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Aroostook County

The Coldest Temperature Ever in Each New England State

New Hampshire poet Donald Hall’s grandmother once said, “Thirty below this morning. Seems like it might get cold.” It does get cold in New England, and the coldest temperature in the region was well below minus 30.

The good news about cold snaps in New England is that they don’t last long. “They have a tendency to be more short-lived than in other parts of the country,” wrote Gregory A. Zielinski and Barry D. Keim in New England Weather, New England Climate. Thus, “The socioeconomic impact is not as widespread or as great as in other parts of the country.” Still. “Heat waves and cold spells can be dramatic in New England,” concede the authors.

April may be the cruelest month, but January tends to be the coldest in New England. The coldest temperature in four of six New England states was recorded in January, and the other two close in late December and mid-February.

The January thaw provides some consolation during the bitter weeks of winter. It’s a climatic singularity — a climate event that happens every year at about the same time. The January thaw happens nearly every January, usually between the 21st and the 25th. Temperatures will rise from about January 22 to January 25 throughout the region.

“Snowy Night, Woodstock, Vt. Courtesy Library of Congress.

New England weather varies from the north to the south, andfrom the coast to the interior. The lowest temperature inland — in places like Caribou, Maine, Burlington, Vt., and Keene, N.H. — happen around January 17. In the south and along the coast — Hartford and Boston, for example — the coldest temperature happens around January 31.

The Lake Champlain region — northwestern Vermont — has the greatest daily variation in temperature in the country. Lowest temperatures vary day-to-day by as much as 10 degrees in January.

Here, then, are the places that recorded the coldest temperature in each New England state.

Connecticut’s Icebox

Norfolk, known as the “Icebox of Connecticut,” recorded the coldest official temperature in the state on Feb. 16, 1943. Unofficially, temperatures fell to 45 below zero in some northwest Connecticut towns. Subzero temperatures that night were also recorded in places as far south as Nantucket and New Haven.

“A chilly spot,” is how a New York Times reporter characterized the town in a Feb. 14, 1988 story. “It is the place where the snow is said to be deeper, the temperatures lower and the winters longer than elsewhere in Connecticut.” Norfolk also gets the most snow in Connecticut during an average year — 107 inches.

February 1943 was a frigid month throughout the Northeast, a time when World War II raged overseas. The government had just announced shoe rationing in order to make more leather available to the military. That spurred scare buying of apparel in early February. But then the Arctic cold that settled over the region put an end to the panic buying of clothing, the Times reported. The government, by the way, also rationed coal, the heating fuel used by most New Englanders.

Coldest Temperature in Maine

Hunting in winter is popular in Aroostook County.

The coldest cold in New England happens when high pressure in Canada pushes air from the North Pole into the region — the “Siberian Express.” It can drop temperatures well below zero for several nights and keep them below zero during the daytime.

The Siberian Express hit New England in January of 2009, a winter already colder than usual. On January 16 the thermometer read minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit in Clayton Lake, an unincorporated village in Aroostook County, Maine. That was two degrees colder than the coldest temperature ever recorded in Maine. So cold, in fact, that it triggered two meetings of the state’s Records Verification Committee.

The University of Maine’s Maine Climate News reported the committee brought together people from an alphabet soup of government agencies. They included the National Weather Service (NWS) in Caribou, the U.S. Geological Service (USGS) in Augusta, the Maine state climatologist, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Northeast Regional Climate Center (NRCC) in Ithaca, N.Y. and the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

An instrument at the Big Black River station for the USGS had recorded the Arctic temperature. The climatologists then challenged the reading and had several instruments tested. In the end, the Records Verification Committee unanimously voted to accept the minus 50 degree verdict.

Henry David Thoreau had written about another cold Friday in 1810, but that was before alphabet soup.

Coldest Temperature: The Bay State

Aerial view of Chester, Mass., 1905

On Super Bowl Sunday in 1984, the temperature plunged to a record minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit in Chester, Mass., a small town on the eastern edge of the Berkshires. Any Chester resident who braved the cold to attend a Super Bowl party that January 22^nd watched the Los Angeles Raiders beat the Washington Redskins, 38-9.

