,4 o^ \ ^^^ ■/r?7-M jeVA/V>-. * « o ^''« ., 0^ .. ° " " • o . ,0' ' 'V <^ ... O > .0 ^ ■a * .-^ .^^. mmi :n V ■i^ % %^- C^' 1^ 0^ o^ r « ^ "°. • o^ c- .V ^o V^^ ^^-^^^ i"^-^^-^ ^ ^ ^^ w. ;i O" • '. .y °o TV^K PriJ.KX HAD SCARCKl-Y COMPLETED HIS WORK t)X THIS VOLUME, AND HIS .\L\XVSC'K1PT WAS VKT IX THE HANDS OF THE PRINTER WHEN DEATH, THROUGH HEART FAILURE. CAME TO SILENCE THE VOICE OF THIS WELL- KNOWN LECTURER AND STILL THE PEN OF THE AUTHOR- JOURNALIST FOREVER. KHACiii:i) I H(iM IH1-: r.. \ A. u. k. .\ i \ an iuki-n in< i imhskink In Fair Aroostook WHKRE ACADIA AND SCANDINAVIA'S SUBTLE TOUCH TURNED A WILDERNESS INTO A LAND OF PLENTY By CLARENCE PULLEN Bangor, Maine Published by the Bani^or & Aroostook Railroad Company 1902 -^1^ h t1"\ IHt LifaRAKY OF CONGRESS, Two Coplei R«e«lvt0 DEC 31 1902 Cepyright Eititty CLASfi CO XXo. Nt. % «J J- if- i, COPY B. C'di'VKii.in, i:»()2 Bv THH Bangok - ; more often the exist- ence of the mill is indicated only b\- the lumber piles at a station and a wagon road leading into the woods. At Millinocket Station, from which trainloads of paper are daily sent to feed the printing presses of America, a spur of track leads to the Wonder Town of pulp and paper hidden some- where behind the rolling hills. But these, even Millinocket, are sidetrack i.ssues, so to speak, compared with the pro- ductiveness of the land beyond from which come the long freight trains passed on the way bringing Aroostook lumber and IX KAIK AROOSTOOK. 9 potatoes and grain and hay southward to the markets of the eastern and the southern vStates. While Maine for a half- century was peopling with her sons the territorities of the west, her own great northern county, greater in area than Massachusetts, and of unsurpassed fertility, received scarcely passing attention, it being known to people in general mainly through its historical association with "the Aroostook war." Now things ha\e changed and Aroostook county, already standing third among all the counties in the I'nited States in the value of the products of the soil, is yet only in the initial stage of her great development. It is this region which we are on our way to explore, and the road which takes us thither, the Bangor and Aroostook, is the vital arter}- through which pulses the life of traffic and travel that unites it with the rest of the State and the business centres of the whole country. Winding among gravelly hills, skirting the bases of "horse- back" ridges pushed up b>- moving ice of the glacial period, and speeding, straight as an arrow, over the tangents that span long stretches of the route, the train glides smoothly to the north and east. This pathway- in the wilds is a marvel of fine location and thorough construction. The Bangor and Aroos- took road is young and growing; it has gained in stature and done well in a business way since it began its journey through the wilderness, ten years ago, to plant its stakes in the Northern Canaan and grow up with the coimtry. Now with the aspiration of youth it commands the resources of prosperity, and it proposes to have it distinctly understood that while, in a sense, a back woodsman, it is no back num. ber in an}- respect, and that it knows how to keep up its end -with the best of the great iron roadways. With all the rough hurry work that it has to do in the handling ol I H\\ AV IN THK WII.DS 10 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. lumber and potatoes and such, and in the building of new lines tlirough the clearings, it everywhere keeps up a spick-and-span front and its passenger ser\-ice is all that could be wished for in elegance and eflficiency. In this connection I overheard a con- U EAL I H AH.OA1 — AKO(IST( )I-FERING T( versation while traveling in the upward bound morning train, which is worth repeating. Two men with fishing gear, evidently on their first visit to the Maine forests, were commenting on the up-to-date character of the train appointments. " In our State a compan>- would have thought any old cars, with a stump-puller to haul them, good enough to take people in and out of the woods," remarked one of the men. " Now on this road everything is fresh " — "Except the manners of the traimnen," interrupted the other. "Yes, they're all right too. What I meant to speak of was the vestibuled cars— and the parlor car— and the general appearance of newness and neatness in ever^■ detail." IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 11 "You'd expect a road to keep itself spruce carrying such .consignments as this all the year round, wouldn't you?" spoke up a man from the seat behind. He was a timber operator from Houlton, who had been explaining points of interest to the strangers, and he pointed as he spoke to a freight train on a siding, 34 of whose 50 cars were loaded with long spruce lumber billed for Bangor or Boston or Brazil. The two men expressed due approval of the sentiment, and in.spired by this a commercial traveler in the opposite seat had begun to formluate something in the same line based upon ''starch" when a deer on the track, which raced the train for a quarter stretch before taking to the woods, drew general attention, and the previous question was suffered to lapse. It is the time of May, and even so early in the season, far in advance of the rush time of summer travel, there is a goodly representation of tourists and sportsmen from the cities among the passengers. Fishing rods and camping conveniences are much in evidence, and at almost every stop of the train parties of fishermen leave the cars and are left amid their gear and BEAl'TY SPOTS YOU NEVER CEASE TO ADMIKE. 