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Wells Maine

The Menhaden Wars Come to Maine

Sometime around 1850, an elderly lady from Blue Hill, Maine, set off the menhaden wars that would roil the Maine coast for 30 years.

Like many coastal Mainers, Mrs. John Bartlett and her family scraped out a living by fishing and farming. One day she boiled a kettle of menhaden to make some food for her chickens. But then she skimmed the oil that rose to the top, put it in a jar and took it to Boston.

Mrs. John Bartlett then walked into a shop owned by an oil dealer, Eben. B. Phillips. She told him about the vast schools of menhaden, also known as pogies, that swarmed along Maine’s coast. He said he’d pay her $11 for every barrel of menhaden she brought him, and he gave her a seine net.

Pretty soon Mrs. Bartlett’s husband and sons were busy catching menhaden. In their second year of operation, they sold Phillips 100 barrels, earning more than five times what an average Maine fisherman made in a year.

By 1861, menhaden had grown into the largest fishery in the United States, with a fleet of 200 vessels, 4,000 fishermen and 30 factories.

Mrs. Bartlett’s jar of fish oil established the first industrial fishery — which collapsed within 30 years.

Menhaden Wars

The menhaden, commonly known as pogy or mossbunker, is a fatty, smelly, inedible fish. Generally viewed with contempt, the fish for centuries was used for bait, fertilizer and animal feed.

Around the time Mrs. Bartlett took her jar of oil to Boston, the whaling industry had started its long decline. Menhaden oil began to replace whale oil for dressing leather, for lamp oil and for making soap, rope and paint.

Pogies seemed inexhaustible. One Newport, R.I., sea captain reported seeing a school of menhaden off Portland two miles wide and 40 miles long. Ichthyologist G. Brown Goode said he heard a story that 1.3 million menhaden were caught in a single haul in New Haven Harbor – and he believed it.

Blue Hill, Maine, in 1920, well after the menhaden wars killed the fishery.

Very little goes unnoticed in a small coastal town like Blue Hill. Mrs. Bartlett’s neighbors saw the money they could make in the menhaden oil business. Fishermen started going after pogies in Hancock and Waldo counties in Maine.

Until about 1860 it remained a cottage industry. Small sloops, schooners and dories caught menhaden with gillnets and seines. The fishermen then took their catch ashore to try works, large kettles on outdoor hearths. After just 30 minutes of boiling, the oil was poured into locally made barrels and shipped off on coasting schooners.

Some people began to wonder if they weren’t leaving too much oil in the fish before getting rid of them. So Phillips, the Boston oil dealer, outfitted 50 families in Maine with mechanical screw presses to crank out even more menhaden oil. The presses, along with steam processing, transformed the fish oil business from a cottage industry into a leading coastal industry.

Pogy Mania

Pogy mania then spread along the northeast coast – on Cape Cod, along Boston’s South Shore, in Rhode Island, Long Island and Connecticut.

The farmer’s fish was becoming an industrial commodity. Fish oil factories were springing up all along the Maine coast, replacing the primitive kettles and hearths on the shore.

Within five years, fishermen in Maine began to see the effects of overfishing. Food fish like cod, mackerel and haddock feed on menhaden. Pogy mania, they believed, was causing the fish stocks to decline. Hundreds of Mainers who fished with hook and line began to protest the menhaden slaughter. They blamed the seiners for harvesting an unsustainable amount of pogies.

Fishermen from Boothbay, Surry, Ellsworth and Sedgwick sent petitions to the Legislature demanding an end to seine fishing. In 1855, lawmakers met them partway, banning the practice in bays, inlets and harbors.

The First of the Menhaden Wars

Bigger and bigger fish oil factories went up all along the New England coast. In 1864, a commercial fish oil operation started in Bristol, R.I. it cost $12,000, with buildings, boilers, engine, pipes, wharf, hydraulic press and cooking tanks. Rhode Island, along with New York, would dominate the fish oil business for the next decade.

By 1870 more than 90 menhaden reduction plants lined the coast from Maine to North Carolina.

But Maine attracted fishermen from all over coastal New England because it had the best menhaden. Pogies travel north to the Gulf of Maine, and by the time they arrive they’ve gotten good and fat feeding on the plankton along the way.

The sight of out-of-staters gathering up huge catches of menhaden in enormous nets incensed the Maine fishermen. Up and down the coast, they demanded the Legislature do something. Lawmakers responded, passing a bill in 1865 forbidding out-of-state fishermen from seining in state waters up to three miles out. Violators would get fined heavily and forfeit their boats and gear. The law exempted small nets, though, and coastal residents could still seine in their own town waters.

