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Aroostook

The High Comedy of the (Bloodless) Aroostook War

If only all wars could be like the Aroostook War, a boundary dispute fought mostly with fists rather than cannon. The conflict featured a battle broken up by a bear, an arrest over a homemade flag and soldiers who shivered in ridiculous uniforms.

It was also known as the Pork and Beans War, either because of lumbermen’s diet or the British regulars’ rations.

Map of the disputed territory. The blue line represents the American claim, the red the British and the yellow the final boundary.

Map of the disputed territory that caused the Aroostook War. The blue line represents the American claim, the red the British and the yellow the final boundary.

The Aroostook War, which took place from 1838-39, involved timber-hungry Mainers and timber-hungry New Brunswickers. They squared off until Daniel Webster settled the whole thing.

Though the conflict was more farce than war, the mythical Republic of Madawaska that started it is taken seriously by its inhabitants today.

Madawaska

Robert Pike in Tall Trees, Tough Men characterized the Aroostook War as starting when ‘Maine carted a couple of brass cannon up north to shoot at Canadians stealing Maine timber.’

The trouble started when the Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolution, but left ambiguous the border between Maine, then a district, and the Canadian province of New Brunswick.

The Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, still left the boundary unsettled. Conflict seemed inevitable as the British needed the tall pines along the St. John River for the navy’s masts. But the Americans had a voracious appetite for lumber as well.

People called the disputed land Madawaska, settled by French people. The French had little love for the British, who crowded them out of their land in Nova Scotia. They called themselves Les Brayons, and farmed peacefully.

The lumbermen caused all the trouble, fighting among themselves for the best stands of trees.

Enter John Baker

In 1817, a settler named John Baker arrived in Madawaska with his family from Kennebec. He earned a reputation as ‘the Washington of the Republic of Madawaska.’

Baker pursued his rights to land as an American, and obtained a land grant north of the St. John River after Maine became a state in 1820.

Baker built up a successful millworks, which still stands, in territory claimed by the British. The U.S. government recognized the British claim, but that didn’t stop Baker. On July 4, 1827, he hoisted a homemade flag his wife Sophronia had sewn with an American eagle above six stars. Baker declared the Republic of Madawaska an American republic. He then threw a party with Les Brayons and a French fiddler in what is now Baker-Brook, New Brunswick.

The Madawaska Flag flown during the Aroostook War.

The next month, John Baker declared American Aroostook Independence Day on Aug. 10, 1827..

New Brunswick demanded Baker take down the flag. When he refused, they arrested him and hauled him off to a Fredericton jail. No sooner did he leave her sight than his wife hoisted another homemade flag.

A New Brunswick court tried Baker for conspiracy and sedition, convicted him, fined him and sent him home. The U.S. government protested vigorously. Washington sent U.S. regulars to Houlton, and they began to build an invasion road and fort.

The Road to the Aroostook War

Negotiators appointed under the Treaty of Ghent had requested a survey of Madawaska. But according to local legend, the Americans got the British surveyors so drunk they surveyed the wrong river. In the end, the two sides couldn’t agree, so they appointed the King of the Netherlands umpire. His decision satisfied neither side.

Madawaska then organized a government under John Baker’s leadership and elected Pierre Lizotte, a Brayon, to represent them. Lizotte wisely rejected the honor because New Brunswick officials arrested, tried and convicted people who voted.

The Maine Legislature subsequently retaliated by recognizing the Town of Madawaska. The ‘town’ measured three times the size of Rhode Island.

Tempers continued to flare. Fists flew, officials got arrested and tensions finally boiled over in 1838 with the Battle of Caribou. ‘Battle’ may be too strong a word.

On December 29, American woodcutters spotted New Brunswick lumbermen cutting down trees on an American’s estate. The American woodcutters rushed to stand guard, and a shouting match ensued. The lumbermen drew arms and prepared to fire, but a black bear attacked three New Brunswickers. The New Brunswickers shot and killed the bear, but the Americans thought they were being fired at. They fired at the fleeing New Brunswickers – and missed.