Chester also holds the distinction of being only one of three U.S. places that recorded the hottest and coldest temperature in its state. On Aug. 2, 1975, known as New England’s Hot Saturday, the mercury rose to 107 degrees Fahrenheit. (The other two are Millsboro, Del., and Warsaw, Mo.) That’s higher than the highest recorded temperatures in the Florida cities of Miami and Orlando.

Sargent’s Purchase (aka Mount Washington)

The White Mountains have a way of creating their own weather, and on Jan. 22, 1885, their highest peak, Mount Washington, came up with a doozy. The thermometer showed minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Mount Washington, not known for its balmy weather, has recorded temperatures as low as eight degrees Fahrenheit — in June.

Mount Washington from Intervale, N.H.

The mountain’s mean annual temperature is near 26 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Zielenski and Keim. They call it “the ultimate New England example of how elevation affects temperature.” Temperature decreases at a rate of 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit every thousand feet up. Mount Washington is 6,288 feet high. It also averages 254 inches of snow every year.

Mount Washington also set a record, since broken for the highest wind speed. On April 12, 1934, observers recorded a gust of 231 mph — and lived to tell about it.

Rhode Island’s Coldest Temperature

The United States had entered World War II just six weeks earlier when Richmond, R.I., experienced the state’s coldest temperature: minus 28 degrees Fahrenheit. It was January 17, 1942, the day after a German U-boat sank the tanker Coimbra off Long Island.

It figures that the warmest coldest temperature would happen in Rhode Island. The Ocean State, along with southern Connecticut, has a mean average temperature higher than the rest of New England.

Rhode Island has widely varying weather, from day to day and from season to season, according to the state meteorologist, Lenny Giuliano.

But Richmond lies a few miles inland in the southwest part of the state. “Southwestern Rhode Island, from four to 10 miles inland, exhibits a coolness not suggested by the nearness to the ocean,” Lenny Giuliano, state meteorologist, wrote.

Subzero temperatures happen rarely in Rhode Island — typically, one day a year or not at all along the coast and five per year in most of the interior. But in cold winters, the southwest part of the state can get as many as eight below-zero days a few miles in from the coast.

Cold Comfort in Vermont

The tiny town of Bloomfield, Vt., shared the coldest temperature ever in New England with Clayton Lake, Maine, 75 years earlier. On Dec. 30, 1933, the weather service reported temperatures of −50°F in the Northern Vermont town of about 400.

Prohibition had ended that month, which may have stopped the smuggling of booze across the line from Canada. Rum running wasn’t uncommon in those lean times, and the line houses along the border were a little over 20 miles away from Bloomfield.

So when Prohibition ended that December, Bloomfield residents could warm themselves with a shot of brandy – legally.

This story was updated in 2023.

Images: Mount Washington By Harvey Barrison – originally posted to Flickr as White Mountains_12 30 09_81, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10396490. Snowy Night Wolcott, M. P., photographer. (1940) Center of town. Woodstock, Vermont. “Snowy night”. United States Vermont Windsor County Woodstock, 1940. Mar. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017802584/..

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Six Historic Movie Sets in New England

So many New England places have served as historic movie sets that we found it hard to choose one for each state. Filmmakers over the years have set scenes in the mansions of Newport, along the colonial seaports and at college and prep school campuses – to name just a few.

Take, for example, the 1987 film Mystic Pizza. It features the Connecticut towns of Stonington, Mystic, New London, Pawcatuck, Groton, Watch Hill and Westerly, along with the Yale campus and Watch Hill and Westerly in Rhode Island.

The historic districts of Providence and Boston have starred in many, many films. Even Connecticut’s famous Glass House has been cited as the inspiration for the architecture in Batman vs. Superman.

We did manage, however, to come up with representative historic movie sets in each New England state. If you know of others, please include them in the comments section.

Mystic Seaport

Mystic Seaport, one of several historic movie sets used in Amistad

We decided to go with Amistad because of its historic theme. Amistad, of course, told the story of the slaves who rebelled aboard the ship of the same name. They went to trial and won their case with the help of John Quincy Adams.

Steven Spielberg used several historic movie setes for the 1997 film, including both the Massachusetts and Rhode Island statehouses, Mystic Seaport and several Newport, R.I., mansions.