Menhaden Trust

But the industrialists who harvested and processed menhaden oil on a large scale organized itself into the Association of the Menhaden Oil and Guano Manufacturers of Maine, the so-called Menhaden Trust. It used its wealth and growing power to persuade the Maine Legislature in 1866 to loosen some of the new restrictions on menhaden seining. The new law let county commissioners give permits to seine for menhaden – which mean out-of-staters could once again harvest Maine fish in state waters.

The change outraged Maine fishermen, convinced the industrial operators would wipe out the menhaden and with it, the cod, haddock and mackerel that fed on them. They complained the fish oil factories had diminished their catch by a third.

Petitioners from Brunswick complained. “The interests of the many demand protection from the monopoly of the few wealthy capitalists, who by this means may appropriate the whole fishing privilege upon the coast,” they argued.

But the hundreds of people fishing for the Menhaden Trust and working in their factories supported the loosened restrictions.

Massachusetts Menhaden Wars

By 1865, fishermen in Massachusetts divided over the same issue that had riled Maine fishermen. The commonwealth had banned purse seines, which could encircle and harvest entire schools of fish.

Line-and-hook fishermen opposed seining for pogies because they feared it would destroy the cod and mackerel fisheries. Others wanted to overturn the ban on purse seining. They argued that pogies were an inexhaustible resource that could bring wealth to coastal communities.

Lawmakers turned to the Fisheries Committee to resolve the dispute. The solution they came up with: They told the line-and-hook fishermen they could seine for pogies themselves in their own towns without getting a license.

The Crash of 1879

Until 1870, wind had powered all the vessels fishing for menhaden. But in 1870, the Church brothers, Rhode Island’s pogie barons, launched the first menhaden steamer called Seven Brothers.

In 1873, the first menhaden steamer appeared in Maine waters. By the middle of the 1870s, the fish oil business had moved to Maine from Rhode Island and New York. In 1875, historian Samuel Adams Drake predicted the extinction of the menhaden.

No longer did a fleet of small sailboats and dories fish for pogies using small seine nets. Instead, the Menhaden Trust ran the show. They had 48 steamers and 13 sailing vessels, employing 727 fishermen on their vessels and 300 men in their factories.

Maine’s largest factory could process 4,000 barrels of pogy oil a day, up from 500 a day just a few years earlier.

By then no one could ignore the depletion of the cod and mackerel stocks. Menhaden disappeared from the waters off Maine’s easternmost towns, Jonesport and Lubec.

In 1879, Maine fishermen told the U.S. Fish Commission that menhaden no longer schooled near shore anymore as they had for decades. Maine lawmakers again responded by banning seining in inland waters.

It was too late.

No More Pogies

The menhaden fishery crashed. In Maine, menhaden landings fell from a million pounds of menhaden landings in 1878 to 20,000 in 1879. Factories sat idle. Hook fishermen had no bait and no income. Steamers with purse seines had cleaned the pogies out of the water. There would be no more pogies in Maine for six years.

Alarm spread throughout New England over the collapse of the fisheries.

Bills were introduced in Congress to protect the menhaden, for example, by requiring larger holes in seine nets and banning pogy fishing within two miles of the coast. But the Menhaden Trust, led by Rhode Island fish processers, killed any serious effort to save the fishery.

In 1880, ichthyologist G. Brown Goode described the menhaden decline: “More than 40 steamers went out into the Gulf of Maine in July,” he wrote. “To return in a few weeks without wetting their nets.”

But Goode, in the thrall of the Menhaden Trust, remained in denial about the cause of the fishery collapse.

“After reciting numerous theories on the subject, and showing their improbability, the speaker gave it as his opinion that they were kept away by the decrease in the temperature of the water, caused probably by a deflection of the polar currents. A vote of thanks was unanimously given to Prof. Goode for his able and instructive treatise.” According to the New York Times on Jan. 15, 1880.

Gone for Good

Goode was wrong. Industrial overfishing killed the menhaden fishery in New England.

“The fish have not been encountered in abundance in the coastal waters in that area since,” wrote Fred C. June for the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries in 1961.

Instead, they moved south.

