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Leonard Black, A Suffering Slave Who Overcame Many Trials

Leonard Black couldn’t read or write when he escaped slavery in Maryland, but he found a way to pay for his education. He then told the story of his cruel masters in a booklet printed by a New Bedford printer.

Leonard Black developed into an inspirational minister who preached that all men are equal before God. He also taught that slavery required ignorance.

The slaves are taught ignorance as we teach our children knowledge. They are kept in darkness, and are borne down under a cruel, cruel oppression! All human rights are denied them as citizens! They are not recognized as men! My old master frequently said, “he did not believe a d–d nigger had any soul!” They are made to undergo everything as a beast. Having a full, perfect, undeniable right to stand out before God as MEN, the cruel, God-defying white man, without semblance of right, with no pretence [sic] but might, has prostituted them to the base purpose of his cupidity, and his baser beastly passions, reducing them to mere things, mere chattels, to be bought and sold like hogs and sheep!

Leonard Black, Slave Boy

Leonard Black was born into slavery in 1820 in Maryland, 60 miles south of Baltimore. As a young child, the slaveowner sold his mother and sister in New Orleans. At six years old, he had to work for a Mr. Bradford, which separated him from the rest of his family.

“No one, who has always enjoyed the right of liberty, can realize the horrors of slavery,” he wrote.

To be at the will of another, to be owned like a cow or horse, and liable at any moment to the highest bidder, to be transported to a distant part of the country, leaving the dearest relatives behind; to be, in fine, ground down mentally and physically by the untold curses of slavery, may be a very pretty thing to the masters of the “peculiar institution,” but it is death to the slaves.

Mrs. Bradford beat him and made her 10-year-old son beat him and spit in his face. One day she ordered him to take a bushel of corn upstairs, but he couldn’t do it. She hit him with the johnny-cake board, cutting his head so badly it bled more than a quart.

After two years Mr. Bradford placed Leonard Black with his father, fearing Mrs. Bradford would kill him. Mr. Bradford’s father was worse than Mrs. Bradford. The old man had been a professor of religion. Black called him a ‘backslider’ and a ‘wanderer from God.’

Backslider

Leonard Black lived with the senior Bradford for 7-1/2 years, during which he had no hat and no pants, but only a pair of shoes and a lindsey slip. He had to eat his meals, mere scraps from the table, while standing. He slept on a piece of carpet on the hearth. His job was to fetch wood, and one winter day he came inside to get warm.

He wrote

Old Mr. Bradford followed me in, and said: “If you want to be warmed, I’ll warm you.” He took the tongs, heated them in the fire, and branded my legs; and the scars are there to this day. I could not sit down in consequence of the wound.

When the old man died, he was sent to work for a Mr. Gardner, who was just as cruel.

After 13 years he returned to Mr. Bradford and his four older brothers. Three of them escaped and went North. A preacher who came to visit Mr. Bradford’s daughter alleviated Leonard’s sufferings from time to time. He gave him money with which he bought books. In 1836, Leonard Black converted to Christianity, inspired by the 8th verse of the 23d chapter of Matthew,

*I experienced a hope under a slave man,” and “Give us of your oil, for our lamps have gone out.”

Freedom

The African Church in Boston

Finally, in 1837, Leonard Black escaped. He walked to Boston, working odd jobs along the way and evading his captors. In Boston he asked for his brothers, and he learned of a George Black, a minister living in Portland, Maine. While boarding with an African-American woman he tracked down Black, who offered to pay his fare to Portland.

He learned Black wasn’t his brother, a disappointment. However, Black and his family kindly took him in. They made clothes for him and taught him to read. He got jobs as a farm laborer and as an engineer in a steam factory.

In 1838, he moved to Boston with George Black, who became the minister of the African Meeting House on Belknap Street.

Try, Try Again

Leonard Black married one of George Black’s daughters, and they lived with David Walker, the African-American whose anti-slavery pamphlet resulted in a price on his head in the South. He worked on the wharves and as a servant, but decided he wanted to be a preacher.

Francis Wayland

Leaving his family in Boston, he moved to Providence, where he lived with Francis Wayland, president of Brown University. He studied the Bible at the Meetinghouse Street Church. He moved his family from Boston, got a job working for a stone mason and told the pastor he wanted to be a minister. The church brethren gave him a hearing and decided he wasn’t ready.

Discouraged, Leonard Black sold his books and went to work on a canal boat until an accident nearly cost him his life. After working on the canal for three weeks a horse fell on him and kicked him in the head.