Surprisingly, Amistad was the first film to use the seaport since the television movie A Man Without a Country 25 years earlier.

Acadia National Park

Though Pet Sematary didn’t have a historic theme, Acadia National Park provided a historic movie set

Acadia National Park serves as a historic movie set for Pet Sematary because the Antiquities Act protects it from development. The 1906 Act gives the president the right to create national monuments from federal lands, and Pet Sematary is one of a number of blockbuster movies shot on land protected by the Act.

Mainer Stephen King, appropriately, wrote the horror novel on which the 1989 film is based. The story about a haunted pet cemetery takes place in Ludlow, Maine, a real town in Aroostook County. But he actually shot the film in a number of Maine towns: Hancock, Bucksport, Ellsworth and Bangor.

The film boasts the tag line, “Sometimes dead is better,” and features a soundtrack by the Ramones.

The Crane Estate

The Crane Estate, used several times as a historic movie set

Witches of Eastwick, based on the novel by Boston North Shore resident John Updike, features the Crane Estate in Ipswich. David Adler designed the Tudor Revival mansion for the Robert Crane family on a 2,100-acre estate. The Trustees of Reservations now own the estate and offer public programs and beach access during the summer.

In the 1987 film, the Crane Estate is the home of the eccentric millionaire Daryl Van Horne, played by Jack Nicholson. Other historic movie sets in Witches include Abbot Hall in Marblehead and Milton Academy in Milton, both in Massachusetts.

The Crane Estate also served as a historic movie set for Flowers in the Attic (1987), Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009) and The Equalizer (2014).

Philips Exeter Academy

A view of Philips Exeter Academy

Philips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H., provided the historic movie set for A Separate Peace, the coming-of-age novel every Baby Boomer read in school. The 1972 film starring a 20-year-old Parker Stevenson took place during World War II.

John Knowles published the novel 15 years after attending Philips Exeter as a boarder from West Virginia. He fell in love with the place, later writing, “The great trees, the thick clinging ivy, the expanses of playing fields, the winding black-water river, the pure air all began to sort of intoxicate me.”

Historic Exeter, N.H., is also featured in the A Separate Peace, as is New Hampshire’s Salisbury Beach. The nearby towns of Portsmouth and Dover, N.H., also appeared in another sort of coming-of-age film: the 1962 production of Lolita.

A later made-for-TV version of A Separate Peace was filmed in Toronto, Canada.

The Blithewold Mansion

The Blithewold Mansion, used for weddings and historic movie sets

We already gave Amistad to Connecticut, so we decided to select Mr. North as Rhode Island’s historic movie set. Thornton Wilder wrote the novel on which the 1988 film is based. Mr. North starred Anthony Edwards, Robert Mitchum and Lauren Bacall.

When the main character arrives in Newport, R.I., rumors about his healing powers start to spread. Director Danny Huston filmed it not in Newport, but at The Blithewold Mansion in Bristol. Coal baron Augustus Van Sickle built the English manor-style house, which features 33 acres full of rare and unusual plantings. The nomination for the National Register of Historic Places describes Blithewold as having outstanding landscaping, gardens and arboretums. Popular for weddings, Blithewold is now run as a house museum.

If you’re wondering about which Newport mansions served as historic movie sets, the Colony House appeared in Amistad as the appellate court. Marble House served as Queen Isabella’s palace, and Rosecliff Mansion appeared as the White House dining room.

The University Green Historic District

UVM’s University Green

The University Green Historic District, a central part of the University of Vermont campus, stars as the historic movie set in What Lies Beneath. The horror film starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer has a stock plot. Claire Spencer, the wife of a university scientist, believes her lakeside Vermont home is haunted – or else she’s going mad.

The film features other Vermont locales, but the University Green is easily the most historic. It dates to 1801 and has some of the school’s oldest and most architecturally significant buildings surrounding it. The National Register of Historic Places added it to its list in 1976.

Images: Mystic Seaport, By Stan Shebs, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115477; Acadia By Chandra Hari – Wikimedia file, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64743138; Crane Estate, By Djmcrenn – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4520123; University Green of Vermont, By Mfwills – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8670114. This story about historic movie sets in New England was updated in 2022.

