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Maine

The Penny Loafer: A Brief But Surprising History

The penny loafer may epitomize preppy New England style — after all, John F. Kennedy wore penny loafers on the golf course. And John Cheever, chronicler of New England preppy angst, was known for his wrinkled khakis, blue-and-white striped Brooks Brothers shirt and Size 6 penny loafers.

But the penny loafer didn’t originate in New England.

Nonetheless, New England played an important role in the development of the penny loafer, in large part because of its long shoemaking tradition.

New England as Shoe Capital

The region’s indigenous people made moccasins by hand for centuries. They also provided the design inspiration for the penny loafer (more about that in a bit). Nine years after the Pilgrims landed, a cordwainer arrived to make shoes for the colonists.

Shoemaking then grew as a cottage industry in New England. Farmers, like John Adams’ father, often made shoes as a side hustle. Full-time cordwainers made shoes at home or in small workshops called ten-footers that dotted New England towns. Randolph, Brockton, Brookfield, Lynn and, later, Natick became early centers of the shoe industry in Massachusetts.

Eventually, demand for shoes grew. Employers introduced sewing machines and centralized production in factories. By 1850, Lynn alone produced 4.5 million shoes a year, and Massachusetts had 50,000 journeymen shoe workers.

The transition to factory work did not go smoothly. On Washington’s Birthday in 1860, some 20,000 shoemakers went on strike in 25 New England shoe towns. New England shoemakers strike of 1860 resulted in wage hikes for men and some union recognition.

Shoe workers march

The Teser, Precursor to the Penny Loafer

The penny loafer has other roots in the fjords of Norway. Norwegian peasants traditionally wore a slip-on shoe called a teser. In a small western Norwegian town called Aurland, they were popular among fishermen and farmers.

A Norwegian bridegroom wearing tesers.

Sometime in the 1890s an Aurlander named Nils Tveranger decided to go into cordwaining. He went to the obvious place for an apprenticeship: Boston. There he met the indigenous moccasin, which inspired him to design the loafer. It’s the gathered toe stitch that marks the Native American influence on the penny loafer.

Tveranger then returned to Aurland and started making shoes. Eventually, 13 shoe factories grew up in the tiny town.

Shoemaking in Aurland

Aurland happens to have world-class salmon fishing, which attracted upper-class American and English sportsmen between World War I and World War II. They admired Tveranger’s slip-on footwear, and started bringing them back to England.

Mountains and fjords in Aurland

It wasn’t a penny loafer yet, though.

Birth of the Penny Loafer

The Aurland shoe migrated to Europe’s upper-crust neighborhoods and stylish American watering holes. Eventually a sharp-eyed reporter for a new men’s magazine called Esquire noticed the Aurland shoe. It isn’t clear where he spotted the shoe; according to one version, he saw it in Palm Beach. According to another, he spotted it in the European cafes of the Lost Generation. Maybe both. Whatever the case, representatives from Esquire and from a tony New York men’s store, Rogers, Peet, met with John Bass, president of G.H. Bass, a Wilton, Maine, bootmaker.

They tried to persuade him to make the . Bass didn’t think the Norwegian peasant shoe it would sell. He later said, “I didn’t think this type would go over, for it looked like a house slipper to be worn outdoors.”

It caught on

Bass, however, succumbed, and went along with the Esquire and Rogers, Peet people. The company added the strip across the upper with the slot for the penny.

Bass called the shoe Bass Weejuns (for Nor-weejun). The loafer ended up a huge hit among the leisure class. Then after World War II it migrated to college campuses in a big way, where it joined khaki pants and blue blazer in the preppy pantheon of style.

However, the penny loafer went beyond New England, both in the manufacture and in the wearing. Such nonpreppies as James Dean, Elvis Presley, David Hockney and Elton John wore penny loafers (the latter chose a two-toned version from Prada).

The Penny Loafer Gets the Penny

No one knows for sure how or why people started putting coins in their footwear. Some say they did it so they’d always have change for the pay phone. Eventually the copper penny became more aesthetically acceptable than the silver nickel or dime. Or maybe it was just a luck thing.

Today, the penny would prove problematic for air travelers, as it might alarm the magnetometer at security. Plus, pay phones don’t exist anymore.

In 1998, Bass stopped making Weejuns or any other kind of shoe in the United States after 122 years. Bass’s parent company, Phillips-Van Heusen Corp., shut down the Maine factory and sent 350 jobs to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

You can still buy penny loafers from the fjords of Norway. Aurlands shoe company sells a line of them for an average of $400 a pair. But they’ll ship for free.

