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Freeport Maine

New England Places To Visit, From Presque Isle, Maine, to Greenwich, Conn.

The New England Historical Society introduces a new weekly feature, New England Places. We plan to suggest places to visit based on our stories the previous week, our calendar items and anything else that strikes our fancy. Look for New England Places on Saturday mornings to help you plan your weekend.

No matter where you live in New England, you are within driving distance of a Carnegie Library. Still standing are 92 of the 95 from Norwalk, Conn., to Presque Isle, Maine, all donated by Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie. Of those, 68 are still public libraries and six are still college libraries. (Click here for a complete listing.)

The interior of Mount Holyoke’s Williston Library, donated by Carnegie, was designed to resemble Westminster Hall in England. Mount Holyoke has a beautiful campus worth visiting even without getting inside the library. Check the calendar here for a schedule of campus tours.

You can combine shopping with history by visiting the Abercrombie & Fitch outlet in Freeport, Maine. It used to be a Carnegie Library.

Reading, Mass., Carnegie Library

This week we wrote about the controversy that erupted in Greenwich, Conn., when the United Nations announced plans to build a new city in northern Greenwich and parts of Stamford and North Castle. Greenwich is a lovely suburb, with 34 sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including nine historic districts, an African Methodist Episcopal Church and a lighthouse. Even the Merritt Parkway is considered historic.

Greenwich offers parks, miles of walking trails, the Bruce Museum (closed Easter) and the Bush-Holley House and Museum (also closed Easter), once an art colony and now headquarters of the Greenwich Historical Society. For suggestions about what to do in and around Greenwich, check the Stanton House Inn blog here.

Saturday marks the birthday of an important New Englander: navigator Nathaniel Bowditch (1779). The Nathaniel Bowditch House in Salem, Mass., is a National Historic Landmark and one of Salem’s many magnificent Federal Style homes that you can see while on your way to the Peabody Essex Museum, open this weekend. The PEM started as the East India Marine Society in 1799, founded by sea captains and supercargoes who sailed beyond Cape Horn. Most would have been aided by Bowditch’s The New American Practical Navigator. The museum, which charges admission, is currently exhibiting paintings of the Isles of Shoals by Childe Hassam and “Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age.”

Looking for something to do with the kids? Old Sturbridge Village holds Maple Days this weekend, featuring the entire process from tapping the trees to eating the syrup. Click here for more information.

Looking ahead, the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford will display jewels worn by the cast in Downton Abbey on Thursday, March 31. A lecture and jewelry trunk show will be with Andrew Prince, who created the jewelry pieces for Downton Abbey and The Young Victoria. Click here for more information.

On Saturdays in Hartford the Connecticut Historical Society is hosting a guided tour of a traveling exhibit of Beatrice Fox Auerbach’s clothes. It includes more than 100 garments, shoes and accessories that once belonged to the woman who ran G. Fox. & Co. For more information, click here.

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L.L. Bean, Merchant of the Maine Woods

L. L. Bean liked to hunt and fish more than he liked to work, and his first attempt at running a clothing store failed miserably.

He was pushing 40 when he had the idea that would make him a household name. He came off a hunting trip in the Maine woods that failed because his boots got wet, leaving his feet cold and sore. A local cobbler helped him graft leather uppers to a pair of rubber work boot bottoms. He then got hold of a list of non-resident holders of Maine hunting licenses and produced a three-page flyer with a proclamation.

You cannot expect success hunting deer or moose if your feet are not properly dressed. The Maine Hunting Shoe is designed by a hunter who has tramped the Maine woods for the last 18 years. We guarantee them to give perfect satisfaction in every way.

That failed too.

Ninety of the first 100 pairs were returned because the leather separated from the rubber.

Bean made good, though, on his ‘100 percent money back guarantee,’ and perfected the boot.

L.L. Bean Himself

L.L. Bean

Leon Leonwood Bean was born Oct. 13, 1872, in tiny Greenwood, Maine, the son of Benjamin Warren Bean, a farmer and horse trader, and Sarah Swett Bean. His parents died within four days of each other when he was 12. He and his five siblings went to live with relatives in South Paris, Maine.

After his locally made boots failed, L.L. Bean borrowed $400 in 1911 and went to Boston to persuade the United States Rubber Company to improve the quality of the shoe. The company agreed and, in another stroke of luck, the United States Post Office introduced parcel post service.

Maine Hunting Shoes were so popular that L.L. Bean opened a store to sell them on Freeport’s main street in 1917. The shoe, according to Bean, saved an outdoorsman from lifting 2,310 pounds in the average seven miles he took a day.

When his brother was named postmaster in Freeport, Maine, L.L. Bean opened a factory on the floor above the post office.