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The Little Canadas of New England

Dozens of Little Canadas have contributed a significant but often ignored part of the character and history of New England since the 19^th century.

Young millworkers from Manchester’s Little Canada, 1909. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

They’ve given us magnificent churches, Catholic hospitals and sports heroes like Springfield’s Leo Durocher and Woonsocket’s Nap LaJoie. They’ve produced writers like Annie Proulx, who comes from Norwich, Conn., and chefs like Emeril LaGasse, a native of Fall River.

People from the Little Canadas have toiled in textile and paper mills, defense factories and logging camps. They’ve sent politicians like Norm D’Amours from New Hampshire and Fernand St. Germain from Rhode Island to Congress.

Even today, New England’s Little Canadas celebrate midnight Mass at Christmas with pancakes afterward and serve poutine – French fries, gravy and cheese curds – in restaurants and social clubs.

Leo Durocher

Creating Little Canadas

By 1990, Massachusetts had the highest number of Franco-Americans in the United States, with 310,636 – and nearly half of all Franco-Americans in New England. New Hampshire ranked fifth, with 118,857, Connecticut sixth with 110,426 and Maine eighth with 110,209. French speakers comprise at least 14 percent of the residents of Coos County in New Hampshire and Androscoggin and Aroostook counties in Maine.

They didn’t all come at once. Some were expelled by the British in the Great Roundup of 1755. Some fled the fighting between the French and British in the Patriots Rebellion of 1837.

In the 19^th century, most French Canadians who left for New England’s Little Canadas were young adults fleeing poverty, unemployment and backbreaking toil on subsistence farms.

Between 1840 and 1930, about 900,000 French-speaking Canadians left Québec to work in New England’s factories, mills, potato fields and logging camps. The mythical figure Paul Bunyan was a Franco-American ( ‘Bunyan’ is similar to the Québécois phrase “bon yenne!“).

By 1850, most Franco-Americans lived in Vermont, named from the French words vert mont, or green mountain. The state’s most famous Franco-American export was the wildly popular singer and actor, Rudy Vallee, born in Island Pond. Even today, 26 percent of the residents of Canaan, Vt., speak French.

Work

By 1860, another 18,000 Canadian immigrants moved to New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. This time, the economic boom after the Civil War attracted waves of French Canadians. They came to the huge textile mills in Lewiston, Maine, in Woonsocket, R.I., in Berlin and Manchester, N.H., and in Lowell, Worcester, Holyoke, New Bedford and Fall River, Mass. They were the only major ethnic group to arrive in the United States by train.

Wife and children of a poor French-Canadian potato farmer in the St. John Valley, 1940. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Wife and children of a poor Franco-American potato farmer in the St. John Valley, 1940. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

By 1875, Quebec started luring its young people back by offering them free land. As many as half returned. Those who stayed were called Canucks and resented by the Irish, who had arrived earlier and viewed them as interlopers willing to work for lower wages and take their mill jobs, tedious though they might be.

By 1900 they were still clustered in crowded Little Canadas like Woonsocket and Biddeford, Maine, both 60 percent Franco-American. The densest Little Canadas, not surprisingly, are along the Maine-Canada border in the St. John Valley. There, 79 percent of Frenchville residents speak French.

20th-Century

In the first decade of the 20^th century, the population of Salem, Mass., was more than one-fifth Quebecois and their children. In South Salem’s Little Canada, children attended French schools like Sainte-Chrétienne. They built French churches like Église Sainte-Anne and they started French businesses like St. Pierre’s Garage, Ouellette Construction and Soucy Insurance.

St. Ann’s Church complex, Woonsocket.

Franco-Americans were almost all Roman Catholic, and strict ones at that. They believed that abandoning the French language meant abandoning their religion, and they clung to their language and customs longer than many other immigrant communities. They called it la survivance. Battles often erupted between French parishes and the Irish-dominated parishes over their desire to hire French-speaking priests.

