Tag:

Stonington Maine

Maine Statehood: The Mexit From Massachusetts in 1820

The story of Maine statehood is also the story of a province and a people exploited by absentee owners and left defenseless in a time of war.

Most people view Maine statehood through the lens of the Missouri Compromise. To settle the national question of slavery, for a little while at least, Maine was admitted as a free state and Missouri as a slave state.

A fish weir in Maine

But, like Brexit two centuries later, Maine statehood resulted from an aggrieved but divided populace. It took longer than Brexit — 28 years. It also took six referendums and a war before the District of Maine escaped the rapacious grasp (to some) of Massachusetts.

But they did it, and Maine statehood began on March 15, 1820.

“The day was noticed, as far as we have heard from the various towns by every demonstration of joy and heart-felt congratulation, becoming the occasion,” reported the Eastern Argus on March 21, 1820.

Before Maine Statehood

Maine had once been an independent colony, but in 1691 the English Crown granted a charter giving Maine to Massachusetts.

Then for a century Maine languished as a colony of Massachusetts. In 1750, the population of Maine was pretty much the same as it had been 100 years earlier: about 10,000.

Fishing vessel

The reason? Violence. The French claimed nearly half of eastern Maine. They allied with the Wabanaki Confederacy and waged nearly a century of intermittent war against English settlers. Fighting between the English and the French and Indians started with King Philip’s War in 1675 and ended with the end of the French and Indian War in 1763.

From 1689 to 1713, there wasn’t a single English home north of Wells. And today, Maine has virtually no 17^th-century houses in the state.

Only when the final Anglo-French war wound down did land-hungry Yankees start migrating en masse to Maine.

Land, Lots of Land

After the American Revolution, Maine’s population exploded. It rose from 56,321 in 1784 to 96,540 in 1790.

The land office couldn’t keep up with demand for land at $1 an acre up to 150 acres. Settlers could even claim 100 acres for free if they managed to clear 16 acres within four years.

Maine blueberry barren

Speculators, like William Bingham and Henry Knox, paid as little as 25 cents an acre for tracts of land the size of Rhode Island. When the American Revolution ended, Maine’s population had grown to 56,321. By 1820, 298,335 people lived in Maine.

Sardine Factory, by Leslie Landrigan

Maine began to prosper from fishing, lumber, shipbuilding and shipping, also known as the coasting or carrying trade.

Nineteenth-century records from Wiscasset show Maine’s “astonishing” dependence on lumber and shipping lumber, according to historian Ronald Banks. From January 1800 to January 1812, except two years for which figures are unavailable, 576 vessels left the port, wrote Banks. All 576 carried a main cargo of lumber, staves and other timber products. Only 20 carried something along with lumber. “There is no reason to believe Wiscasset was unique,” wrote Banks.

Maine in 1798

Blue Hill built so many ships that sawdust now makes up most of the first eight feet of mud in the inner harbor.

And yet the people who prospered most in Maine couldn’t catch up to those in Boston. The “better element” began to agitate for separation, arguing that Massachusetts overtaxed and underrepresented them. Boston, too, siphoned the profit from shipping and lumber through trade regulations.

From 1792 to 1807, Mainers took three votes on separating from Massachusetts. All three failed.

The Coasting Law

A big reason for Maine statehood to fail was a federal law governing interstate shipping. Congress gave Maine shippers a competitive advantage when it passed the Coasting Law of 1789.

Most coasting vessels were schooners like this (National Gallery of Art)

Coasting vessels, typically schooners, hauled cargo up and down the coast, much like trucks today carry freight on the interstate. The 1789 law required coasting vessels to clear customs in every state except the state next door.

As part of Massachusetts, Maine coasters didn’t have to clear customs until they reached New Jersey, a considerable advantage to Mainers. If Maine were to separate, coasters would have to clear customs in Massachusetts–a costly and time-consuming prospect.

Separation

The War of 1812 gave Mainers a new reason to separate from Massachusetts. Many in Massachusetts opposed the war, and Gov. Caleb Strong refused to send Massachusetts militiamen into the fight. He left Maine on its own. The British captured Castine, Belfast, Eastport and sacked Bangor and Hampden.

Strong did lift one finger in defense of Maine. He appointed a wealthy capitalist from Bath, William King, major general of the Maine militia.

After the war, William King did not forget Massachusetts’ negligence. Nor did many Mainers.