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President Kennedy was one of six New Englanders who lived in the White House. Learn what life was like for them in the Executive Mansion, and what they liked to eat. With 30 recipes. Available in paperback and as an ebook from Amazon. Click here.

Images: Images: Aurland mountain and fjords By Aconcagua – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1020902. Penny loafer by Robert Sheie via Flickr CC By 2.0

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The Roosevelt Cottage on FDR’s Beloved Campobello

Just northeast of the easternmost tip of the United States, across a bridge and past the Canadian border guards, you’ll find a quiet, picturesque island with a rugged coast, a handful of lighthouses and a 34-room summer cottage reeking with history. Campobello is an island in the Bay of Fundy, nine miles long and three miles wide. For decades, Franklin Delano Roosevelt spent summers on his beloved island. Today. a visit to his summer home transports you to the time and place where a wealthy future president relaxed, recharged and nearly died.

Head Harbor Light on Campobello

Campobello

His wealthy parents first brought him there when he was teething. The island at the time hosted wealthy East Coast rusticators seeking cool air and nature. Young Franklin learned to love the sea at Campobello. His father gave him a 21-foot sailboat, and Franklin treasured the time they spent sailing together.

Young Franklin Roosevelt in the canoe made by Tomah Joseph

His father also hired a Passamaquoddy chief, Tomah Joseph, to teach him how to paddle a canoe. Joseph made Roosevelt a birchbark canoe and taught him about his tribe’s history and culture.

The Roosevelts returned to Campobello every summer.

Franklin married Eleanor in 1905, when he was 24 and she 21. After they had the first of their two children, Franklin’s domineering mother gave them the sprawling cottage on Campobello Island. Eleanor brought the children there every summer; Franklin came when his political career allowed him the time.

They added a wing in 1910, bringing the total number of rooms to 34, including 18 bedrooms. It had neither electricity nor a telephone. But the house is light and airy, open to the outdoors with verandas that face the ocean.

View from the Roosevelt cottage

Paralysis

Franklin ran for vice president of the United States in 1920 and lost. He then practiced law in New York City. That gave him the freedom in 1921 to vacation with his family at Campobello for the first time in years. One day in August he spent the day sailing. That night he skipped dinner saying he felt ill and went to bed.

The dining room

He had contracted a paralytic illness, possibly polio. The next day his leg felt weak, by the next, both legs were paralyzed. He suffered chills, fever and excruciating pain. Eleanor nursed him in his bedroom, probably saving his life.

A month later he left Campobello on a canvas stretcher, clutching his little terrier, Duffy. He was lifted through the window of a trin and taken to New York where a hospital would treat him for polio. His promising political career seemed to have lost its promise.

Twelve years later, in June 1933, Roosevelt returned to Campobello aboard a presidential yacht. Dozens of small craft, sardine carriers, fishing vessels, naval destroyers and Coast Guard cutters greeted him at Friars Head with pageantry and a parade. There were pennants and buntings and Scottish pipers and a military band.

FDR on his first return to Campobello as president.

He only returned twice after that.

The Roosevelt Cottage

Franklin died in 1945. The family continued to use the house until 1952, when Eleanor sold it to industrialist Armand Hammer. When Eleanor died in 1962, Hammer deeded the property to the governments of the U.S. and Canada. In 1964, they created a 2,800-acre International Park, the only park in the world owned by two countries.

Today, the park includes four other cottages from the same era. It also includes carriage roads and hiking trails to beaches, bogs, forests and ocean headlands.

The cottage interior

The Roosevelt cottage, completed in 1897, was designed by Willard Sears, a New England architect who also designed what is now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown and the Stone Chapel at Phillips Andover Academy. Roosevelt’s mother bought it from its first owner, Mrs. Hartman Kuhn, who liked Eleanor. Kuhn made Sara Roosevelt promise to give it to Franklin and Eleanor.

Campobello Island

There’s more to the island than the Franklin Roosevelt’s summer cottage and the park. Country roads wind through the picturesque island, past beaches, rocky headlands and lighthouses: Mulholland Lighthouse (visible from Lubec), Friar’s Head, Raccoon Beach, Liberty Point and Head Harbour Light Station. Welshpool, an old fishing village, has accommodations and restaurants. About a thousand people live on the island.

Five Things You’ll Remember From Your Visit to Campobello

Canoe

Tomah Joseph’s birchbark canoe hangs from the ceiling of the visitor center, an impressive sight. The visitor center also offers exhibits about Franklin Roosevelt, a video and a gift shop.

