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Moosehead Lake

Northern New England Has Gores – Who Knew?

There are small numbers of people in northern New England who live in oddly-shaped geographical areas or “gores. ”

They prefer a relatively isolated, rural, existence in seasonal or permanent homes, surrounded by forests, mountains, bodies of water and a few neighbors. They are willing to pay for limited governmental services funded mainly by the state.

Unlike the southern New England states, incorporated local units of government do not encompass all of the land areas in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. Various unincorporated entities – including gores – constitute the remaining area.

The Gores of Northern New England

A gore is a piece of irregularly shaped land left over from original surveying efforts in the 18^th and 19^th centuries to plot town boundaries. They exist only in Maine and Vermont and may or may not have any residents.

In Maine, somewhat more than half of the total land area of the state is designated as “unorganized territory.” It consists of 429 unincorporated “townships” and several coastal islands that extend across the 16 counties of the state. Eight of these townships are gores, located in four counties. Three of them (Coburn, Gorham, and Massachusetts) are in Franklin County. Three are in Somerset County (Blake, Misery, and Moxie). And there are one each in Lincoln County (Hibberts) and Penobscot County (Veazie).

The Maine Legislature is the “local governing body” for the gores and the rest of the unorganized territory. It approves the budgets of the state agencies and any counties seeking funds for services derived from a state-administered property tax. Services provided include waste disposal, law enforcement, fire protection, ambulance services, animal control, road maintenance (except private roads) and land use to limit development.

The Coburn Gore border crossing from the Canadian side.

Maine Gores

Four Maine gores have seasonal and/or permanent residents. Population counts are difficult to ascertain as the U.S. Census does not provide them. Moxie Gore has the largest area (19.96 acres) and the largest population (estimated at over 100). It’s known for its waterfall and whitewater rafting opportunities. Coburn Gore is mainly noted for its U.S.-Canadian border crossing. Misery Gore has Moosehead Lake for its attraction. Hilberts Gore has one resident of long duration among its fields and woodlands.

Map of Misery Gore near Moosehead Lake in Maine

Beyond gores, the unorganized territory also includes townships designated by name (e.g. Bancroft) or number (e.g. T13R16WELS) and those termed a grant, island, patent, purchase, strip, surplus or tract.

Vermont Gores

Vermont has four gores: Avery’s Gore, Warner’s Gore or Grant and Warren’s Gore are in Essex County. Buels Gore is in Chittenden County. Only Warren’s Gore and Buels Gore have residents. In Warren’s Gore, a Board of Governors of the Unified Towns and Gores oversees the gore. It also appoints a supervisor who can act as truant officer, constable, treasurer, tax collector and town clerk. In Buels Gore, the governor appoints a supervisor. In both gores, residents pay a state property (education) tax and a municipal tax that can be used for certain assessments or town services (e.g. emergency fire or rescue services).

Vermont also has five unorganized towns – Averill, Ferdinand, Glastenbury, Lewis and Somerset. The Board of Governors oversees them since they lack enough residents to qualify as an incorporated town.

Grout Pond and Glastenbury Mountain

And the Rest…

Historically, New Hampshire also had gores, but none currently exist. However, it has eight grants, seven townships, six purchases and four unincorporated locations that resemble gores.

Barring a significant upsurge in population leading to annexation by a neighboring town(s) or creation of a new town, these gores will remain as remnants of bygone times.

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

Images: Moosehead Lake By Dennis Redfield – originally posted to Flickr as Moosehead Lake, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8733277, and Glastenbury Mountain by Andy Arthur via Flickr, CC by 2.0. Also By Richard Coté – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34635193.

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The Ku Klux Klan Fights the Battle of Greenville, Maine

In 1924, dozens of Ku Klux Klan members paraded through the tiny logging town of Greenville, Maine, to bully some outsiders into leaving.

The outsiders refused to go. Instead, more than a hundred of their friends from the nearby logging camps descended on the town, and held their own march – all night long, in freezing weather.

The outsiders came to Greenville to organize the loggers into a union so they could improve their miserable working conditions. They were members of the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies. The Wobblies had led the successful Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Mass., 12 years earlier, and now they were taking on the lumber barons.

The KKK didn’t like unions any more than it liked French-Canadians. They were more than happy to help the logging companies intimidate the Wobblies and any French Canadian logger thinking about joining a union.

The Ku Klux Klan

The Ku Klux Klan grew explosively in 1924, after all but vanishing in Maine at the start of the 1920s. But a charlatan with a gift for public speaking moved to Maine to revive the Hooded Order.

Eugene Farnsworth had worked as a Salvation Army recruiter, a barber and a traveling magician – until an accident on stage killed his assistant. Not until 1923 did he find his true calling as the state’s King Kleagle.