William King

King and many of the people of Maine were Republican-Democrats who supported Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Massachusetts, on the other hand, was dominated by Federalists. King believed the Federalists shut Republican-Democrats out of patronage and lucrative land, bank and insurance charters.

But the Federalists were on the way out, and the Republican-Democrats were on the rise. Maine’s Republican-Democrats thought statehood would bring lower taxes and freedom from self-important—and self-dealing–Federalists.

One of Maine’s many working waterfronts.

Many small farmers had grievances against the large landowners who charged them rent for land they thought they’d gotten free. Or they kicked the farmers off land they’d cleared and didn’t pay them for the improvements. The small fry in Maine’s interior thought Maine statehood would enable them to right those wrongs.

Besides, Maine was big enough to be its own state now, with a population of nearly 300,000.

Many Massachusetts Federalists wanted to free themselves from the Republican-Democrat Mainers who threatened to dominate them politically. They could solve that problem by cutting the province loose. So the Massachusetts Legislature on May 20, 1816, agreed to let Maine vote for separation.

Maine Statehood Fails in 1816

Maine held two votes in 1816 on statehood, and both times statehood lost. Coastal towns dependent on shipping voted overwhelmingly against it. No county cast more votes against separation than Hancock County. In heavily Federalist Blue Hill not one person from that town supported statehood. (The 1816 vote went 0-59 and 0-77.)

Stonington, Maine

William King realized the coastal towns voted against statehood because of the 1789 Coasting Law. Maine statehood would hurt Maine shipping and shipbuilding. Maine coasters couldn’t go all the way to New Jersey without clearing customs; they’d have to do it in Massachusetts.

The Maine State Capitol in Augusta.

Fortunately for William King, he had a brother, Rufus, a U.S. senator from New York. Rufus King and other allies in the Senate managed to revise the Coasting law.

And so on July 26, 1819, Maine took its sixth and final vote for statehood. A total of 17,091 voted for full Maine statehood versus 7,132 for remaining a province of Massachusetts.

Less than three months later, delegates from all over Maine traveled to Portland for the state constitutional convention. They took 18 days to draft a constitution, overwhelmingly approved by a popular vote in January 1820.

On March 15, 1820, William King became Maine’s first governor. Maine statehood was a reality.

With thanks to Ronald F. Banks, Separation of Maine from Massachusetts 1785-1820.

This story was updated in 2022.

0 comment 1.3k views

When Sardines Were Bigger Than Lobsters, Maine Women Had Good Jobs

In the Downeast town of Stonington, Maine, the women used to listen for the factory whistle, which blew when a boat came in loaded with sardines.

A sardine factory worker, identity unknown.

They hustled to the long, low wood building on the wharf. They donned rubber aprons, took their positions on the cold, slippery floor and picked up their scissors. There amid the awful clatter of machinery they snipped the heads and tails off the tiny fish. Then they packed them into the tins, careful to avoid cutting their fingers on the sharp edges.

For thousands of women, life revolved around the cannery when Maine was the hectic hub of the sardine business. Nearly every town along the coast had at least one small sardine factory. Some had more than a dozen.

Now the sardine factories are all gone, and stories of the women who worked there would be forgotten were it not for three amateur historians.

“What was very poignant was that many of the women that we interviewed said that they would return to work at the factory if it were open today,” said Gail Sytsema, a Stonington summer resident. “There was a marvelous sense of support amongst the women in a job that was so challenging.”

Sytsema used to take a daily walk along Stonington Harbor by the old sardine factory – now the Isle Au Haut boat service. She grew curious about the people who once worked there. Sytsema enlisted Sharon Hellstedt and later Trish Brierley in finding out more. The women spent the next five years combing the state of Maine, researching the sardine industry, collecting artifacts and interviewing former workers.

Stonington Sardines

The Stonington sardine factory today

Stonington lies at the southern tip of Deer Isle, where lobstering is now the biggest industry. Back in the day, it used to be cutting granite and catching and packing sardines.

Like many sardine workers, Anita Oliver had fond memories of work at the Stonington cannery.

“We could talk all day, laugh,” she said. “That was the best time of my life.”

Oliver was speaking on a video produced in 2012 by Stonington’s Opera House Arts and researched by the three friends. In the video, Oliver and four former sardine workers — Ann Eaton, Janet Nevells, Catherine Larrabee and Kathy Eaton Gray — talk about the good old days in the cannery.