Bay Window

Light and air fill the house, which opens to the outdoors with a veranda overlooking the bay. The large bay window in the main room overlooks the grounds sloping to the Bay of Fundy. It’s a spectacular view. You may see seals or whales.

The main room of the cottage with the original wicker furniture, very much in the syle of the day.

Bed

When Franklin was stricken, Eleanor nursed him in their marital bed. They didn’t have California kings in those days. Given that he was over six feet tall and she was almost as tall as he was, it’s hard to imagine how they ever got a good night’s sleep when he was well. While nursing Franklin, Eleanor slept on the window seat in the room and Roosevelt’s political advisor, Louis Howe, slept in the next room.

Family Photos

Roosevelt family memorabilia fills the house, though much of the furniture didn’t belong to them. Franklin’s marine paintings, sailboat models and two of Tomah Joseph’s works of art give a sense of the people who lived there. But the photographs also reveal some Roosevelt family dysfunction. Eleanor, for example, always turned away from the camera, and the children often look unhappy. Franklin’s mother, right in the center, stares straight at the photographer. Docents at the cottage bring their own interpretation to the Roosevelt family dynamics.

Children’s Toys

With no electricity in the house, the children had to make their own entertainment. The playroom has some of their artifacts: a fishing rod, toys, games, model building tools and a ship model. The Secret Service used the room when Roosevelt visited as president (the children had grown up by then).

To Visit Campobello

The cottage and visitors center are open from the last Sunday in May through the second week of October. The grounds and trails remain open year round. Admission to the park and the cottage costs nothing. Tea With Eleanor gets high marks from reviewers. Two docents recount the First Lady’s life over tea and cookies that Eleanor would have served.

You can get to Campobello by car over the bridge from Lubec, a Maine fishing village, or by ferry from Eastport. From Canada, take a ferry from mainland New Brunswick to Deer Island, and then a second ferry to Campobello Island.

Bring your passport. And a sweater. Don’t expect crowds.

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Now available in paperback. Click here to order your copy from Amazon.

Images: Exterior shot: By New Brunswick Tourism – Roosevelt Campobello International Park / Parc international Roosevelt de Campobello, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43694472. Dining room: By David Wilson from Oak Park, Illinois, USA – 20020714 10 Dining Room at Roosevelt Home Campobello Island, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43694449. Bookshelf By btwashburn from Belmont – Roosevelt Cottage, Campobello Island, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43694549. Main room By btwashburn from Belmont – Main room, Roosevelt Cottage, Campobello Island, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43717478. Sailing to Campobello By FDR Presidential Library & Museum – 47-96 1214, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43717612. Head Harbor Light By Skeezix1000 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4412784. View from Roosevelt Cottage by Ron Cogswell via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

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Sally Wood, Maine’s First Novelist

Sally (Sarah) Sayward Barrell Keating Wood (1759-1855) was not only the first Maine novelist, but also the first American female gothic fiction writer. She wrote four novels, one collection of tales, and some unpublished works.
Sally Wood was born in York, Maine, on Oct. 1, 1759 to Sarah (Sayward) and Nathaniel Barrell. Raised in the home of her grandfather, Judge Jonathan Sayward, she had an aristocratic upbringing. She married Richard Keating, a clerk for her grandfather, in 1778. They had three children – Elizabeth, Sally, and Richard Jr. After her husband died in 1783 from a fever, she found writing to be therapeutic in her spare time.

Sally Wood, Novelist

She wrote all four of her novels in a short period between 1800 and 1804. The first novel: Julia, and the Illuminated Baron appeared in 1800; Dorval, or the Speculator in 1801; Amelia; or, the Influence of Virtue in 1802; and Ferdinand and Elmira: a Russian Story in 1804. Choosing anonymity, Wood authored three of them “By a Lady of Massachusetts” (as Maine still belonged to that state), but signed Dorval simply as “By a Lady.” Three of the novels were published in Portsmouth, N.H., while Dorval was printed in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Barrell Homestead in York, Maine.

Her novels generally involved adventurous tales with gothic elements, seduction and the triumph of virtuous women over villainous men. For example, in Julia, the honorable heroine is kidnapped and taken to a ruined castle by a corrupt baron bent on seduction. But then her lover saves her.