He despaired while he recovered slowly. His wife was pregnant, he had no money and he couldn’t work. Wayland and others helped him and his family through those hard times, and he decided to try the ministry again.

Life and Sufferings

In 1847 he went to New Bedford to dictate his story, published s The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, a Fugitive from Slavery. Written by Himself. In the run-up to the Civil War, at least 80 such slave narratives went into print to inspire enthusiasm for the abolitionist movement.

It worked for Leonard Black. He preached in Nantucket, then in 1850 he became a Baptist minister at the Third Stonington Church in Stonington, Conn., where he doubled the membership to 60 adults.

He found a sanctuary and a ministry at the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, N.Y., but only for a short time. Congress enacted The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required Free states to return runaway slaves to their owners. Leonard Black feared for his life and his freedom, so he resigned the ministry and lived quietly in New York for the next 12 years.

In 1873 he and his wife moved to Petersburg, Va., where he served as pastor of the First Baptist Church and again doubled the size of the congregation.

He died on April 28, 1883, and more than 5,000 people attended his memorial service. Every store that employed an African-American closed that day.

This story was updated in 2021.

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The 1762 Drought Troubles George Washington

The 1762 drought, one of the worst in New England history, stretched all the way to Virginia. It even prompted complaints from Mount Vernon.

The drought hit Eastern Massachusetts hardest, according to Sidney Perley, in his classic 1891 book Historic Storms of New England: Its Gales, Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Showers With Thunder and Lightning.

George Washington, in a letter dated June 20, 1762, worried he wouldn’t harvest an ounce of tobacco.

We have had one of the most severe Droughts in these parts that ever was known and without a speedy Interposition of Providence (in sending us moderate and refreshing Rains to Molifie and soften the Earth) we shall not make one oz of Tobacco this year. Our Plants in spite of all our efforts to the contrary are just destroyed, and our grain is absolutely perishing, how it may be in other parts of the Country I can not postively [sic] say, yet I have heard much complaining.

The 1762 Drought

In New England, the weather didn’t warm up until late, and it barely rained at all. The wells went dry, the grass dried up, vegetation scorched.

On July 7, Falmouth (now Portland) held a fast and prayer meeting on account of the drought. But hardly anyone went because they had to put out the fires that broke out.

Throughout the region, farmers prayed to God to avert the dreadful evil. On July 24, a cloudburst with thunder and lightning brought relief to Dorchester, Mass. But only Dorchester (now part of Boston) got wet. The fires continued, the earth got drier and the vegetation died. By late July, farmers thought the crops would fail completely.

And then at the end of July, wrote Perley, “A bounteous rain gladdened the earth.” It rained again on August 13 and August 16. Three days later, a great rain fell on New England/ And from that time on people had no reason to complain about the drought.

The crops were skimpy, however, and hay was so scarce it sold for four times its normal price the next winter. Grain and hay had to be imported from England. Many farmers slaughtered their cows because they couldn’t afford the price of hay.

The Dry Year

Farmers’ diaries tell the story of the terrible summer when the earth turned to dust.

Jeremiah Weare of York, Maine, called it the “dry year.” He noted hay was very scarce and dear, about $16 to $20 a ton.

Thomas Smith, a farmer in Portland, Maine, described the drought as a “melancholy dry time.” ”All are now looking for an absolute famine,” he wrote.

For the next 19 days, Smith simply recorded the weather as fair. After the bounteous rain on August 19, he no longer lamented the “sore and amazing” drought.

In Danvers, Mass., it didn’t rain until September 22.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Hercules Had It Easy Compared to the Great 1938 Hurricane Tree Cleanup

The Great 1938 Hurricane blew down so many trees that paper mills were still processing them nine years later. Trees downed by the hurricane could still be seen in 1951.

Tree damage in the Boston area from the 1938 Hurricane. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Comparable to Hurricane Katrina, the 1938 Hurricane struck on Sept. 21, 1938. The most powerful storm to make landfall in the Northeast in 200 years, it killed nearly 700 people and destroyed 19,000 buildings and 26,000 automobiles. The hurricane altered the shoreline of Long Island, washed away bridges, severed train service between New York and Boston and between cities in Connecticut and Rhode Island. It brought down 20,000 miles of power and telephone lines.

Often forgotten in accounts of the 1938 Hurricane is the damage it wreaked on New England’s timber. The storm blew down trees in over a third of the region – mostly in southern New Hampshire and central Massachusetts.