The video is on display at the Deer Isle-Stonington Historical Society as part of an exhibit about the cannery. The Maine Coast Sardine History Museum tells the story in Jonesport, once home to 15 sardine canneries. The Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport has produced a video about the Jacob Pike, a sardine carrier (view it here).

A Short Sardine History

There is no actual ‘sardine’ fish; they are pilchards, small oily fish in the herring family. They were once a luxury food, while lobster was food for poor people.

Sardines were served with special little dishes and forks. Before Prohibition, bartenders set out sardines and crackers instead of popcorn and mixed nuts. In 1935 Oscar Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland started a sardine tasting club in London.

During World War II, sardine canneries flourished with large government orders for the troops. Sardines then became the ramen of convenience food, a staple of every workman’s lunchbox and Friday night supper for the poor immigrant family.

The industry reached its peak in the early 1950s, with nearly 6,000 workers at more than 50 canneries in Maine.

Stonington

Stonington’s first sardine cannery started in 1867. A state-of-the-art sardine factory was built on the harbor in 1911. It became the town’s largest employer, with more than 100 employees, mostly women. Women were quicker at packing the small tins.

The cannery also provided work for fishermen, seiners and truck drivers.

Ann Eaton’s husband a fishermen making $50 a week. They had one child and one on the way. It was pretty obvious she had to get a job. At the sardine factory she found income, empowerment and lasting friendships.

The work was hard and the women worked quickly, as they were paid by the can. The women talked and joked all day. Sometimes they played practical jokes on each other. “We had some good times,” said Janet Nevells. “You couldn’t leave your table,” said Catherine Larrabee, one of her victims.

Red Feed

A sardine packing card

Many women taped their fingers to protect them. “You could get some good little can cuts,” said Ann Eaton.

Sometimes their hands broke out in sores and bled in reaction to bacteria from undigested red feed, a small marine crustacean eaten by the fish. Red feed also caused the fish to break down as they were handled.

The women rebelled against the red feed. Some left their tables. left the building. Some put the affected fish down the flume – a hole near the tables where the heads and tails were thrown. The boss then made sure they didn’t use fish with undigested red feed.

Changing the Law

Work wasn’t steady. The women worked when the factory whistle blew or later when the radio station in Rockland told them to go to work. When they worked a cumulative number of hours, they were eligible for the unemployment benefits to which they contributed.

But a quirk in the law said cannery workers had to work steadily through their shifts to receive unemployment. If a worker took a half hour off during the month, she couldn’t collect her benefits.

The women protested it wasn’t fair. They didn’t know when they’d work, and sometimes they couldn’t avoid picking up a child or going to a dentist appointment.

Maine Statehouse

In 1979, Anita Oliver and Donna Stinson went to the unemployment office and were told they’d never change the law. They went to the Maine Legislature in Augusta.

“We said we believe in it and it’s time something was changed because it’s not right,” Oliver said. “I said if you’re the sole provider of a family and you don’t get a paycheck for a week, what are you going to do, fall on the state?”

Their representative introduced a bill to correct the injustice. It passed.

Gov. Joe Brennan came to Deer Isle for a fundraiser and asked to see them. “You changed that law,” he said. “We were so happy because everyone said you couldn’t do it,” Oliver said.

End of the Line

The recreated sardine factory office at the Deer Isle-Stonington Historical Society.

But time was running out for the sardine factory. Tastes were changing, and other kinds of convenience food replaced sardines. Tuna fish was marketed to the masses with great success.

Sandy Oliver, a food historian who lives on Islesboro, said tuna dealt a body blow to the sardine industry.

“Marketing matters,” she told the Bangor Daily News. “What tuna fish producers did in the 1950s and 1960s was remarkable.”

Sardine Factory, by Leslie Landrigan

Overfishing Sardines

There were other reasons for the death of the U.S. sardine industry: Overfishing. Regulation. Globalization.

Ann Eaton could see that overfishing would doom the factory, which also packed fish steaks.

“They would come in with these big fish, and they were full of spawn,” she said. “They did it for years. We could see it. They said, ‘You keep this up. You’re killin’ em’.”

New environmental and safety codes also killed the industry. In Stonington, the waters around the factory turned red on days when the sardines were packed in tomato sauce, yellow when they were packed in mustard. The factory burned coal, so soot and dust settled on clothes drying on nearby lines. And the wooden floor was a fire hazard.

In 1992, the Stonington sardine workers hung up their aprons for the last time.

It would have cost too much to bring the cannery up to code, Eaton said.