Finding a New Theme

In 1804 Sally Keating published her last novel and also married Gen. Abiel Wood of Wiscassett, Maine. They resided there until his death in 1811. Sometime later she moved to Portland, Maine. Known there as Madam Wood, she wrote the first of a two-volume work called Tales of the Night. Published in Portland in 1827, she used the pseudonym “A Lady of Maine.” It encompasses two stories: “Storms and Sunshine; or the House on the Hill” and “The Hermitage, or Rise of Fortune.” Both tales are unlike her previous novels with their mostly European settings and virtuous heroines in gothic adventures. Instead both narratives are centered around undramatic lives in New England involving a family returning for an inheritance (“Sunshine”) and a woman married to an older man (“Hermitage”). She presumably destroyed the manuscript of the second volume, after reading the fictional works of Sir Walter Scott.
A short unpublished manuscript — War, the Parent of Domestic Calamity: A Tale of the Revolution — also exists based on letters about her youth and family traditions. A poem of hers is housed in the Old Gaol Museum in York, Maine.

The Old York Gaol, York, Maine

Sally Wood spent the last years of her life in Kennebunk, Maine. She died there on Jan. 6, 1855.

Edward T. Howe, Ph.D., is Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at Siena College near Albany, N.Y.

Images: Old York Gaol by By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59423780. Barrell Homestead By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52361191.

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The Boyhood Home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If ever there was a man born with a silver spoon in his mouth, it was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Yet far from using his birthright as a ticket to a dissolute life, Longfellow combined his family connections and his exceptional intellect to become the most famous poet in the world.

Longfellow’s career began in Portland, Maine (Massachusetts at the time) where he grew up in a house originally built in 1785-1786 for his maternal grandfather, Revolutionary War general Peleg Wadsworth. The house was built in a neoclassical style of brick, one of the earliest brick structures in Maine. Originally the house had two stories, but a third story was added after a fire in 1814. That made it big enough to accommodate the large family. At times as many as 12 people lived in the house.

The Wadsworth family can trace its roots in America to the Mayflower. The Longfellow family, meanwhile, traced its roots to England via William, Henry’s great-great grandfather. He was a soldier who came to Nova Scotia as part of a British military force. Henry’s grandfather served as a judge and his father a congressman.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

These two families came together in the marriage of Stephen Longfellow and Zilpah Wadsworth, who in 1807 would take up residence in the Wadsworth home at 489 Congress Street in Portland. Henry was eight months old then. He would live there until he left for Bowdoin College at 14, and he would call it home for 35 years. Henry mastered three foreign languages and returned to Bowdoin, after touring Europe, to teach. He would later take a position at Harvard College until he gave up teaching and turned his attention to writing full time.

The house played an important role in shaping Longfellow’s life. In the house he first got the notion to make writing his profession, rather than law or medicine or business. His father did not fully support his plan, given the unlikelihood that he could support himself as a writer.

Longfellow would prove his father’s doubts wrong, and by no small measure. He became the best known poet in the English-speaking world in his lifetime, writing works such as “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “The Song of Hiawatha” and “Evangeline.”

People of all walks of life appreciated Longfellow’s work. When he was in his sixties in 1868, Queen Victoria received him. The queen was surprised to see her servants clamoring for a glimpse of him.

Longfellow died in 1882 and lived most of his adult life in Cambridge, Mass. But his childhood home in Maine retained a place in his heart, and he visited regularly until the year before he died.

Anne Longfellow Pierce, Henry’s sister, preserved the family home in much the state it was in when Peleg Wadsworth had lived in it. In her will, she bequeathed the house, land and many furnishings to the Maine Historical Society upon her death in 1901. The society has operated it as a museum ever since. A visit takes you on a remarkable trip back in time to the early days of Maine and Longfellow’s life.

Rear of the Wadsworth-Longfellow house shown from the garden.

Five Things You’ll Never Forget if you Visit

The Pitcher in the Summer Dining Room

On one shelf in the summer dining room rests a blue-and-white pitcher made around 1800 in memory of George Washington. The pitcher was used to serve lemonade each year on the Fourth of July. It has sat on the shelf for well over 100 years.

The summer dining room

The Waiting Room

For about 10 years beginning in 1815, Stephen Longfellow operated his law office in the house’s front sitting room. A new side entrance and vestibule were built as a sitting room for clients. It was a place Henry often used to study and write. He was not happy when the family remodeled the room to make it a china closet after his father moved his law office out of the house.

Childhood Desk of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The second-story back bedroom contains a number of items from the Longfellow children’s day, including a pine child’s desk, worn and scribbled with graffiti, that dates to the school years of the Longfellow children.

Handprints in the Hall

In the rear hallway of the house, the plaster bears one of the most tangible reminders of the Wadsworth children. On the wall you can see the handprint in the plaster and the inscription “Eliza Wads-worth.” It belongs to Zilpah’s sister who died at the age of 22. Elizabeth Wadsworth not only was a favorite of Zilpah, who nursed her through her young life, but she was also thought to be betrothed to Stephen Longfellow. She died, however, before they married. It was after Elizabeth’s death that Zilpah and Stephen would marry.