Elijah Reed, a menhaden fisherman from Maine, grew frustrated with the menhaden wars and went south to find more abundant fishing grounds. In 1867 he put down roots by the Chesapeake Bay, where fishermen hadn’t started going after menhaden. He built a fish oil factory on Cockrell’s Creek. The town that grew up around menhaden fishing and processing named itself Reedville, after Elijah Reed.

By 1900, the menhaden industry was centered in New Jersey and Virginia. It never returned to New England.

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Saint-Castin, the French Baron Who Drove the English From Maine

A 13-year-old son of a French baron named Jean-Vincent d’Abaddie de Saint-Castin arrives in Maine in 1665 to quell the Iroquois and conquer North America. Brutal colonial wars will soon pull Saint-Castin into the fighting among the Dutch, the French, the English and the Abenaki.

To outsiders, Saint-Castin’s allegiances may seem to veer between the French and the English, but he remains steadfast in his loyalty to the Abenaki people. He learns their ways and their language, and they adopt him as one of their own. He marries Molly Mathilde, the daughter of an Abenaki chief. And he commands military operations that drive the English from Maine in the latter half of the 17^th century.

Artist William Lowe’s conception of Saint-Castin

Those, at least, are the broad outlines of the life of Jean-Vincent d’Abaddie de Saint-Castin. A descendant of kings and cousin to a Three Musketeer. An Indian sachem. A skillful hunter, a rich fur trader. A bold, hardy, adroit and tenacious guerilla fighter.

To New Englanders, their most dangerous enemy.

Saint-Castin

He was born in France in 1652, the second son and third child of a French baron. His mother was a cousin of Henri d’Aramits, immortalized by Alexander Dumas as Aramis. She was also a direct descendant of Louis VIII.

His mother died of the plague when he was a baby, and his father before he reached his teens. At 13, Saint-Castin joined the French Army—not all that unusual for the younger son of a French nobleman.

Louis XIV

His king, Louis XIV, had dreams of kicking the English out of North America.

In 1665, he sent the 1200 men of Saint-Castin’s regiment, the Carignan Salieres, to eastern Canada. They sailed in seven ships to Quebec City, Saint Castin as an ensign in the company of Hector d’Andigne de Grandfontaine, later governor of New France.

By the time the young nobleman arrived, the French had been coming to Acadia to trade and fish for more than a century.

They got along well with the people who already lived in the land they called the Dawnland. Five peoples of the Dawnland — the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki and Penobscot – had banded together in the Wabanaki Confederacy.

“…[N]ever did the Abenakis consider the French as entertaining expansionistic designs that would have deprived them of their lands and rights, whereas they lived under constant threat of the same from their English neighbors,” wrote historian Paul Chasse.

Great Dying

The Indians exchanged beaver skins with the French for blankets, needles, knives and guns. Eventually they came to depend on those items, especially guns.

But the French and other Europeans also brought plague. Epidemics of smallpox, typhus and influenza hit Maine especially hard. The Great Dying of 1616-1619 killed three-quarters of Maine’s Indians.

The Wabanaki population, estimated at 20,000 (except for Mi’kmaq) before contact with Europeans, fell to about 5,000 around 1620.

As the Indian population declined, the French population increased. When Saint-Castin arrived, French speakers amounted to about 10,000 in New France. However, only about a thousand French people inhabited Acadia, which bordered New England and included Maine, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

But the English population was growing faster than the French. With about 50,000 settlers in New England by the 1670s, they started pushing east. They would claim Maine—Acadia—all the way to the Penobscot River. The French claimed Acadia extended to the Kennebec River. That, of course, meant conflict.

Beaver Wars

But the beaver, not the English, first drew the French into war in North America. Their skins made fine felt hats, a hot fashion item in European capitals.

The thirst for beaver skins, though, had wiped out much of the beaver in North America. The Wabanaki’s enemies to the west, the Iroquois, started to cast covetous eyes on the Wabanaki beaver territory and on fur trading posts in New France. And so the Beaver Wars began.

Iroquois warrior with musket around 1730

The French king sent the Carignan Salieres to Canada to eliminate the Iroquois threat to New France. It is likely, writes Georges Cerbelaud Salagnac, that Saint-Castin took part in a 1666 campaign against the Iroquois.

The campaign succeeded, and in 1667, the French, the Wabanaki and the Iroquois made peace.

Fort Pentagoet

At 18, Ensign Saint-Castin sailed to a tiny coastal fort called Pentagoet with his captain Hector D’Andigne de Grandfontaine. The English had agreed to cede Acadia to the French. Grandfontaine had orders to oversee the transfer and develop the colony as its governor. He made Pentagoet, now Castine, Acadia’s capital.