That year, Farnsworth went on a speaking tour that drew thousands of enthusiastic listeners. His message of hate toward Catholics and foreigners appealed to Maine Yankees. Protestant ministers often joined Farnsworth on the podium to denounce the French-Canadian and Irish immigrants who worked in the textile mills and logging camps.

Farnsworth met with stunning success. In his first year he built the state’s Klan membership to 23,000. They marched in broad daylight wearing their white robes, and burned crosses at night. They even set off a bomb in the heavily French-Canadian city of Lewiston.

The Ku Klux Klan near the Canadian border, 1927

Maine, in fact, had the biggest KKK chapter outside the South in the 1920s. By 1925, more than 100,000 Mainers belonged to the bedsheet nightriders.

Maine’s Lumber Camps

The Klan, however, didn’t object when Yankee lumber barons brought French Canadians to work for them as near-slaves.

To harvest Maine’s great forests, the lumbermen needed tens of thousands of workers in their logging camps, sawmills and paper mills. They needed them to cut the trees, to build mills and camps and to drive the logs down Maine’s rivers.

The work in the logging camps required men to spend the long winter in the northern Maine woods. It was hard, dangerous and often deadly.

To find men willing to work under those conditions, lumber companies had to import foreigners. Employment agents found them in Boston, Bangor and Lewiston and tricked them into working in the woods. The camps, they said, were just a few miles from town where they could enjoy themselves during their time off.

The agents would drive the immigrants a short distance into the woods and drop them off. The workers sometimes had to walk 60 or 70 miles to the camp. Or they’d have to borrow money to hire a wagon to get there.

Peonage, Maine Style

Once at the camps, they didn’t leave until spring. They lived in primitive bunkhouses and bought necessities at the company store, usually at wildly inflated prices. Many couldn’t quit because of their debts to their employer. Sometimes they didn’t have the strength or the stamina to do the work, but that didn’t matter.

Winter in a logging camp, 1895

For an entire decade, they were virtual slaves. Maine lawmakers, pressured by the lumber barons, passed a law in 1907 that put loggers in jail if they quit their jobs. Before the Legislature repealed the law 10 years later, 342 men went to jail for walking away from the camps.

In 1911, the U.S. Immigration Commission reported on debt peonage in America. “Since the evils of involuntary servitude have been largely stamped out in the southern States, there has probably existed in Maine the most complete system of peonage in the entire country.”

Then in 1920, the Wobblies came to organize the mostly French-Canadian loggers into a union.

The Battle of Greenville

The Ku Klux Klan apparently didn’t want to kick out all of Maine’s Roman Catholics. Instead of confronting the lumber barons who brought French Canadians to the state, the KKK supported them.

Things came to a head between the KKK and the Wobblies during a cold winter weekend in Greenville, a small town on the shores of Moosehead Lake.

Bucolic Greenville, Maine.

Bob Pease, a Finn who headed the IWW in Maine, and two other Wobblies had moved into a boardinghouse in the town. From there they started to recruit loggers in the camps. Greenville’s selectmen ordered them to leave. They refused, saying they’d done nothing wrong.

A Portland Press-Herald reporter asked Pease why they stayed. “Because we want good wages, eight hours a day in the lumber camps and clean linen in our bunks,” he said. “The day of the old logging camp and the lumberjacks is about over with.”

One Saturday night in freezing weather, 40 members of the KKK came to Bob Pease’s boardinghouse and told him to leave. He called the county sheriff, who sent a deputy to protect them through the night.

On Sunday and Monday, some 175 members of the IWW streamed out of the logging camps to show solidarity for the organizers. Neither the boardinghouses nor the YMCA would put them up. Instead they marched up and down the streets all night long.

“We are going to stick,” said Pease, “and if the Klan starts anything, the IWW will finish it.” He called the Great Northern Paper Company “slave drivers,” but said the Wobblies were too strong for them.

The lumber interests had brought in the KKK, said Pease. And he pointed out most of their employees were the very people the Ku Klux Klan despised – French-Canadian Catholics.

The Wobblies wanted to organize all workers into one union.

A Whimper

In the end there was no violence, no trouble. Most of the Wobblies returned to the lumber camps, and the Klan melted away.

The lumber companies found other ways to squeeze out the Wobblies. They refused to hire anyone who’d joined the IWW. And the YMCA and the local merchants discriminated against them.

In response, Pease and the other Wobblies organized a boycott against four Greenville establishments.

For that, a grand jury in Bangor charged them with conspiracy.

On the day of their trial, 37 Wobblies came to the courtroom, only to find the court rescheduled.

Pease and the others received sentences of one to two years in jail. The Wobblies’ organizing collapsed.

But so did the Klan.