The Stonington sardine factory shut down suddenly in 1992. “We never dreamed it would close,” said Kathy Eaton Gray. Seventy women lost their jobs. Some went to work housekeeping for a local motel or working for the new nursing home.

All along the Maine coast, canneries were bought, stripped and closed as the industry consolidated and moved offshore. There are still huge sardine factories in Portugal, China, Australia and India.

On April 18, 2010, Stinson Seafood, the last sardine factory in Maine, closed in Prospect Harbor.

There’s no question the sardine workers regret the death of the industry. “If that factory was there today, I’d want to work there,” said Ann Eaton.

This story updated in 2022.

Images: Maine Statehouse By Albany NY at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8502630

5 comments 508 views

The Real Burt Dow, Deep-Water Man

The real Burt Dow was an oceangoing man who lived in a Maine fishing village, liked kids and animals and was handy around the house. But he wasn’t exactly the kind of person you’d expect to be immortalized in a book and an opera.

He made friends, though, with children’s book author Robert McCloskey, who summered near his home on Deer Isle, Maine. McCloskey wrote a fictional tale featuring the real Burt Dow in 1963, the year before Dow died. Then in 2010, the Stonington Opera House turned Burt Dow, Deep Water Man, was into a children’s opera. Six years later, a local actor portrayed Burt Dow near his grave in the Mount Adams Cemetery as part of a fundraiser for the Stonington Public Library.

The village of Stonington at the tip of Deer Isle.

Burt Dow

In McCloskey’s book, Burt Dow takes his leaky boat, the Tidely-Idley, out on the water with his sidekick, the Giggling Gull. Along the way he gets swallowed by a whale. To extricate himself, he splashes the whale’s stomach with left-over boat paint and sediment sludge. The whale then gets indigestion and expels the contents of his stomach

Lobster boats off Deer Isle

The real Burt Dow never got swallowed by a whale. Whales have only swallowed people on rare occasions — three in recorded history, except for Jonah. And McCloskey’s description of a whale swallowing a human has an element of whimsy missing in the harrowing tale of a 19^th-century Cape Codder named Peleg Nye falling into a whale’s mouth. But the book has many elements of truth in it, especially the way it captures the essence of a coastal Maine fishing community.

Deer Isle

The Deer Isle Bridge

Deer Isle is a large island off the Blue Hill peninsula, accessible by a high iron suspension bridge over Eggemoggin Reach. The island is home to fishermen, farmers, stonecutters, artists and summer visitors, and includes the towns of Deer Isle and Stonington.

Stonington Opera House

In anticipation of the library fundraiser, Deer Isle residents went on a quest to discover the real Burt Dow.

From his headstone, which McCloskey helped pay for, we know his dates: born in 1882 and died in 1964, the year after the publication of the book about him.

Local people say he was on one of the last working three-masted schooners to sail around Cape Horn.

Wonderful Memories

Mary Lott, who summered on the island, knew and admired Burt Dow as a child in the late 1950s and early 1960s. “He would say, ‘I’m not a captain, I’m a mate’,” she said. She was pretty sure he had sailed around the world.

Her father kept a diary, and noted how Burt Dow showed up, then showed up again. “Burt said he had helped build our cottage,” Lott said. The stairs down to the water had washed out, and her father asked if he could make a ramp. He did.

Deer Isle cottage

“Dad said, ‘Could you do this, this and this’?” said Lott. Soon Burt Dow had a list of things to do, and he’d join the family for dinner.

She remembers Burt Dow had hairy ears and chewed tobacco, always carrying his can with him. He had a weathered complexion, and he wore wool pants and a raggedy sweater or shirt.

A Sweetheart

Most of all, she remembered him as sweet. He showed Mary and her brother the best place to find berries and where to fish for scallops. He taught them to row his little boat. Burt Dow also lent them a five-foot model schooner he had made – with rigging – to sail around the harbor near their home. And he gave the McCloskey girls a rabbit.

He lived with or near his brother, a farmer, and his sister, who sometimes babysat for young Mary Lott and her brother.

In the book, McCloskey wrote:

That pink plank,” he says, “is the color of Ginny Poor’s pantry… and the green one is the color of the floor and doors in Doc Walton’s waiting-room… and there’s the tan porch and trim color from Capt’n Haskell’s house.

Ray Dinsmore as Burt Dow

Burt Dow didn’t have a fishing boat of his own, but as a resident of Deer Isle he had a lobster license. So he borrowed the boat of his good friend, Capt. Stacy Haskell.