Multiple Arrests

Cartoon satirizing the tensions that led to the Aroostook War.

The next month, Maine Gov. John Fairfield sent a posse to arrest the New Brunswick timbermen. The British arrested the posse’s leader. New Brunswick officials arrested Maine’s land agent and held him in New Brunswick. Then the the Americans incarcerated New Brunswick’s land agent in Bangor for a while. British troops began to gather on the Saint John River.

America readied for the Aroostook War, led, as usual, by the press. “Maine and her soil, or BLOOD!” screamed one editorial. “Let the sword be drawn and the scabbard thrown away!” Congress authorized 50,000 troops and a $10 million budget and forts were built along the frontier, sometimes within sight of each other.

Newspapers sent war correspondents to the front, and Maine militiamen took target practice at effigies of Queen Victoria. A farmer who wandered onto the firing range became one of the few casualties of the war. Another soldier succumbed to the measles.

No one actually died in battle during the Aroostook War. The soldiers who marched through the snow suffered from the cold because of their light uniforms. That deficit was made up with thick red shirts and pea-green coats.

One local legend has it that a New Brunswick lumber camp cook and his large girlfriend wandered over to the American fort one day, only to find it deserted. The Americans fled because the girlfriend wore a red dress and they thought the Redcoats were coming.

Peace, At Last

The diplomacy of U.S. Gen. Winfield Scott and New Brunswick Lt. Gov. John Harvey averted bloodshed. The two men had become friends when Scott was imprisoned under Harvey during the War of 1812.

Daniel Webster

Daniel Webster and Lord Ashburton settled the Aroostook War with the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which also resolved other border issues between the United States and Canada.

In the end, Maine got the fertile Aroostook River Valley, the heavily forested upper St. John, the right to navigate freely on the lower St. John and duty-free status for Aroostook timber in British and U.S. ports.

The treaty placed John Baker’s sawmill in British Canada, where he stayed. His remains are buried at Fort Fairfield, where a monument incorrectly declares him a Maine hero.

The memory of the Aroostook War and the myth of the Madawaska Republic live on. The flag that Sophronia Baker created flies at the city hall in Edmundston. Madawaskans fly the banner at Madawaska festivals. And the mayor of Edmundston assumes the honorary title of ‘President of the Republic of Madawaska.’

With thanks to Beauty Tips From Moose Jaw by Will Ferguson. This story about the Aroostook War was updated in 2023.

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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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Isaac Stephenson, Bullwhacker on the Aroostook

Nothing Isaac Stephenson ever accomplished gave him as much pure pleasure as breaking in three yoke of green oxen and hauling the biggest loads of pine logs to the Aroostook River.

Oxen hauling salvage logs, Bridgton, Maine. National Archives.

Stephenson accomplished quite a lot in his long life, which stretched to 88 years. He made a fortune in lumbering in the Great Lakes region during and after the Civil War. He won election to the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin, founded a newspaper and was a key supporter of Robert LaFollette and the Progressive wing of the Republican Party.

Isaac Stephenson

He began lumbering in New Brunswick logging camps at 11 years old. At 14 he moved to Maine and learned to drive oxen through the forests and to the river. At 16 he headed west to the seemingly limitless wilderness of Wisconsin and began cutting it down.

In his memoirs, Recollections of a Long Life, he recounted the migration of the lumbermen from New Brunswick and Maine, the center of the global timber industry in the early 19^th century.

“They blazed a way with restless energy into the timbered wilderness of Pennsylvania, of Wisconsin and Michigan, of Minnesota, of the mountain region of the far West and finally of the Pacific coast,” he wrote. “I moved as an individual in the flowing stream.”

Prosperity and Success

Isaac Stephenson was born on June 18, 1829, near Fredericton, New Brunswick. His father, also Isaac Stephenson, had immigrated from a town near Londonderry, Ireland, in 1809.