The blowdowns posed a dilemma: What to do with enough woody debris to nearly fill Rhode Island? And how to do it quickly enough so it didn’t set off tremendous forest fires?

Preventing Forest Fires

“Local residents felt they were sitting on a powder keg,” wrote Earl Peirce, chief of the division of co-operative forest protection within the U.S. Forest Service. Peirce wrote an account of the cleanup 30 years later.

The biggest tree cleanup would take place on the north shore of Long Island Sound, central Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. New Hampshire Gov. Francis Murphy sent a telegram to President Franklin Roosevelt asking for help. So on Oct. 8, 1938 Roosevelt ordered the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration to clean up the mess.

The stricken region had 50 CCC camps and 15,000 WPA workers. They worked on the tree cleanup for two years.

Damaged trees along a Rhode Island highway.

Trees damaged by the 1938 Hurricane along a Rhode Island highway.

Some damaged areas were too far from the CCC camps or WPA workers. The Forestry Service recruited crews of local men and trained them to do the work. They started in April 1939, working from 19 camps of between 50-100 men.

The 1938 hurricane did most of its timber damage on private land, and landowners had to be tracked down so they could give permission to have the government clean up their blowdowns –at no cost. Still, a few landowners refused to give permission because, in their words, they “had no use for Roosevelt.”

Workers cleared 10,121 miles of roads and trail and disposed of 214,902 acres of debris. All told, they cleared 600,000 acres of debris — nearly the size of Rhode Island.

Too Much Wood

What to do with all that wood piled in hundreds of lots scattered throughout New England?

The Forest Service estimated 1.6 million board feet of lumber — enough to build half a million houses — could be salvaged. Most was white pine.

So the federal government created the Northeastern Timber Salvage Administration (NETSA) to salvage the usable timber.

NETSA set up 246 wet sites – ponds and lakes – to store the logs so they wouldn’t be destroyed by insects or rot. Dry sites were established as well, along with offices in Boston, Hartford, Portland, Worcester, Manchester, N.H., Providence and Montpelier.

The agency was supposed to buy the logs, saw the logs and sell the lumber. NETSA paid $8.3 million to 13,000 landowners, mostly farmers, for timber damaged by the 1938 hurricane. Nearly 59 percent went to New Hampshire landowners.

It had to train people in lumber work: scaling and grading lumber, running sawmils and preventing and suppressing fires.

NETSA bought logs from November 1938 through June 1940. Selling them was another matter. The Great Depression was still on and there wasn’t much demand for lumber. With the exception of a sale to the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, there was little interest in buying the hurricane logs.

Tree Cleanup Proves a Windfall

So the Eastern Pine Sales Corporation formed to buy the lumber from NETSA and to sell it – without flooding the New England lumber market. It was largely controlled by L. Grossman & Sons of Boston. What seemed at first like a risky venture for the Grossman company turned into a coup when the United States entered World War II. L. Grossman & Co. became the largest lumber company in New England.

Most of the lumber from the 1938 hurricane went to local companies with government contracts. They used it for the war effort.

NETSA’s salvage program ended on Dec. 31, 1943, but the lumber would be processed for several more years.

Photo courtesy National Archives.

The paper industry bought millions of logs. The National Archives photo above, taken in 1947, shows the Northern Kraft Paper Mill in Howland, Maine. The mill still used wood from the tree cleanup after the 1938 hurricane.

This story updated in 2022. If you’d like to read more about the 1938 hurricane, click here.

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God Gives Diet Advice to Maine Visionary Ellen Gould White

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John Springer White and Ellen Gould White

After she was hit in the face with a stone, Ellen Gould White received visions from God that gave the world the Seventh-Day Adventist denomination and Kellogg’s corn flakes.

She was probably the most influential Seventh-Day Adventist leader, having published 5,000 periodicals and 140 books – 100 of which are still in print — over her lifetime. She preached the virtues of fresh air, pure water, exercise and a diet of fruit, vegetables, nuts and grains. Her crusade for vegan diets and health reform ultimately resulted in the Seventh-Day Adventist health care network.

Though much of her nutritional advice came from her visions and the Bible, modern scientific researchers say it is sound.

Dr. Agatha Thrash writes that her 19^th century wisdom sounds like dietary advice offered by 21^st century physicians and dietitians. Her beliefs, Thrash said, are validated by scientific evidence that nations consuming the greatest amount of meat and dairy products also have the highest rates of cancer, osteoporosis, heart disease, asthma, and diabetes.