He did own a rowboat, which he did paint from leftover paint from Ginny Poor’s pantry. Today, island visitors can stay at one of two Ginny Poor’s cottages at the Pilgrim’s Inn.

As a fourth-grader, Mary Lott had to write an essay on the person she most admired. She chose Burt Dow. “I always had wonderful memories of Burt,” she said.

This story was updated in 2022.

1 comment 750 views

John Steinbeck Gets Lost in the Magic of Deer Isle, Maine (And Gets Lost, Too)

Of all the places John Steinbeck visited during his famous road trip across America, the island of Deer Isle stood out as mysterious, evocative and easy to get lost in.

If you haven’t been to Deer Isle, it’s a large island off the Blue Hill peninsula, accessible by a high iron suspension bridge over Eggemoggin Reach. The island is home to fishermen, farmers, stonecutters, artists and summer visitors, as it was in Steinbeck’s time. It includes two towns, Deer Isle and Stonington.

Stonington is the largest lobster port in Maine.

Deer Isle

“This Isle is like Avalon; it must disappear when you are not there,” wrote Steinbeck in the travelogue about his 10,000-mile journey, Travels With Charley In Search of America.

Sand Beach in Deer Isle.

John Steinbeck was born on Feb. 27, 1902 in Salinas Calif.. At 58, he had left his home on Long Island in the fall of 1960, accompanied by his poodle Charley. He drove a green pickup truck fitted with a custom camper shell. According to Steinbeck’s son Thom, Steinbeck took the journey because he knew he was dying and wanted to see the country one last time. (He had a heart condition and didn’t die until Dec. 20, 1968.)

Steinbeck explained in the book why he started out in Maine:

I wanted to go to the rooftree of Maine to start my trip before turning west. It seemed to give the journey a design, and everything in the world must have design or the human mind rejects it.

Deer Isle in the distance, from Caterpillar Hill in Sedgwick.

Steinbeck had a lousy sense of direction, and described how he got thoroughly lost in Bangor. He remembered he needed to get back on Highway 1, found it and drove 10 miles in the wrong direction. He got lost in Ellsworth, something nearly impossible to do in 1960. Then the roads narrowed and the lumber trucks roared past him. He spent the whole day lost, even though he found Blue Hill and Sedgwick.

His literary agent had insisted he visit Deer Isle. He was immediately struck by the place.

“One doesn’t have to be sensitive to feel the strangeness of Deer Isle,” he wrote. Everything stood out, he noticed, and the people had the same quality. “I would hate to try to force them to do anything they didn’t want to do.”

Stonington. Definitely a quirky place.

Stonington

The Town of Stonington especially intrigued him:

Stonington, Deer Isle’s chief town, does not look like an American town at all in place or in architecture. Its houses are layered down to the calm water of the bay. This town very closely resembles Lyme Regis on the coast of Dorset, and I would willingly bet that its founding settlers came from Dorset or Somerset or Cornwall.

Well, no. They came from Massachusetts. He continued:

Maine speech is very like that in West Country England, the double vowels pronounced as they are in Anglo-Saxon, but the resemblance is doubly strong on Deer Isle. And the coastal people below the Bristol Channel are secret people, and perhaps magic people. There’s aught behind their eyes, hidden away so deep that perhaps even they do not know they have it. And that same thing is so in Deer Islers.

Stonington

In Stonington he ate a lobster and bought a kerosene lamp at a store he called “half hardware, half ship’s chandler.” Then he drove on along the coast, to Aroostook County and along the perimeter of the United States.

Downtown Stonington at night.

Travels With Charley came out in 1962 to much acclaim.

John Steinbeck in 1962

Not Entirely Factual

Steinbeck never said Travels With Charley was completely factual. He left out many things. Blogger Bill Steigerwald carefully traced Steinbeck’s journey and learned something new about his stay on Deer Isle: He caught part of the Nixon-Kennedy presidential debates there on Sept. 28, 1960. In a letter to Adlai Stevenson, Steinbeck wrote about his distress that the candidates acted so courteously to each other.

He did include an anecdote about Mainers that may or may not be true, given his frustration with the directions he received when he got lost.

He was told never to ask directions of a Maine native. “Why ever not?” he asked. Came the reply:

Somehow we think it is funny to misdirect people, and we don’t smile when we do it, but we laugh inwardly. It is our nature.

This story last updated in 2022.

17 comments 497 views