Zilpah’s Wallpaper

Zilpah’s chamber on the second floor was a room that Henry’s mother spent many hours in. While much of the mansion is typical of what you might expect of an old New England home, Zilpah’s room reflects her colorful tastes, especially on the wall. The bright blue French wallpaper features a trellis and floral design that look very un-New England.

Visiting the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Childhood Home

The Wadsworth-Longfellow House is open for tours May through October. Information about the house is available at its website.

Summer dining room image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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Katahdin, The Mountain With Its Own Special Butterfly

Mount Katahdin rises from the wildest part of the Maine wilderness, and to those who climb to its peak it inspires awe and a sense of mysticism. At its pinnacle, Katahdin is only the 22^nd highest in America, but National Geographic named it the country’s second best summit hike. Not because of its height or difficulty, but because it’s “the most inspiring peak in all of eastern North America.”

After Henry David Thoreau scaled Katahdin in 1846, he wrote, “Nature here was something savage and awful, though beautiful. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandshelled globe…. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever.”

Katahdin by Frederick Church

The tableland above Katahdin’s treeline has a tundra climate, with patches of moss and lichens and small shrubs covering barren rock. A rare insect, the Katahdin arctic butterfly, lives above the mountain’s treeline and nowhere else.

Katahdin anchors Baxter State Park, 200,000 acres, or about 300 square miles of mountains, lakes, streams, ponds, waterfalls and forest. The mountain ends the Appalachian Trail. It also has a potato, two U.S. Navy destroyers, a piano sonata and a sheep named after it.

Here are seven more fun facts about Katahdin.

1. To call it Mount Katahdin is redundant.

Kathadin means “Greatest Mountain” in the Penobscot Language. So calling it Mount Katahdin is like calling it Mount Great Mountain.

For the Penobscot, Katahdin represents the beginning of life and enlightenment. They believed an evil spirit named Pamola lived on the summit. If they climbed to the top, Pamola would kill or eat them.

Mount Katahdin

2. The Katahdin Arctic Butterfly was the first invertebrate placed on the Endangered Species List.

It’s endangered because of rising temperatures. And because people like to collect it.

On Aug. 1, 1995, U.S. District Court Judge James Ware sentenced two people convicted of poaching the Katahdin Arctic Butterfly from Baxter State Park. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had gone after the poachers for three years. But as early as 1939, the park’s manager expressed concern about “the extent and rate of amateur and scientific collection on Katahdin.”

The Peterson Field Guide to Butterflies in 1951 included a photo of the Katahdin tableland with specifications for reaching the “famous collecting ground.” (That changed for the better.)

Katahdin Arctic Butterfly (illustration)

In the 1990s, government investigators caught the poachers with 2,375 butterflies, 13 (including the Katahdin Arctic Butterfly) protected by the Endangered Species Act. They uncovered a network of collectors ranging from Mexico, Germany, the Czech and Slovak Republic, Canada, France, Spain, Italy, Australia, Japan, Brazil and the UK and many U.S. states.

The poachers faced a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for violating the U.S. Lacey Act and the Endangered Species Act of 1973. The judge’s most severe sentence, however, amounted to five months in prison, a $3,000 fine and five months in a halfway house.

The endangered American pipit and the threatened northern bog lemming also live on Katahdin.

3. When a 12-year-old boy got lost – and found – on Katahdin in 1939, his story became a children’s classic.

Donn Fendler of Rye, N.Y., went camping with his family on the mountain in July of 1939. It can still get cold in Maine even in July, and especially on top of a mountain. Fendler got separated from his family as they neared the peak and it was, in his words, “cold and shivery.”

The hunt for the missing boy turned into front page news across the United States. Hundreds of volunteers helped look for him. He survived for nine days eating berries, praying and refusing to give up, he said.

Donn Fendler, 12, of Rye, N.Y., is shown with the sack which he used as a sleeping bag while he wandered for eight days in the wilds of Maine. A Boy Scout, Donn used to good advantage, the wood-lore taught in the organization. Donn disappeared near the shrouded summit on Mount Katahdin. The boy was found by campers at Stacyville, Maine, July 16, 1939, 35 miles from the point where he became lost 8 days earlier. (AP Photo)

Finally he came to a hunting camp 35 miles from the place he’d gotten separated from his family. He’d lost 16 pounds, lost most of his clothing and suffered dehydration. Insect bites covered his body.