Maine Childhood

Ellen Gould Harmon White was born Nov. 26, 1827, in Gorham, Maine, about 12 miles west of Portland. She was one of eight children, including her twin sister, born to Robert and Eunice Harmon. Their father was a farmer and a hatmaker, and he used mercuric nitrate in his hatmaking – a substance that causes brain damage.

Shortly after Ellen and her sister were born, her father moved the family to Portland. At nine, she was running home with her sister when an older classmate shouted at them and threw a rock that hit Ellen in the face. The injury caused her pain and bitterness, but she later credited it with helping her convert to Methodism. She found God when she and her parents attended a Methodist camp meeting in Buxton, Maine, a few years later.

“The cruel blow…was the means of turning my eyes to heaven,” she later wrote. “I might never had not known Jesus Christ, had not the sorrow that clouded my early years led me to seek comfort in him.”

Visions of Millerism

By 1840, Ellen and her family became followers of William Miller, who famously led thousands of people on a religious wild goose chase in 1843 that ended only when (to his followers’ disappointment) the world did not end.

When the world continued in 1844. Ellen began to experience visions every two or three days, typically in public places or meeting halls. The man who would marry her, Millerite James Springer White, believed she had the power of Biblical prophecy. Others believed she suffered from epilepsy as a result of her head injury.

Her husband and another observer described her typical vision: She began by shouting “Glory!” three times and then fell into a swoon. She recovered with superhuman strength, once holding her parents’ 18-1/2 lb. Bible in her outstretched hand for a half hour – when she weighed 80 lbs. She didn’t breathe, but her pulse was normal and she had a pleasant expression on her face. Sometimes she walked around, though she was unconscious of her surroundings.

When she came out of her trance, everything seemed dark to her. She sighed and said, “Dark.” Then she became limp and weak.

Seventh-Day Adventism

She married White in Portland on Aug. 30, 1846, and they began traveling to Millerite groups to talk about her visions. Eventually her prophecies gained acceptance among groups that had evolved from the Millerites. James White published a periodical for their followers, and Ellen Gould White began writing extensively about her prophecies.

Ellen Gould White in later years.

Seventh-Day Adventism was formally established on May 21, 1863, in Battle Creek, Mich., incorporating many of Ellen Gould White’s doctrines and prophecies. During the past decade, it was the 12^th largest religious denomination with nearly 75,000 churches, 18 million members and 175 hospitals.

James and Ellen Gould White had four sons, but only two lived to adulthood. James suffered from poor health and died on Aug. 6, 1881.

One of the tenets of Seventh-Day Adventism is the commitment to healthy living, something Ellen Gould White preached. She advocated a health food diet, exercise and Nature’s remedies of sunshine and clean water. She campaigned for the church to establish health institutes for the care of the sick and the instruction of health. She taught that all God’s creatures should be treated with love and respect.

Her health food crusade inspired Seventh=Day Adventist John Harvey Kellogg to develop corn flakes.

Some of her sayings:

Overeating has a worse effect upon the system than overworking; the energies of the soul are more effectually prostrated by intemperate eating than by intemperate working.

Grains, fruits, nuts and vegetables constitute the diet chosen for us by our Creator. These foods prepared in as simple and natural a manner as possible, are the most healthful and nourishing.

Meat is not essential for health or strength, else the Lord made a mistake when He provided food for Adam and Eve before their fall.

If ever there was a time when the diet should be of the most simple kind, it is now.

In order to preserve health, temperance in all things is necessary,–temperance in labor, temperance in eating and drinking.

Ellen Gould White died on July 16, 1915 in California.

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Maine’s Mildred Gillars Wanted Fame and She Got It in WWII

Mildred Gillars paid a price for the fame she craved so desperately. She became one of the most hated women in America for her radio propaganda broadcasts on behalf of Germany during World War II.

Mildred Gillars, “Axis Sally,” seated on cot, smoking cigarette, in U.S. Counter Intelligence Headquarters, Berlin, Germany in 1946 (Library of Congress)

Gillars’ childhood started out inauspiciously. She was born in Portland, Maine, in 1900 to Vincent Sisk, a railroad man, and his wife Mae. Both had Canadian roots. But after seven tumultuous years together — Vincent suffered from alcoholism — her parents divorced.

Through friends, Mae met her second husband, Robert Gillars, a dentist. Robert applied for a license to practice in Maine, but couldn’t get one. The family then moved through the Midwest and Canada, returning to Maine when Mildred turned 16. Finally they left for good for Ohio.