Fort Pentagoet lay at the mouth of the Penobscot River near an Abenaki village. The great chief of the Abenaki, Madokawando, and his family spent summers there fishing and hunting. When winter arrived, they paddled upstream to their winter home on Indian Island. There a French missionary converted many of them to Catholicism.

Map of the original Fort Pentagoet

Be Fruitful and Multiply

To strengthen New France with more French settlers, Louis XIV made the Carignan Salieres soldiers an offer. He gave them rations, land and money (depending on their rank) if they stayed. He encouraged them to marry, even sending 800 women – ‘the king’s daughters’ – as marriage bait. It was even okay to marry Indian women.

In the end, about 450 French soldiers – including Saint-Castin – stayed.

Saint-Castin found the wilderness and the Abenaki to his liking, and he adopted many of their ways. He also formed a friendship with Madokawando.

But the 30 or so soldiers at Fort Pentagoet struggled. The government of New France paid little attention to its wilderness outpost, leaving it to fend for itself. To survive, Grandfontaine had to trade with the English who came by sea. But French officials forbade commercial ties with the English. Soon they replaced Grandfontaine with an army officer named Jacques de Chambly.

Anglo-Dutch War

In 1674, a raid on Fort Pentagoet became a turning point in Saint-Castin’s life. The French and the English allied against the Dutch and fought them largely at sea. But by 1674 the war drew to a close. The Dutch settled with the English, but not with the French.

Historical marker commemorating the Dutch attack.

And so Capt. Jurriaen Aernoutsz, commander of a Dutch privateer the Flying Horse, viewed Pentagoet as fair game. He sailed into Penobscot Bay in August with a fighting force of 110 men. They easily overtook the French soldiers at Fort Pentagoet and captured them – along with the commander, Chambly. Then they turned the fort’s own guns on its walls and leveled them.

Accounts differ as to what happened to Saint-Castin. Did the Dutch take him to Boston? Did he somehow escape? Or did the Dutch send him to Quebec City?

Whatever the case, Saint-Castin traveled to French headquarters in Quebec City with a ransom note for Chambly.

The obscure young Army officer gave the note to Louis de Frontenac, governor general of New France. De Frontenac apparently recognized Saint-Castin’s talents. He gave him a bill of exchange for the ransom, and the mission that would put him in the history books. Saint-Castin was to urge the Wabanaki to join the French.

Governor Frontenac performing a tribal dance with Indian allies

Return of Saint-Castin

Saint-Castin returned to the ruined fort at Pentagoet. But instead of rebuilding fortifications he built a house and a lead-shot workshop amidst some 30 Indian wigwams.

On the surface, he seemed to have shed his responsibilities as a French officer, according to Salagnac. He migrated with the Indians to their winter home upriver. He enjoyed the company of Indian women – perhaps too much, according to gossip that made its way to the Jesuit missionaries and the leaders of New France. But he remained a staunch Catholic.

Meanwhile, he proved an astute businessman and his trading started to make him rich. Then around 1675, Saint-Castin’s older brother died childless, making him Baron Saint-Castin at the age of 22.

Rather than returning to France, however, he stayed in Acadia with the Wabanaki.

And sometime before 1678 he married Madokawando’s daughter Pidianske. She had converted to Catholicism, and took the Christian name Marie-Mathilde, nicknamed Molly Mathilde.

According to historian Bunny McBride, Madokawando wanted his daughter to marry Saint-Castin because it assured at least some French support to the Wabanaki.

Molly Mathilde

McBride, in her book Women of the Dawnland, tells the story of Molly Mathilde. She didn’t want to marry Saint-Castin, though she’d known him for most of her life. But when she turned 15, her mother told her she had to marry him.

Molly Mathilde said no. The man had hair all over his face and arms, and sometimes he dressed in strange colored wigs and boots with spurs. He smelled funny, too.

Her mother had no sympathy for her. She had been told to marry Madokawando, and she did. For her people. Molly Mathilde would have to do the same.

Saint-Castin first married her in the Indian way, but in 1684 a French Jesuit priest married them in a Catholic ceremony at Pentagoet.

“Romance may not have been the inspiration behind Molly Mathilde’s marriage to St. Castin, but the mutual cares of a shared life gradually inspired love,” wrote McBride. “Among the French, people commented that the baron had surrendered his former habits and that he often spoke of his commitment to his wife.”

Together, they had five children who survived infancy.