Life in Little Canadas

Life in the Little Canadas revolved around the neighborhood parish and the home, where families were often large. By the 1920s, Little Canadas supported thriving French-language newspapers, Catholic schools, social clubs and fraternal organizations. They established Rivier College in Nashua and Assumption College in Worcester. They built the first Catholic hospital in Maine, St. Mary’s in Lewiston, and started the first credit union in the United States, also named St. Mary’s, in Manchester, N.H.

St. Ann Roman Catholic Church was built with nickels and dimes from Franco-American millworkers and painted with such magnificent frescoes it earned the nickname “the Sistine Chapel of Woonsocket.”

Manchester, N.H., had perhaps the most well-known of the Little Canadas on its west side, where Peyton Place author Grace Metalious and Revlon founder Charles Revson grew up. West Sider Rene Gagnon participated in the most celebrated flag raising in history, on Iwo Jima during World War II.

Jack Kerouac

The most famous Franco-American author, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac or Jack Kerouac, was born in Lowell’s Little Canada.

Tensions with the Irish continued into the 1920s, as well as with the Ku Klux Klan. Anti-Catholicism fueled the resurgence of the Klan in New England, especially Maine, and Franco-Americans stayed in their houses when the Klan roamed through Little Canadas looking for trouble.

By then, New England’s mills were in decline, and Quebec’s economy was booming. Franco-Americans began to drift back to Canada, emptying out some of New England’s Little Canadas. Finally, World War II ended their cultural isolation.

This story about New England’s Little Canadas was updated in 2023.

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The Needham, A Potato Candy Sacred and Peculiar to Maine

The Maine potato candy known as the needham has always stood in the shadow of the whoopie pie, but generations of Mainers have nonetheless revered the sweet confection.

Mainers find needhams in their Christmas stockings. Maine moms get them in gift boxes on Mother’s Day. Maine grandmas make them at home. And Maine convenience stores display them by the cash register.

Few Mainers know much about the faith healer after whom the needham was named, or that he was a product of historic conflicts between English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic.

Or, for that matter, that cannibals came close to eating him for dinner.

The needham

The Noble Spud

The candy itself combines cocoanut, sugar, chocolate and that classic Maine ingredient, the potato. Maine once harvested more potatoes than any other state, and the potato is still a major crop in Aroostook County.

In 1986, Maine writer John Gould described the needham as ‘sacred and peculiar’ to Maine. He told the commonly accepted story of how the candy originated sometime around 1872.

A candymaker, Mr. Seavey, introduced a new item when one of his cooks brought forth a chocolate-covered coconut cream with a secret ingredient — potato. The cook passed it around to see what Mr. Seavey, and others, thought of it. Significantly, the new candy had a square shape.

Mr. Seavey and others immediately approved the candy, but they didn’t know what to call it. Mr. Seavey said, “Let’s call ’em needhams, after the popular preacher,” according to Gould.

And so the candy became the needham, for a century a native Maine delicacy except for a few areas where it crossed the line into New Hampshire.

“Seavey’s Needhams are as Maine as the lobster, the first sunrise, and the ayeh,” wrote Gould.

George C. Needham

George C. Needham himself was almost a tasty treat for South American cannibals, according to his obituary in the New York Times Philadelphia edition on Feb. 2, 1902.

Born in Ireland in 1840, Needham went to sea at the age of 10 in an English ship bound for South America. The captain and crew brutally tortured him.

They beat him, tied him to the mast and finally tattooed his arms and body. At the end of the voyage to South America, they took him ashore in a desolate section of Patagonia where he faced starvation.

A band of cannibal Indians found him and considered him a delicate morsel. They prepared to make a feast of the boy, but at the last moment they discovered the strange tattoo marks on his body. The superstitious Indians let him go.

Needham returned to civilization and entered business, but at 20 he gave up a promising career for the Protestant ministry. He preached throughout England and Ireland until 1868.

Needham then met Boston evangelist Dwight Moody, who persuaded him to immigrate to America.

He started out holding prayer meetings sponsored by the YMCA in South Boston. The story goes that he ran out of money by his second week. A man named Henry Durant read in the paper that Needham was holding services and decided to help him.

“He will soon be crossing over the Dover Street Bridge,” said Durant to himself. He put $50 in an envelope, went to the bridge and gave Needham the money.