By the time she reached adulthood, she had taken on a stepfather’s name — becoming Mildred Gillars — and developed a powerful appetite for fame. She got it.

Mildred Gillars, Actress

Mildred Gillars briefly attended Ohio Wesleyan College, but there the acting bug bit her. So she made her way to New York. In the city, she won small roles in stage plays and in vaudeville shows, but could not get a big break.

In 1928, in a bid to ignite her career, she pulled a stunt. Pretending to be a woman abandoned by her child’s father, she placed an ad in the Camden, N.J., newspaper looking for him. The ad and the news coverage it generated eventually blew up when it was exposed as a publicity plot for a movie about fatherless children.

The fame did little to help Mildred’s career, and in 1929 she traveled to France and on to Algiers, popular destinations for young Americans looking for adventure. She made her way by modeling and teaching English.

In 1933, Mae — whose second husband had turned out to be as big an alcoholic as the first — wrote and told Mildred she would be visiting Hungary, and she invited her daughter to join her.

For the next six years, the two lived in Hungary and later Berlin, Mildred always close to the theater and filmmaking scene. She earned her living, though, as a translator, English teacher and personal assistant.

War Breaks Out

By 1939, however, Hitler’s rule in Germany was growing increasingly autocratic and openly anti-Semitic. Meanwhile, Germany’s war machine was gearing up for all-out conflict. The U.S. State Department was urging U.S. citizens to return home.

Mae returned to the states, but she could not persuade Mildred to join her. In 1940, the war underway, Mildred took a job with the German state radio division, Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, which was then broadcasting on AM frequencies and short-wave.

At Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, Mildred was reunited with her former college professor at Hunter College, Otto Koischwitz. Mildred had several affairs with married men during her life, and she and Koischwitz had had an affair in her New York days. They rekindled their romance in Germany.

With his position as a leader in Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, Koischwitz encouraged Mildred to use her talents on behalf of the Third Reich, as a propaganda broadcaster.

In 1943, Mildred took to the airwaves as “Midge at the mic,” broadcasting English-language shows aimed at Americans. U.S. soldiers nicknamed her “Axis Sally,” a moniker that would stick with her forever.

For close to three years, Mildred Gillars broadcast shows aimed at undermining American morale. Sometimes she would make direct appeals to soldiers to give up the fight. Other times she would suggest they were risking life and limb while the “4-Fs” back home were taking their jobs and their women. Most famously, she would visit U.S. soldiers in hospitals and POW camps to record them giving greetings to their families back home, assuring family and friends of their safety. She would intersperse their recordings with subtle and not-so-subtle jabs at U.S. military prospects.

Listener Bait

The updates from the soldiers were “listener bait,” and the real message was what Mildred Gillars wrapped around those updates about U.S. servicemen. Some examples of her messaging:

“Mothers and dads in America, you’ve no idea what hell your boys have been through. And to thank, they’ve got Franklin D. Roosevelt who promised you American mothers that no American boy would be sacrificed on foreign battlefields. I only wish you could get a little glimpse of the conflict going on in Normandy. Well, Roosevelt asked you to do it for him and you did. Wait until some of these human wrecks get back home once again. You won’t be able to recognize some of them. Believe me, I’ve seen them. Well, this is Midge signing off . . . Good night, America!”

“It’s a disgrace to the American public that they don’t wake up to the fact of what Franklin D. Roosevelt is doing to the gentiles or your country and my country . . . This is a Jewish war and I refuse to participate in it and insist on fighting against it.”

Mildred Gillars mugshot

At the end of the war, Mildred tried to melt back into German society and struggled, with the rest of the country, to move past the trauma of the war. But she knew the U.S. military was still looking for her. In 1946, Mildred Gillars was placed under arrest.

Guilty

In 1949, Mildred was brought to trial in the United States. Armed with transcripts of her broadcasts and eyewitness accounts of soldiers she had interviewed, prosecutors initially charged her with 10 counts of aiding the enemy.

Mildred fought back. She was forced to sign a loyalty oath to Germany out of fear of imprisonment or even death, she said. She claimed Otto Koischwitz held such influence over her that she was virtually hypnotized and helpless to resist when doing her broadcasts.

In the end, the jury found Mildred guilty on just one count of treason – involving a radio play that dramatized an American invasion of Germany, resulting in huge losses. The purpose was to undermine U.S. confidence in the D-Day mission.