King Philip’s War

In June 1675, King Philip’s War broke out in southern New England. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Indian refugees from the war came to Acadia to urge retribution.

King Philip’s War (illustration)

The Wabanaki didn’t need much persuading. English authorities tried to order them to give up their guns so they wouldn’t rise join King Philip’s uprising. But even before the English tried to take their guns, they had cheated them, sold them rum and let their livestock trample through their cornfields.

Then in the summer of 1675, three sailors killed the infant son of a chief named Squando by throwing him into the Saco River. The sailors wanted to see if Indians could dog paddle at birth.

That outrage caused Saco and Androscoggin Indians to begin guerilla warfare against English settlements in the Casco Bay region. They killed about 80 settlers and burned down their houses and mills.

Madokawando stayed out of it until August 1676 when Abenaki, Mi’kmaq and refugees from King Philip’s War laid waste to English settlements along the Kennebec. They defeated the English in hand-to-hand combat at the trading post at Arrowsic, then a few weeks later killed seven on Peak’s Island in Casco Bay.

Military Counselor

There is little mention of Saint-Castin’s role in all of the fighting. But historian Georges Cerbelaud Salagnac concludes he advised Madokawando.

“One may reasonably suppose that Saint-Castin began to exercise his talents as a military counselor on the occasion of this war,” wrote Salagnac.

“… Madokawando was the sole great chief of the Penobscots; he had his lieutenants who were in command of the warriors, led expeditions, and parleyed with the enemy when truces were made,” wrote Salagnac. “But it was known everywhere that nothing was done without his son-in-law’s advice, and that the latter had only to express a wish for it to be instantly complied with.”

Any hope of a truce ended with an act of shocking English treachery on Sept. 7, 1676. Four hundred Indians — including Abenaki and some of King Philip’s former warriors — paid a visit to a New Hampshire strongman, Richard Waldron, at his invitation. They would hold a mock battle with the local militia in Dover, N.H.

Instead, the militia captured those who had fought with Philip — half the Indians — and sent them to Boston. There, seven or eight were tried and hanged. The English sold the rest into slavery.

In retribution, the Wabanaki went on a rampage, terrorizing and destroying 60 miles of English settlements along the coast.

Finally in 1678 the two sides agreed to another truce in which the English would pay the Indians in corn for the use of their land.

The English in Boston couldn’t understand why the Abenaki in the north seemed more tenacious and defiant than King Philip’s warriors in the south, according to Salagnac. Eventually they learned of the French soldier who had masterminded the attacks on their settlements – Saint-Castin.

Uneasy Peace

Saint-Castin and his growing family prospered in the interregnum before the next war. An indication of his wealth was discovered in 1840, when a farmer named Stephen Grindle dug up treasure believed buried by Saint-Castin’s daughter. Found six miles north of Saint-Castin’s home, it included somewhere between 500 and 2,000 coins from France, Spain, England, Massachusetts, Portugal and Holland.

The Saint-Castin Hoard

A French priest named Louis-Pierre Thury persuaded Saint-Castin to send his sons to Catholic school in Quebec. Thury would figure prominently in the next war to break out, known as King William’s War, the Second Indian War, the First French and Indian War or even Castin’s War.

In May of 1687 or 1688, Sir Edmond Andros, governor of the Dominion of New England, made a big mistake. He personally led an expedition to Pentagoet to seize Saint-Castin. The baron happened to be away on a military expedition with the French, so Andros and his men ransacked his house and plundered his trading post

In the end, the English had to apologize for Andros’ illegal raid. It did no good, and instead touched off a decade of warfare. The English had continued to cheat the Indians and reneged on their agreement to pay Indians corn for the use of their land.

Saint-Castin’s War

So Saint-Castin and Thury orchestrated a series of raids on English settlements. When it all ended, the French and Indians wiped most of the English settlements off the map of Acadia. From 1689 to 1713, there wasn’t a single English home north of Wells.

On June 28, 1689, the Wabanaki and Pennacook wreaked revenge on Richard Waldron for his treachery during King Philip’s War. In a surprise attack known as the Cocheco Massacre, they killed 29 people in Dover, N.H., captured 28 and tortured Waldron to death. Then they left Dover in smoldering ruins.

Attack on Richard Waldron.

Saint-Castin that summer then launched half a dozen attacks on English settlements as far south as Andover, Mass. He led a Wabanaki attack on Fort Charles in Pemaquid, now Bristol, the northernmost English settlement in Acadia. They burned down the fort and killed 200 English soldiers and settlers.