He said he remembered his lesson from Boy Scouts: Follow streams downhill and cover yourself at night. He used a burlap sack.

President Franklin Roosevelt gave him the Army & Navy Legion of Valor for outstanding youth hero of 1939.

IN 1976, Fendler then wrote a book, Lost On A Mountain In Maine, which became a children’s classic.

On July 25, 2014, the 75th anniversary of the day Fendler was finally found, Maine celebrated “Donn Fendler Day.” He was 87 years old.

Fendler lived for a couple more years, dying in 2016 in Bangor, Maine.

4. Preserving Katahdin’s wildness became an obsession for the heir to a canning fortune.

James Phinney Baxter, a pioneer in the canning industry, founded the Portland Packing Company and served as mayor of Portland for six terms.. His son, Percival Baxter. inherited the bulk of the family wealth even though he had seven siblings.

Percival Baxter and his Irish setter, Garry Owen.

He also inherited his father’s political legacy. Percival won election to the state House and then Senate. Along the way he developed a passion for wilderness conservation. He grew obsessed with preserving Katahdin.

When Gov. Frederick Hale Parkhurst died, Baxter, then Maine Senate president, took his place as governor. But it wasn’t until he was out of office that he began using his own money to buy Katahdin and the surrounding land from the paper companies. He spent 30 years doing it.

Baxter fought against turning his land into a national park because he thought the federal government would spoil it with touristy concessions. He wanted Katahdin and its environs to remain forever wild. He dreamt of a park with no roads, no snowmobiles and no hunting. Baxter lost on all three counts, but he did manage to keep the park out of the hands of state and federal governments. The Baxter State Park Authority owns and operates Baxter State Park.

The park has no gas stations, no stores, no electricity and no paved roads. Headquarters is in Millinocket.

“Man is born to die, his work short lived; buildings crumble, monuments decay, wealth vanishes, but Katahdin, in all its glory, shall forever remain the mountain of the people of Maine,” wrote Baxter. “Throughout the ages it will stand as an inspiration to the men and women of the state.”

5. Bambi (the cartoon) lived in the Katahdin region.

When Walt Disney told his artists to model Bambi on a California mule deer, animator Jake Day insisted the real Bambi had to come from Maine.

Maurice ‘Jake’ Day, a Damariscotta, Maine, native, was one of Disney’s earliest and best known animators and an avid outdoorsman. When Disney said he wanted that mule deer, Day would have none of it. He said Bambi had to be a white-tailed deer from Maine.

Still from the trailer of Bambi

So Disney sent him to Maine with his camera, his backpack and a friend. They spent months shooting more than thousand photos of Bambi country in the Mount Katahdin region.

Disney had given Jake Day a list of things he wanted photographed. The list included hazel nuts, marsh grass, oak leaves, pine cones, birch bark, low-bush and high-bush blueberries, red maple and speckled alder trees.

Jake Day shot trees glittering with ice, snowy beaver dams and trees charred by fire. He photographed the details of the forest floor: the lichen, leaves, ferns, pools, rotting logs, pitcher plants, autumn leaves, a bear cub’s footprints in the mud.

He helped arrange for two four-month-old Maine fawns to model Bambi and his sweetheart Faline. The fawns took a four-day train ride from Maine to Hollywood.

The public first saw the film in Portland, Maine. Jake Day got sick of California and moved back home to Maine, where he climbed Katahdin at the age of 75. He also designed the Baxter State Park logo.

Katahdin is not for the foolish or the faint of heart.

More than 60 people are known to have died on Katahdin since 1933. Every year the Park Authority reports an average of 40 rescues a year, which amounts to one in every 2,000 hikers. To avoid more loss of life, the park closes on October 15 and whenever it snows.

A book about those fatalities, Death on Katahdin, was released in 2018.

Mount Katahdin Maine First Snow by Marsden Hartley

In 1950, an 18-year-old camper was mistaken for a bear and shot to death; the shooter received a penalty of a $700 fine.

A cargo plane crew died in 1944 when their aircraft crashed into the side of Katahdin during poor weather conditions. Lightning struck three hikers and seven drowned. Between 1992 and 2014, two of the 19 fatalities on Katahdin resulted from suicide. The most common cause of death, though, is heart attack.

And two years after the book’s publication, two people died on Katahdin on consecutive days.