Evangelism

Elizabeth Needham

Soon George C. Needham edited a magazine called Times of Refreshing, published by Charles Cullis, a Boston evangelist and faith healer. Needham associated with the Clarendon Street Baptist Church in Boston and married Elizabeth Annabel. Together they preached around the eastern half of the United States, denouncing Catholicism, promoting faith healing and predicting that the second coming of Jesus Christ was imminent.

By 1891, Elizabeth grew disillusioned with faith healing, because she viewed it as hooey. She consequently wrote a book attacking it in 1891, called Mrs. Whiling’s Faith Cure.

By 1892 George Needham was reported to be living in Philadelphia, touring the country and devoting most of his lectures to the still-imminent second coming of Jesus Christ.

In November 1892 he preached religion could make you beautiful, according to Preach the Word, Eleven Bible Lectures.

“Some of us are homely enough, nevertheless we can be beautiful; for when the Spirit of God fills mind and heart, and the Word of God abides in us, there will be a spiritual charm and a heavenly peacefulness radiating from the most unhandsome faces,” he said.

Needham Recipe

By the time George Needham died in 1902, his name was on everyone’s tongue, at least in Maine.

Many years later, Bangor Daily News food editor Brownie Schrumpf included a recipe for ‘Maine Potato Candy’ in her weekly column:

Ingredients

¾ cup mashed potatoes
4 cups confectioners sugar
4 cups shredded coconut
1-1/2 teaspoon vanilla
½ teaspoon salt
4 squares baking chocolate

Directions

Mix mashed potatoes (plain mashed, no seasonings or milk) and confectioners sugar. Stir in coconut, vanilla and salt; blend well. Press into buttered pan so that candy is about ½ inch in depth. Melt chocolate over warm, but not hot, water. (Too hot water causes melted chocolate to have white streaks when it hardens.) Pour chocolate over candy, then cool and cut in squares.

For variation, make haystacks by forming coconut mixture into cones about 1-inch high. Allow to stand for 20 minutes. Dip base of each cone in melted chocolate, to cover cone up to ¼ inch. Finally, place on wax paper until candy hardens.

This story was updated in 2023. If you enjoyed reading about the needham, you may also want to read about the revolutionary roots of the fluffernutter sandwich.

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Flashback Photos: The 1940 Maine Potato Harvest

Trucks waiting outside starch factory in Caribou, Maine.

During the 1940 Maine potato harvest, the Town of Caribou bustled with commercial activity. It was an agricultural boomtown, the largest potato shipping hub in the world during the first half of the 10th century.

Caribou had been a sleepy backwater until the arrival of the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad in the 1890s. Potato farming took off in the surrounding Aroostook County, and other industries sprang up around it — like the starch factory pictured above. U.S. Farm Security Administration photographer Jack Delano noted there were almost 50 trucks in the line. Some waited 24 hours for the potatoes to be graded and weighed.

Potato fields in the vicinity of Caribou.

During the 1940s, Maine produced more potatoes than any other state. Today Maine ranks eighth.

Children gathering potatoes on a large farm near Caribou.

Andrew Mooers grew up on a Maine potato farm. He remembers what it was like to pick potatoes. He writes in his MeInMaine blog:

Picking potatoes was every kid’s entry level job. The one where the kid buys his own winter jacket. Takes better care of it because he does.

Maine potato harvest means getting up in the dark. Listening to the local radio station to see if Farmer Bass, Smith, Fitzpatrick, Winship is picking today. When the harvester crew is suppose to show up ar Corey Farms. Studying the weather forecast. Putting on long underwear because you can see your breath as the sun rises. But by early afternoon, you’ll be peeled down to a t-shirt.

Schools in the area didn’t open until the potatoes were harvested.

Field hands on the Woodman farm.

During the harvest season the field hands worked from sunrise to sunset. Delano’s caption for this photo reads, “Digging potatoes on the Woodman Potato Company farm eleven miles north of Caribou, Maine.”

Harvesting potatoes.

Not all the potato farms were large. Above, a family harvests potatoes on a small farm six miles north of Caribou.

Horse-drawn potato digger.

Some farmers still used horse-drawn potato diggers in 1940, though many used tractors.