In September, 200 Indians attacked the English on Peaks Island, but Capt. Benjamin Church drove them away after suffering heavy casualties.

The raids continued in 1690, starting with massacres in Schenectady, N.Y. and Salmon Falls, N.H. Saint-Castin led an assault on the fort at Falmouth in May, killing 30 and capturing 100.

Sporadic guerilla warfare continued, with one of the most dramatic attacks on York in February 1692. Called the Candlemas Massacre, it ended with 50 dead and 100 captured.

Gruesome Murders

Exhausted and starving, the Indians sued for peace in 1693, but the English wouldn’t negotiate. The war dragged on for another four years, though it may not have deserved the term, according to historian John Grenier.

“It had devolved into a string of gruesome murders that terrorized New England,” he wrote.

Pierre Lemoyne di’Iberville

In 1696, Saint-Castin and Thury led an Abenaki force with the French naval commander Pierre leMoyne d’Iberville against a newly rebuilt English fort at Pemaquid. After a short siege, the fort fell, and the English abandoned the Kennebec.

Finally, the Wabanaki made peace with the English in 1699. The Indians had driven nearly all of them out of Acadia.

Saint Castin had helped the Wabanaki survive, but at a cost. The bloody and gruesome war had intensified English hatred of Indians, and in 1703 another long war – Queen Anne’s war—broke out.

Return to France

But by then Saint-Castin had left for France, intending to return to Molly-Mathilde and their children. French officials had accused him of treason because he and the Wabanaki had traded with the English. He crossed the Atlantic in 1701 to defend himself against the charges, as well as to claim his inheritance.

In France Saint-Castin had a sister, Marie, and her rapacious lawyer husband, Jean de Labaig. Labaig wanted the baronetcy and the estate that went with it for himself. He had also gotten wind of the rumors about Saint-Castin’s libertine ways before – and even during – his marriage.

Labaig used those rumors to put legal obstacles in Saint-Castin’s way.

The church of Saint-Castin in Bearn, France.

Saint-Castin cleared himself of the charges of treason, but spent years fighting Labaig. Finally by 1707 he won his legal battle, gaining the family castle in Bearn and the title of baron.

Shortly thereafter, he died in France. Molly-Mathilde continued to live in Acadia until her death.

The Rest of the Saint-Castins

Saint-Castin’s oldest son, Bernard-Anselm, led the Wabanaki against the English during Queen Anne’s War. When that conflict ended, he sailed with his wife and three daughters to the Saint-Castin estate in France. Bernard-Anselm died in 1721.

Castine, Maine, was named after Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin. His descendants, who include Charles Shay, occasionally visit the Witherle Memorial Library in town.

With thanks to Abaddie de Saint-Castin, Jean-Vincent d’, Baron de Saint Castin by Georges Cerbelaud Salagnac in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Women of the Dawn by Bunny McBride, The d’Abbadies de Castins and the Abenakis of Maine in the Seventeenth Century by Paul Chasse, Steadfast in their ways: New England colonists, Indian wars, and the persistence of culture, 1675-1715, by David Michael Corlett, Saint-Castin: A Legend Revised by Gorham Munson, The Dalhousie Review.

Image: The church of Saint-Castin By France64160 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10769225. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Rise and Fall of the New England Motel

The family-owned motel that flowered along New England’s roads after World War II has grown increasingly scarce. Today, there are one quarter as many independent motels as there were in the year John F. Kennedy became president.

Hearthside Village, Bethlehem, N.H. Photo by John Margolies, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

The vintage motel and the tourist court do still exist in New England, though you might have to look for them. Some got run-down and seedy after interstate highways bypassed them. They’ve become a standing joke in popular culture as “no-tell motels” or “the Bates Motel.” The Simpsons featured a motel called the “Sleep-Eazy Motel,” with burned-out lights that read “Sleazy Motel.

“The business marches along a depressing decline from nightly vacation rates to weekly apartment rents,” wrote a motel historian.

Many motels and tourist courts have been torn down to make way for suburban sprawl. But some still do survive as neat, clean, affordable havens along New England’s mountains and beaches.

But how did the ubiquitous roadside motel rise – and fall – so fast?

Tourist Camps

The motel started out as a “tourist camp,” a space in a farmer’s field or along a body of water where motorists could pitch their tents. But from the very beginning, the federal government played a big part in the evolution of the motel.