In 1926, the Klan membership fell by half. By the next year it had little more than 3,000 members. By 1930, fewer than 300.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Lumber Camps

In 1880, Dr. George Miller Beard boarded a train for Moosehead Lake in Maine to see for himself the strange lumberjacks known as Jumping Frenchmen.

Many lumber camps had them. The jumping Frenchmen tended to be shy, ticklish French-Canadians who responded dramatically when startled. They were often the victims of practical jokes.

George Miller Beard

Beard was a pioneering neurologist who defined the term ‘neurasthenia’ as a medical condition. He went to Moosehead Lake to see jumping Frenchmen with his own eyes. He found what he was looking for.

“When told to strike, he strikes, when told to throw it, he throws it, whatever he has in his hands,” wrote Beard.

But Beard couldn’t figure out what caused the Frenchmen to jump.

A century later, researchers were still trying to figure it out.

Jumping Frenchmen

Robert Pike, who chronicled life in the Maine lumber camps, wrote that old woodsmen ascribed the Jumping Frenchman syndrome to inbreeding among French-Canadians, who seldom married outside their small villages.

The Jumping Frenchmen were a source of merriment among the loggers.

Lumberjacks

“If a jumper was shaving, or whistling, or just sitting on a riverbank, and someone came up behind him suddenly and cried, “Jump into the river!” (or “into the fire,” if there was a fire), in he’d jump,” wrote Pike in Tall Trees, Tough Men.

“If someone stepped up behind him and tickled him lightly, he’d jump through the roof… Strangely, the victims of such mean practical jokes never got made about them.”

A cook who was a jumper was an irresistible target. “The men would wait until he was about to place a dish of soup or some other spilly food on the table and then say, “Drop it!” and down it would come, right down the neck of the nearest man,” wrote Pike.

Or if a line of loggers were sitting on the deacon seat – a bench running the length of the bunkhouse – a lumberjack would pretend to strike his neighbor. “Every jumper in the line, if he saw the motion, would turn and strike at his neighbor,” wrote Pike. “Or a man would take his pipe from his mouth and pretend to throw it on the floor. Then the jumpers could not help dashing down their own pipes.”

More Research

Beard was struck by the forced obedience shown by the jumping Frenchmen as well as echolalia – the repetition of noises or phrases. Beard recited Latin to a lumberjack, “and he repeated or echoed the sound of the word as it came to him, in a quick sharp voice, at the same time he jumped, or struck, or threw, or raised his shoulders, or made some other violent muscular motion. They could not help repeating the word or sound that came from the person that ordered them…”

Interior of a logging camp

Beard found the jumping Frenchman syndrome started in childhood, lasted a lifetime and rarely occurred in women. Of 50 jumping Frenchmen in northern Maine, he found 14 cases in four families.

He didn’t conclude the syndrome was genetic, but speculated it was a temporary degeneration that resulted from life in the isolated lumber camp.

Beard’s research spread around the world, and a search for global variations of Jumping Frenchman syndrome uncovered latah in Malaysia, imu among the Japanese Ainu, miryachit in Russia and ramenajana in Madagascar.

Gilles de la Tourette translated Beard’s findings, and concluded Jumping Frenchman syndrome was part of a group of convulsive tic illnesses that included Tourette syndrome.

Maine logging camp, 1906

Neurologists picked up Beard’s research in the 1960s, debating whether Jumping Frenchman syndrome was a nervous disorder or a habit.

They’re Very Bored

In 1963, Harold Stevens studied a 59-year-old French-Canadian man whose father had worked as a lumberjack in northern Maine. He was easily startled and jumped about 10 inches off the bed when struck by a reflex hammer. He reacted the same way when the telephone rang.

Two years later, a Canadian neurologist named Reuben Rabinovitch wrote about his childhood experiences with Jumping Frenchmen in Quebec. When lumberjacks set up camp near his village in the spring, the children would play the horse-kicking game. Sneaking up on a jumper, a child would suddenly poke him while making a neighing sound. The victim would jump up and shout angrily.

Rabinovitch concluded the Jumping Frenchman syndrome was a conditioned reflex that grew out of the isolation and boredom of life in the lumber camp. When the traditional logging camp died out, so did jumping. In 1986, two Canadian neurologists studied eight jumpers in Quebec. They found the behavior started when the men began work as lumberjacks.

With thanks to Outbreak!: The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior by Hilary Evans, Robert E. Bartholomew. This story was updated in 2023.

Image: Collier, J., photographer. (1943) Spring pulpwood drive on the Brown Company timber holdings in Maine.Feeding logs through the sluice at Long Pond. A key log is caught with twisted point of a pike, and as the woodman pulls this log others are carried with it into the sluiceway. United States Long Pond Maine, 1943. May. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017855658/..

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