Isaac Stephenson

Logging meant prosperity and success to the struggling Irish. In Londonderry they saw big timber-ships from Maine and New Brunswick laden with masts, spars and hewn logs of a size unknown in Ireland. They were evidence of the vast wealth overseas and stirred the imaginations of the people yearning to escape their trying conditions.

In New Brunswick, Isaac Stephenson, Sr., managed the estates of the Loyalists who fled the United States after the Revolutionary War. Eventually he bought a farm. In the winter he logged. His wife died when Isaac was eight years old.

The family lived along the St. John River. As a child, Isaac Stephenson watched forest products go by. He saw an endless stream of log rafts and towboats, canoes of the Indians and white men, pirogues of the Acadians carrying wool to market.

Entry-Level Logging

In the late summer of 1840, barely 11, he began his lumbering career. His father managed a camp of about 15 men, and Isaac came along as cook. Though he wasn’t skilled, he managed well enough, as all they had to eat was pork, beans, bread, molasses, tea and dried apples.

Lumber camp cook, Robert Boucher, beside the loaves of bread baked at Fletcher Field Camp in 1948.

It was an unusually hard winter, with seven feet of snow and an invasion of wolves. All winter long the men felled the trees, hewed them into ton timber and piled them on rollways on the banks of the river. From there they were floated down the St. John River to be shipped overseas for masts and spars.

Isaac watched and willingly learned the lessons of lumbering. He embraced the lumberjack culture of strength, skill and self-reliance in the wilderness. Later he was offered a college education, which he refused.

In 1843, when he was 14, his family moved to a township that would become Ashland in Aroostook County, Maine. Yankees didn’t cut ton timber – logs hewn square with an ax – the way the Canadians did. Isaac’s father was contracted to run a camp producing ton timber.

Bullwhacking

Stephenson wrote in his memoirs that his great success in lumbering resulted from the lessons he learned in Maine.

He learned to be an ox teamster, mastering the art of training and driving oxen. It was the most difficult and best paid craft in the business of lumbering. An ox teamster could earn $60 a month, while the foreman only made $26 to $30.

When a tree was cut down, a pathway was cleared through the deep snow to the main road. The log with one end chained to a sled was dragged from the stump. Teams of three yoke of oxen hauled the log.

The English and French had starting using oxen before the American Revolution to haul the white pines used for masts. Some were as long as 100 feet long and three feet in diameter. Only oxen were strong enough to haul them.

It took Isaac Stephenson two months to train the teams of oxen, and it took great patience and forbearance. But it was something he was good at.

A Maine logging camp.

There was an intense rivalry among the hundreds of ox teamsters in the Maine forests. They placed great importance on contests in hauling trees or starting sleds laden with stone.

The Best Driver

“Fortunately, I made the most of my opportunity,” wrote Stephenson. “The knowledge I acquired stood me in good stead in after years when we did most of the masting on the upper lakes. At Escanaba, Michigan, sixty-five years ago I ranked among the best drivers; and I took, and still take, a great deal of pride in that accomplishment.”

Isaac had caught the eye of Jefferson Sinclair, one of the owners of the lumber company. When he was 16, Sinclair offered him 160 acres, a house and farm equipment if he would go with him to Wisconsin until he was 21. Isaac accepted.

Isaac Stephenson, Rich Man

He would make his great fortune in Wisconsin during the Civil War, suffered great losses in the Peshtigo Fire of 1871 but recovered. He owned vast tracts of real estate in Wisconsin and Michigan, as well as Chicago, Milwaukee, Green Bay and throughout the Great Lakes.

By the time he published his memoirs in 1915, he was concerned the lumbermen had gone too far:

When I went to Maine with my father, the upper reaches of the Penobscot poured a constant stream of logs down to the busy mills between Oldtown and Bangor. .. what once seemed to be illimitable stretches of virgin forest in New Brunswick, in Maine, in Wisconsin and Michigan, have melted away before the westward tide of settlement. The scarcity of timber that seemed so remote then is now ominously close.

Isaac Stephenson died on March 15, 1918, but the work of preserving the forests had already begun.

This story last updated in 2022.

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