Teddy Roosevelt got the ball rolling in 1901 when he told Congress he wanted free campgrounds on public lands.

A public campground near Acadia National Park.

His cousin, Franklin, created the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933, which built campgrounds around the country, including two at Acadia National Park. As with other campsites on federal lands, they provided picnic grounds, tent space, restrooms and running water.

“The first public campgrounds in the United States were nothing more than large, dedicated clearings, free of trees, within which to concentrate groups of tourists,” wrote Martin Hogue in A Short History of the Campsite.

Then along came the trailer, and with it a bad reputation. People complained about the loose morals, the littering and the noise that “tin can tourists” brought with them. One postcard described the tin can tourists as having “one shirt and a $20 bill — and they didn’t change either.”

Cabin Camps and Tourist Courts

The Coastal Motel, Wells, Maine. Photo by John Margolies, courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

The cabin camp emerged as America’s highway network grew along with the population. According to Smithsonian Magazine, farmers and other businesspeople would make deals with an oil company, put up a gas pump and built a few shacks. The cabin camps weren’t exactly luxe. Often dingy, they usually lacked running water or electricity.

But other roadside amenities, such as Howard Johnson’s restaurants, began to proliferate, adding to the allure of automobile travel.

Interior of the Howard Johnson’s in Niantic, Conn. Photo by John Margolies,, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

By the 1930s a homier alternative became popular: the cottage court, also known as the tourist court. More expensive than the cabin camps, they had indoor plumbing and electricity. They were mom-and-pop affairs, with a shared lawn and cottages decorated with standard themes.

Motels didn’t always accept all comers. For African-Americans, travel was a challenge. Many carried the Negro Motorists Green Book, a guide to accommodations that didn’t threaten embarrassment or danger.

Rise of the Motel

The Snyders’ largest motel in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Meanwhile, the first so-called motel, or ‘motor hotel,’ opened in 1925 as the Milestone Mo-Tel in San Luis Obispo, Calif.

After World War II, the growing middle class demanded more and more roadside lodging as the federal highway system expanded. People built motor courts at a furious pace. By 1947, there were 22,000 motor courts in the United States.

Bar Harbor

The motels that sprang up in Bar Harbor, Maine, demonstrate the great economic leveling that took place during most of the 19th century. The town changed from a Gilded Age resort for millionaires into a middle-class tourist destination.

After the 1947 Maine fires wiped out many of the Bar Harbor mansions, cottage courts and motels replaced them.

Mount Desert Island Cabins, one unit, Bar Harbor, Maine. Photo by John Margolies, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Throughout the United States, 50,000 motels and motor courts served motoring tourists by 1951.

Golden Age of the Motel

The Little Village Motel on the Berlin Turnpike

The 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of the motel. Mom and pop added color televisions, swimming pools and the Magic Fingers vibrating bed. Neon signs advertised their amenities along strips of road like the Berlin Turnpike in Connecticut, along the Massachusetts coast, on Route 1 in Maine and in New Hampshire’s White Mountains.

The industry peaked in 1961, with 61,000 motels in America. Today, there are perhaps a quarter of that. The mom and pop motel fell to motel chains like Holiday Inn and Best Western, then to discount hotels like Hampton Inn and Marriott.

Colonial Park Motel, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Meriden Conn. Photo by John Margolies,

But many still cherish the retro comfort and convenience – not to mention the individuality – of the mom-and-pop motel. Some preservationists want to see them saved. Hartford Courant writer Dennis Barone, for example, argued the Berlin Turnpike should be named an official scenic road.

This story about the New England motel was updated in 2022.

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The Year a State Burned: Maine Fires of 1947 Wipe Out 9 Towns

A plume of smoke near Dolliver’s dump signaled the end of Bar Harbor’s splendid era and the worst of the terrifying Maine fires of 1947.

Mrs. Gilbert called the Bar Harbor Fire department on Oct. 17, 1947, to alert them to the smoke rising from a nearby cranberry bog. What caused the fire, no one ever knew. But the world would soon find out about the inferno that destroyed half of Acadia National Park and nearly all of the mansions on Millionaire’s Row in Bar Harbor.

From October 13 to October 27, firefighters tried to fight 200 Maine fires, consuming a quarter of a million acres of forest and wiping out nine entire towns. The Maine fires destroyed 851 homes and 397 seasonal cottages, leaving 2,500 people homeless.

The year 1947 became known as the Year Maine Burned.