Prison

Mildred appealed, claiming freedom of speech protected her, but the appeals court ruled against her. The result was a 10- to 30-year prison sentence for Axis Sally.

Mildred Gillars would spend 13 years in prison in West Virginia before she won parole. She passed up her first chance at parole, apparently unprepared to face the public. When she was finally released in 1961, camera crews awaited her at the prison gate, asking for her thoughts and plans as she made ready to leave with her half-sister.

For once, however, the sultry voice that floated over the airwaves for countless hours during the war had been quieted.

“After 15 years, you don’t feel like having much to say,” she politely explained.

Mildred Gillars would return to Ohio, earn her degree from Ohio Wesleyan and spend some time teaching before finally shutting herself away in a convent, where she died in 1988.

This story was updated in 2022.

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To Discover the Real Bambi, Walt Disney Goes to Maine

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

Still from the trailer of Bambi

Maurice ‘Jake’ Day was one of Disney’s earliest and best known animators and an avid outdoorsman from Damariscotta, Maine.

Edmund Ware Smith’s stories of the outdoors often featured Jake Day and a band of friends back home. They called themselves ‘Jake’s Rangers. Day illustrated Ware’s books, as well as books by Henry Beston and articles in the Atlantic Monthly magazine. He also worked as an editorial cartoonist for the Maine Sunday Telegram before joining Disney’s studio in California.

Disney had obtained the film rights to the timeless story of a young deer’s coming of age. It was originally a novel, Bambi, A Life in the Woods, written in 1923 by Viennese author Felix Salten. Whittaker Chambers, a former Soviet spy, translated the book into English. (Chambers famously testified against Alger Hiss in his perjury trial, compared with the Salem witch trials.)

The book is considered one of the first environmental novels. The Library of Congress placed Bambi on its National Film Registry because of its eloquent message of nature conservation.

Bambi, The Deer

The Bambi who appeared in the novel was a roe deer who lived in a European forest. But roe deer don’t live in the North American wilds. So Disney decided to use a mule deer from Arrowhead, Calif., as a model for Bambi.

Jake Day

Jake Day would have none of it.

To get the right deer and the right forests, Disney would have to go to Maine, he said, and find a white-tailed deer.

Disney challenged him to prove his point.

Jake Day returned to his Maine home, which his family had owned since 1798.

Day took his camera, his backpack and his friend Lester Hall to the Mt. Katahdin region. They then spent months shooting more than a thousand photos of Bambi country.

A white-tailed deer fawn

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 shot at all hours of the day – sometimes at 4 a.m.

Day and Hill studied the script for Bambi in their tent at night to decide what to shoot the next day. What kind of log should Bambi trip over? What was the right setting for Thumper?

Bambi, The Film

Jake Day and the white-tailed deer prevailed. 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 Disney artists didn’t know how to draw deer, and were given special instruction by an animal anatomist. For nine months they sat in a circle around the real Bambi and Faline and sketched them as they lost their spots and grew into adulthood. A few of the drawings became deer fodder.

Artists study the real Bambi in this photo from a Collier’s Magazine Article promoting the film.

Disney was particular about the movie’s images. The artists drew 2 million drawings for the film. Only 400,000 were used. When an artist heard Disney coming down the hallway to nitpick their work, he used code words to warn the others: “Man is in the forest.”

A boy was chosen for Bambi’s voice, but it took so long to create the film his voice changed in the middle of it. They found another boy, Donnie Dunagan, who later joined the Marines. Dunagan didn’t tell anyone about his role in the film because he feared being nicknamed ‘Bambi.’

Back To Maine

Bambi premiered in London on Aug. 8, 1942, then in New York, and had its first public showing – appropriately – in Portland, Maine.

By 1944, Jake Day was tired of California and returned with his family to Damariscotta for six months every year. In a wooden shed behind his house he carved birds and animals for sale, painted, photographed and hiked. He designed the Baxter State Park logo, where he was named ‘Artist in Residence.’

He climbed Mt. Katahdin on his 75^th birthday and would have done the same on his 80^th but the black flies were too bad. He died at 90 years old in 1983 at home in Damariscotta.

In 2011, Bambi was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. The American Film Institute ranked as third on the list of the Top 10 animated movies.

Images: Bambi movie poster By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3891543. Still from the film: By Walt Disney Company – Original trailer (1942)https://archive.org/details/BambiTrailer, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72320508.

This story was updated in 2022.

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