He continued to come up with new outdoor products, such as the Maine Auto Sweater, designed for duck hunting and automobile riding. He created the Deer Toter to transport a dead deer more easily; the Bean Sandwich Spreader; the Bean chamois shirt; and the down vest. In 1944 L.L. Bean introduced its iconic tote, the ‘Ice Carrier’ made of heavy canvas designed to carry ice. It’s now called the Boat and Tote.

L.L. Bean appealed to frugal Yankee customers by advising them to return their Maine Hunting shoes for reworking.

During World War II, Bean designed military wear, and in 1973 the Israeli military rush-ordered boots and heavy shirts direct from the company for duty on the Golan Heights.

Shake His Hand, Get a Catalog

His company continued to grow along with the number of pages in his promotional flyer.

L.L. Bean fixated on building his mailing list. So much so that Maine writer John Gould said, “If you drop in just to shake his hand, you get home to find his catalog in your mailbox.”

Most of L.L. Bean’s sales came through the catalog. The store in Freeport, however, had a bell by the door that sportsmen could ring to summon a watchman or, sometimes, L.L. Bean himself. They rang at all hours of the day and night to buy last-minute hunting or fishing gear. The company hit $1 million in sales in 1937.

In 1951, L.L. Bean opened the store round the clock 365 days a year. “We have thrown away the keys to the place,” he said. Today the Freeport store has no locks. Families stranded in blizzards over the years have camped in the camping section — with permission.

Famous customers included Ethel Kennedy, John Wayne, Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Cronkite, Jack Dempsey and Gregory Peck.

Merchant of the Maine Woods

Time magazine hailed him as the ‘Merchant of the Maine Woods.’ In 1967, the magazine called the company ‘an efficiency expert’s nightmare’:

It stashes incoming mail in shirt boxes. Once it lost $125,000 in business when a list of 40,000 would-be customers was mistakenly destroyed. Under a garish, multicolored letterhead, its owner once answered a formal appointment request by advising “I am personally away more or less.”

In January 1967, 94-year-old L.L. Bean checked the galleys of the now-100-page catalog. He died a week later, on Feb. 5, 1967. The company received 50,000 cards and letters of condolence.

With thanks to Maine Icons: 50 Classic Symbols of the Pine Tree State by Matthew P. Mayo and Jennifer Smith-Mayo and The Grand Emporiums by Robert Hendrickson. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Desert of Maine Swallows the Tuttle Farm

The Desert of Maine is a 40-acre swathe of land covered by glacial silt near Freeport. Scientists believe the silt, finer grained than sand, was a glacial lakebed covered by topsoil over thousands of years.

The Desert of Maine, Freeport. Courtesy Library of Congress.

In 1797, a farmer named William Tuttle bought 300 acres on the site. He built a large barn, grew potatoes and raised sheep. But the Tuttles didn’t rotate their crops and let their sheep overgraze the pasture. One day, a small round patch of silt was exposed. Then it grew. And grew. And grew, until the family grew alarmed.

Over time, the silt took over the farm, covering pasture and buildings. The Tuttles struggled to save their farm, and even tried to make bricks from the sand. The mica content was too high, though, and the bricks crumbled.

Finally in the early 20^th century the Tuttles abandoned the farm. Henry Goldrup bought it in 1919 for $300 and opened it as a tourist attraction six years later. In the 1950s, the Desert of Maine featured a camel named Sarah. She despised tourists, however, biting and spitting at them. So she ended up in a zoo.

The Desert of Maine covering the Tuttle barn, 1936. Courtesy Library of Congress

How the Desert of Maine Started

Even a kitschy tourist attraction can offer a teachable moment. The Desert of Maine provides a lesson in geology.

The Desert of Maine formed at the end of the last Ice Age, when the two-mile-thick Laurentide Ice Sheet covered New England. The heavy ice pushed coastal Maine below sea level.

Then the glacier retreated and Maine slowly bounded back toward sea level, then above it. The melting ice formed a lake about 13,500 years ago, and then a thousand years later the lake disappeared and the Desert of Maine emerged. At first it acted as a sink for wind-blown sand. But then plants began to encroach on the sand, forming topsoil and stabilizing it. Eventually a forest grew over the sand, hiding it until the Tuttles came along.

The photo above was taken in March 1930 by Paul Carter as a photographer for the U.S. Resettlement Administration. His caption reads “Top branches of apple tree showing above sand. It is reported that three twigs blossom in the spring.” The U.S. Resettlement Administration was a New Deal agency that resettled struggling rural and urban families to government-planned communities between 1935 and 1936.

It’s still a tourist attraction where you can camp, picnic, take a tram and play golf. It also has a gift shop, a sand museum and a farm museum..

This story was updated in 2022.

Color photo of Desert of Maine By Daderot – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10414394. Sand museum photo CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12042755.

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