The Malvern, one of the five elegant hotels destroyed in the Maine fires of 1947. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Warnings of Maine Fires

Warning signs of the Maine fires appeared as early as March. An abnormally warm spring caused snow to melt early in the woods. Mid-July to October were unusually dry, with 108 consecutive days without rain.

Ninety percent of the state was forested, and the state had made little preparation for fighting wildfires. Most towns didn’t have a fire department. There was no warning system, no mutual aid agreement and no centralized command and control structure.

By early October, Maine was in a ‘high state of inflammability.’ People were urged to clean their chimneys and the Forest Service reopened fire watch towers normally closed on September 30.

Fires broke out during the first week in October in Portland, Bowdoin and Wells. By October 16, 20 separate Maine fires were burning. Three days later, many Maine towns were covered with a smoky haze and smelled of burning wood. The night sky glowed red.

Maine Fires Trap 60

When the alarm went out, men and boys dropped what they were doing and rushed off to fight the fires. Men who went to work in small towns didn’t know if they’d be called on to fight the Maine fires that day. Volunteers came from all over Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

An eight-mile-long wall of fire burned in Kennebunkport. In North Waterboro, nearly 60 residents and volunteers were trapped for more than an hour behind a line of fire before escaping.

In York County, the fires destroyed most of the homes in Shapleigh and Waterboro. then swept toward the sea and consumed swathes of Alfred, Lyman, Newfield, Kennebunk, Kennebunkport, Arundel, Dayton, Wells, Biddeford and Saco.

USS Little Rock rushed to Portland to help put out the Maine fires.

The Army-Navy Day in Boston scheduled for October 26 was cancelled. The USS Little Rock, a light cruiser harbored in Boston for the celebration, sailed to Portland instead with 1,000 servicemen and equipment to help fight the Maine fires. They saved the town of Hollis and many other small villages, working ‘as if their own homes were endangered.’

On October 29, with 40 fires still burning, the Navy joined the Army and General Electric in a novel method of fire suppression: creating artificial rain. Two B-17s took off from Schenectady, N.Y., and dropped dry ice into clouds over York County.

But it had already begun to rain.

Bar Harbor Destruction

Stanwood, a cottage owned by James G. Blaine, was one of many destroyed by the Maine fires along Millionaire’s Row in Bar Harbor. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

After Mrs. Gilbert notified Bar Harbor fire officials of the smoke on October 20, the fire smoldered underground. For three days it blackened only 169 acres. Then on October 21, strong winds spread the blaze until it consumed over 2,000 acres in Acadia National Park that day alone. Firefighting crews were joined by the Army Air Corps, the Navy, the Coast Guard, National Park Service workers from the East Coast and students from the University of Maine and Bangor Theological Seminary.

The next day nearly 2,300 acres burned on Mt. Desert Island. That afternoon, the wind strengthened and turned toward Bar Harbor, traveling six miles in less than three hours. Fire engulfed 67 seasonal estates known as Millionaire’s Row on the shores of Frenchman Bay. The fires missed the business district but destroyed 170 homes and five grand historic hotels near downtown.

Rescue

Bar Harbor residents fled for their safety, first to the athletic field then to the town pier. When fire blocked all the roads, fishermen from Winter Harbor, Gouldsboro and Lamoine evacuated 400 people by sea.

By 9 pm, bulldozers carved a pathway was through the rubble on Route 3 and 700 cars carrying 2,000 people slowly drove to Ellsworth. Sparks pelted the cars and flames flared overhead, but the motorcade made it to safety.

The fire continued to destroy acres of forest and the Jackson Laboratory before it blew itself out over the ocean in a fireball. It was declared under control on October 27, but smoldered underground until November 14.

Five people in Bar Harbor died as a result of the fire – two in a car crash and two of heart attacks. The fire destroyed 17,188 acres, including 10,000 in Acadia.

Aftermath

The fire changed the composition of the forests in Acadia National Park. It wiped out mature spruce and fir stands and replaced them with sun-loving birch, aspen and oak. Acadia’s forests now turn to red and yellow autumn colors instead of the monochromatic green that reigned before the Maine fires.

On Jan. 13, 1948, officials held a statewide firefighting and prevention conference in Augusta. As a result, many Maine towns established volunteer firefighting departments within the next two years. They began to use standard equipment and to train to national standards.

In addition, the State of Maine got a license for a two-way public safety radio network. The state granted the forest commissioner more authority to respond to Maine fires and launched a public education program about fire safety.

This story was updated in 2023.

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