With thanks to: Butterfly Poaching for Profit in Baxter State Park, Maine, by Jean Hoekwater for Northeastern Naturalist, Vol. 4, No. 3 (1997). Images: View from Katahdin peak Famartin – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64403691

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Thomas Plant's LUCKNOW, now known as Castle in the Clouds

Thomas Plant Bets Big and Winds Up in a Castle in the Clouds

Thomas Plant did everything larger than life when it came to baseball, his shoe manufacturing empire and his castle.

Little evidence remains of his triumphs on the baseball diamond and in the shoe factory, but there is a castle in New Hampshire that became a lasting testament to his monumental life.

Born on October 5, 1859, in Bath, Maine to French Canadian parents, Plant had no formal education beyond eighth grade, but he did have a head for business and exceptional athletic ability. He was a tough, gifted baseball catcher in an age where the position was played without benefit of a mask or (often) even a glove. He played in an era where there was no formal, single major league. Teams were sponsored locally and played for a company, town or other affiliation.

Though the era of the superstar athlete was more than 100 years in the future, Plant nevertheless used his baseball skills to catapult himself to success. After working harvesting ice and at other trades, Plant settled on a vocation: the shoe industry. His biographers note his baseball ability may well explain his move to Lynn, Massachusetts, the shoe-making capital of the world, as companies sometimes recruited employee-athletes to bolster their sports teams.

In 1886, Plant became one of ten investors who pitched in $100 each to form the Lynn Union Cooperative Shoe Company. Tradition states that he raised his stake by betting on a baseball team that he managed. Over time, he would venture out on his own to start the Thomas G. Plant Shoe Company. The company history has its highs and lows. Over the years, workers suffered serious injuries that resulted in contentious lawsuits and at one point labor relations were so strained that the union workforce waged a boycott of the company until conditions and wages were improved.

Thomas G. Plant Shoe Company

At the same time, the company also was known for its innovations and progressive labor practices. At its Jamaica Plain facility (built in part to escape the powerful unions of Lynn), Plant implemented color-coded uniforms for his workers to aid in efficiency and built ramps so that employees who had to move about the factory could use roller-skates to be more productive. The plant also paid higher wages than others and provided gymnasium facilities and a library to facilitate worker self-improvement. At its peak, the facility was the largest shoe factory in the world with more than 4,000 employees. (It was destroyed by fire in 1976.)

Thomas Plant’s Personal History

Plant’s personal legacy was as complex as his professional one. In 1895, Plant married Caroline Griggs in one of Chicago’s best-attended society weddings of the season. Griggs was of Connecticut descent, and her father was a wealthy, self-made man like Plant. By this point, Plant’s shoe company was generating more than $1 million in annual sales. He had lived frugally, occupying a room in his brother’s home rather than building or buying his own. Plant had aspirations of joining Yankee society and his marriage to Griggs helped his cause when the couple relocated to Boston.

But the marriage was ill-fated. It officially landed on the rocks when Catherine learned that Thomas had a paramour ensconced in a luxurious apartment, possibly a woman he’d met from his factory. Caroline served Tom with notice of divorce proceedings and moved to Cohasset in 1910. For the next two years, the marriage made wonderful newspaper headlines, but it resisted repair. It ended finally when one morning Catherine came down for breakfast in Cohasset to find a check for $1 million in her napkin ring – the final divorce settlement (at least that’s the story that is told).

Thomas Plant Takes on the Trusts

While his marriage was unraveling, Plant’s business was also experiencing headwinds. The United Shoe Machinery Company was formed when six machine-makers joined together and created a virtual monopoly on shoe-making equipment. They convinced the government to place a tariff on foreign equipment while they began putting the shoe industry in a stranglehold. They wouldn’t sell their equipment. Rather, companies had to lease it and pay royalties on shoes produced on the machinery. And if a company used any other manufacturing equipment in a plant with United’s machinery, it was a violation of the lease and United could, and did, repossess its machines.

Thomas Plant was unhappy with United’s business model. He first tried to negotiate with the company, suggesting reduced royalties for companies that produced large quantities of shoes. United declined. So he next set about patenting his own equipment and working with other companies until he could assemble a complete manufacturing line using non-United machines. This touched off a lengthy period of litigation between United and Plant. As his marriage was disintegrating, Plant began negotiations to sell his company to United to end the dispute. Over a period of many months, the two sides negotiated a price and he sold.

Some said Plant intended to sell his equipment and factory to United all along. Others said he was beaten by the monopolistic United and the sale was a defeat. During the negotiations, Plant confided to one friend that he was tired of business, and all he wanted to do was find a place to retire to in peace.