Loading barrels of potatoes onto a truck.

In Aroostock County, noted Delano, the farmer speaks of his potatoes in terms of barrels rather than bushels or sacks. Above, barrels of potatoes are loaded onto a truck to be taken to a storehouse.

Farmer with potatoes.

Above, a French-Canadian potato farmer waits with a truckload of potatoes at a starch factory in Caribou for his potatoes to be graded and weighed.

Hoisting potatoes.

Here a worker hoists and dumps potatoes in a storage barn on one of the farms of the Woodman Potato Company.

Starch factory along the Aroostook River.

Inferior graded potatoes ended up at starch factories like the one pictured above.

Products exhibition in Washington, D.C.

The better ones may have ended up here!

Photos courtesy Library of Congress.

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Images of New England Observing Memorial Day in WWII

New England observed Memorial Day during World War II with special solemnity. For many, the memory of fallen heroes was fresh, raw and intense.

The Roosevelt administration sent photographers into the field to record how Americans honored their war dead. They worked for the Office of War Information, and would go on to lead illustrious careers.

How Ashland, Maine Observed Memorial Day

Rural Aroostook County lost 239 young men in World War II, either missing in action, killed in action or killed in the line of duty.

Many of the young men from tiny Ashland, Maine, in the county were drafted, and so Memorial Day took on a somber significance.

Legionnaires and Boy Scouts

The town, a farming community, had fewer than 1,000 residents, so the ceremonies featured hardly any young men.

John Collier took these photos of the ceremonies in Ashland in 1943 for the Office of War Information. After the war, he became an anthropologist and an early leader in the fields of visual anthropology and applied anthropology.

In Ashland, Collier noticed all boys and young men marched in the Memorial Day parade. Almost none watched from the audience.

The parade about to begin

Below, a Congregational minister offered a prayer for divine guidance through the years of war.

Prayers

Though only a small farming center with a population under 1000, Ashland had a good band with lots of purple trim and gold braid for the Memorial Day ceremony.

Keeping the beat

A bugler sounded Taps during the ceremonies.

Honoring their sacrifice

Gloucester, Mass., on May 31, 1943

Gordon Parks took these photos showing how Gloucester, Mass., observed Memorial Day in 1943. Parks, then 30, was working for the Office of War Information. He would later become well known for his photo essays of the civil rights movement for Life magazine — and for directing the 1971 film Shaft.

He also composed music and wrote fiction and poetry. His best known work is The Learning Tree, an autobiographical novel about a poor young African American growing up in segregated rural Kansas during the late 1920s and early 1930s. He received 20 honorary doctorates before he died in 2006 at the age of 93.

Here he captures one of the speakers at the Gloucester Memorial Day ceremony.

Solemn words

Gloucester, a fishing community, also held memorial services for fishermen lost at sea. Here relatives of fishermen wait their turn to toss flowers into the water.

Waiting their turn.

A Legionnaire played Taps during the Gloucester ceremony.

Again

When the parade ended, the ROTC band took a rest.

Southington, Conn., 1942

These Memorial Day photos of Southington, Conn., were taken by Fenno Jacobs during World War II for the Office of War Information. Jacobs, born in Waltham, Mass., was a rebellious child who didn’t get past the eighth grade. He joined the Merchant Marine, then took up photography. By the time the OWI hired him he had worked for Time, Life and National Geographic.

Jacobs belonged to a team of photographers who spent the month in Southington, Conn., taking pictures of residents at work and at leisure. The photos were compiled into a booklet designed to show friends and enemies in Europe the traditions and values of typical American families. Military planes dropped thousands of copies over Europe during the German occupation.

The photo below shows the parade marching past the Southington Town Hall on Memorial Day in 1942.

The flag at half-staff

Southington had a large number of residents with German, Polish and Italian ancestry. Their immigrant ancestors came to work in the mills during the 19th century.

A nicely decorated bicycle on the left

The Catholic congregation gathered in the St. Thomas cemetery for an outdoor Mass.

Remembering those who have passed

After World War II, Southington became a bedroom community and the population grew to over 42,000 people.

After the parade

Photos courtesy Library of Congress. This story was updated in 2022.

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