. The plant manager in August 2021 said he thought manufacturing in Maine would be excited to have employees of that caliber. (If they can find manufacturing in Maine or anywhere else in the U.S. for that matter.)

What To Eat With Them

In Boston, baked beans go with brown bread, made from rye or whole wheat, corn meal, molasses and raisins. It’s ok to steam it in a can, but it is not ok to steam beans in a can the way a certain company whose name rhymes with mines does.

Rhode Islanders eat baked beans with johnnycake – fried pancakes made from ground corn. You can still buy stone-ground corn meal in Usquepaug , R.I., from the Kenyon Corn Meal Co. They grind it in a mill that dates to the early 1700s.

If in doubt, there’s always the frankfurter.

Traditional Boston Baked Beans

Here’s the Durgin Park recipe for Boston Baked Beans.

Durgin Park 2009

1 lb dried Navy beans
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
½ lb salt pork
1⁄2 medium onion (peeled and uncut)
4 tablespoons sugar
1⁄3 cup molasses
1 teaspoon dry mustard
1 teaspoon salt

Soak beans overnight.

Preheat oven to 325°. Place the baking soda in a Dutch oven and fill halfway with water.

Bring to a boil, add the beans and boil for 10 minutes.

Drain beans in a colander and run cold water through them. Set aside.

Dice the salt pork.

Put half of the salt pork on the bottom of the bean pot, along with the onion.

Put the beans in the pot.

Then put the remaining salt pork on top of the beans.

Mix the sugar, molasses, mustard, salt and pepper with 3 cups of hot water and pour over the beans.

Cover pot with lid and place the pot into the preheated oven.

Bake for six hours.

Check pot periodically to make sure the amount of liquid is okay.

Add water to the beans slowly as needed to keep them moist; DO NOT FLOOD THEM.

Remove the pot from the oven and serve.

Images: Baked beans By Victorgrigas – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23943506. 1980 Beanpot By Nusportsinfo – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5677874. Beanpot: By FiveRings at en.wikipedia – self-made, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16968646. Lumberjacks: Collier, J., photographer. (1943) United States Maine, 1943. May. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017855691/. Three Sisters By Garlan Miles – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=97241939. Durgin Park By Pmcyclist – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6655738.

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