Out with Caroline, In with Olive

The sale complete, Thomas Plant took a vacation in France. He met Olive Cornelia Dewey, who was 24 years younger than he. This put paid to Plant’s marriage as the divorce proceedings resumed and quickly settled once he returned. Plant next married Olive Dewey, and the two began the hunt for Plant’s dream retirement home. His niece had filled his head with stories about the natural beauty of the Ossipee Mountains in New Hampshire and he dispatched his brother and his secretary to begin buying up land.

While other wealthy industrialists chose Bar Harbor or Newport for their summer retreats, the Plants chose a beautiful mountain top in New Hampshire.

The acquisition of the 6,300-acre property did not go without a hitch, as some landowners did not wish to sell. In some cases, Plant paid exorbitant prices for parcels. In others, he resorted to bullying to get people to move. When he finally assembled all the acreage he wanted, work began in earnest on Ossipee Mountain Park.

Thomas Plant Builds His Castle

Architects were hired and fired, as were craftsmen and others. More than 1,000 workers set to work on the project. Work stopped in one early stage when a builder hired on more than 100 Italian craftsmen from Italy only to be told by Plant to fire them. The result was the workers took their foreman captive and only released him when Plant coughed up the pay he owed.

Bit by grinding bit, Plant’s army carved the road to the cliff on which the castle is built. Stables, outbuildings, and other facilities were constructed and pink granite was mined and incorporated into the building.
The 16-room, 10,000-square-foot mansion was completed in 1914, and they called it LUCKNOW, perhaps a reference to a Scottish Castle or perhaps a simple pun because people who went there were in luck.

As everything involving Plant, the house was complicated and unique. It featured a blend of architectural styles, including Arts and Crafts, Mission, and Colonial Revival, reflecting Tom and Olive’s eclectic tastes. Plant himself suggested there were Norwegian, Swiss and Japanese influences in its makeup.

Likewise, the furnishings reflected the couple’s tastes and interests. Tiffany glass skylights and furniture by Irving and Casson represented the current styles they favored. Timber and building materials from locales around the world were incorporated into the construction. Modern indoor plumbing, needle showers, up-to-date kitchen and modern phone system highlighted Thomas Plant’s love of technology.

A suit of armor sized for the diminutive Plant was displayed, as were Tom’s trophies for his horses and an art collection, including several pieces depicting Napoleon. Thomas stood somewhere between 5-feet and 5-feet, 4-inches, depending on what source you believe, and he had a fascination with Napoleon.

Though no longer part of the property, Thomas Plant also established the Bald Peak Colony Club to have a golf course where he could play with friends.

Thomas Plant Strikes Out

An advertisement offering Thomas Plant’s LUCKNOW for sale.

Through most of the 1920s, Olive and Thomas Plant entertained guests at LUCKNOW, encouraging them to swim in Lake Winnipesaukee, ride horseback on the 30 miles of trails, enjoy a round of golf or just take in the scenic views.

Unfortunately, Plant’s success in the shoe industry did not translate to success in investing. He was patently bad at that, investing in sugar and Russian bonds, among other failures, and over the years his bank accounts dwindled.

He tried to sell LUCKNOW in the 1920s. His ad for the estate noted that the property was not for someone looking for a bargain and only men of “wealth and high standing and repute” should inquire.

“LUCKNOW is a country home for a man of big thoughts and ideas who can enjoy big things in a big way; a man who wants to make it possible for his family to spend long, happy summers and autumns in the open, close to nature, where they can enjoy within the limits of their own property every conceivable healthful outdoor sport.” He was unsuccessful in finding such a man.

Plant ended his life deep in debt. His former business associate held a mortgage on the LUCKNOW property and held off foreclosing, letting the Plants stay at LUCKNOW until Thomas Plant died in 1941. Upon his death, his friends had to take up a collection to pay funeral expenses, and the estate was sold at auction to settle his debts.

After Plant died, the property passed through a number of hands until it opened to the public as the Castle in the Clouds.

If you visit Castle in the Clouds.

Today the grounds are open for tours and hiking and riding seasonally, and the property includes a restaurant. It is a favorite destination for leaf-peeping. The property is located in Moultonborough, N.H. and offers a number of tours and special events each season. It is owned by the non-profit Castle Preservation Society.

This article draws on many sources of information, including the wonderfully researched Tom Plant: The Making of a Franco-Amer. Entrepreneur, 1859-1941 by Barry H. Rodrigue and Thomas G. Plant Shoe Factory Fire by Walter H. Marx.

Photos: LUCKNOW by Fletcher – Own work CC BY-SA 4.0,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_in_the_Clouds#/media/File:Castle_in_the_Clouds.jpg

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