12 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. hampers on the station platform. Ladies there are among^ them, Dianas of llie rod and line, who have discovered the charm of IN MAINE the wildwood, and who choose, in the Maine lakes, to ang^le in stiller, clearer waters than those in which are cast the flies of fashion. Moreox'er, Woiuan, lovely vvoniun, Quite divine, so sweetlj' limnnii, finds no discomfort in the pervading consciousness that no gloxes and veilings are so becoming to the fair hands and face as the bronze gifts of the sun, and that grace and animation are never more effectively inspired than by the enthralling exercise of matching a six-ounce rod and a hundred feet of braided line again.st the turns and rushes of a square-tailed trout. And all these advantages thrown in with exuberant health and exhil- arating sport. The question of suffrage may wait, but her enfranchisement into the pleasures of tlie canoe and fly-rod is a right that no IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 13 woman will ever give up to the monopoly of man again, once she has experienced the fun of going a-fishing. Fifty miles of primitive forest threaded, the west and the east branches of the Penobscot River crossed and left behind at Norcross and Grindstone, and then, at Stacyville, the woods by the trackside open in patches of cleared land with grass and grain growing green among the black stumps. At Sherman there are wider fields with fewer stumps, and cattle and sheep at pasture, and here, tlie commercial traveler aforesaid remarks genially to me : " We're in Aroostook county now. You'll find the country getting more open all the way from here on till we come to the fiftj'-acre grain and potato fields. It's a country of fertility and growth. The idea of growth and expansion pervades every- thing up here. Why, dough will ri.se twice as fast up here as it does down Bangor way, and if you leave your walking-stick stuck into the ground over night you'll find in the morning that it has taken root and is sprouting branches — and if you let it alone it will bear apples or plums in another year ! Strange, but your power of astonishment will soon get worn out if you travel Aroostook in growing time." I think that he speaks with some exaggeration, but that there is a fine, breezy optimi.sm in his statements, suggestive of the boundless west, which I like. Indeed I have ob.served this west- ernism of tone among the passengers on the train from the time we left Brownville. Anyone who has .something to sa}^ may open Cf)lII-n WE NOT WE U EEEL KATAHDIN S PRESENCE. 14 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. conversation easily with his neighbor, and there is a comrade- ship among the fellow-travelers of a da}- that is characteristic rather of Kansas or Colorado than of New England. In fact, Aroostook has stood for all that the fairest western Eden boasts, and more, from the time that President Cram preached his ser- mon from a text that was a radical variation of the time-honored "Go west, young man," the application of which was the open- ing up of this vast eastern garden land to traffic and settlement with his famous Bangor and Aroostook railroad. I will not sta}^ now to speak of what this enterprise has wrought for Maine in the enlargement of her resources and the turning of the tide of emigration, which so long had taken the ^^^n^' ^ ! ..■— 2fW5^ ^ ■■ . ''^ i^ mSBK^KK^^^^^^^^B^^^^ii^^^^^^a^iimiM M STANDINt; KNEE-DEEl' IN FRACiKANT MEADOW? westward way, to territory within her own borders. The inter- est of the scenes through which we are passing admit of no (li\-i(lc(l attention, for Aroostook liegins at the very border to reveal her buxom charms in a series of cumulative tableaux. As the train rolls on the trackside clearings expand into fields. IN FAIR \ROOSTOOK. 15 The stumps show fewer, and the level openings rise away into knolls and ridges checquered by wide stretches of turf and tillage, with backgrounds of hardwood forest. The landscape SNUt; IN THE LEE OF THE SHELTERING BAKN. contours are smooth and rounded ; the sky line becomes a toss- ing emerald sea as the tree tops stir in the breath of June. For a while the woodland along the line of road continues to assert supremacy in the landscape ; but even where long, level stretches of cedar swamp sullenly shut in the track, there rise into view on the east high uplands smiling in groves and farms. In fenced pastures sheep and cattle, sure sign of wise husbandry of the soil, give a pastoral charm to the scene. Everywhere are the signs of a great material prosperity. The fields look well kept and fertile ; with the farm houses, small and neat, are immense barns with sheds and granaries. The streams filled with running logs, the mills b}' their banks, signify wealth of production. Not once have the cars ceased to be well 16 I N }■ A I K A K 0( )ST( )0 K iilled with passengers during the journey. As sportsmen and lumber operators, by twos and threes and dozens, have left the train at every wayside station, others have boarded it in their place, and here and there a crew of roughly garbed lumbermen, fresh from the " drive " have taken passage in the smoking car. This movement of life extends into all branches of trade in Aroostook and buying and selling are done in a large way. "Aroostook is the county where 1 like best to go," said a commercial traveler, w^ho.se line is tobacco. "There are no small orders up here. A merchant at any cross roads or station in the woods, where there may not l)e five houses in the town- ship that you can see at one time, thinks nothing of ordering ])y the carload any brand of 4 goods that hits his fancy. And they have the trade and the money to back their buying." Besides the rural l)eaut>- of the scene, which one learns in Aroostook always to expect and ceases never to admire, I saw two things at Ashland Junction that particularly drew my atten- tion. One was Katahdin across the woods, forty-five miles away in the south- west, standing massive and alone, robed in imperial hues of white and purple. The other was a large sack transferred at the junction, which had come up from liangor that morning consigned to a camp on tlie line of the railroad extension now building be\-ond Ashland and it contained one hundred loaves of Italian bread. "There are sex'eral hundred Italians at work on the Fort Kent extension of our line," said Mr. Moses Burpee, the chief engineer of the Bangor and Aroostook road, to me. "At most of their camps there is an Italian baker who makes the bread lidM.l.K ]> IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 17 for all the gang. The camp that this is consigned to evidently is short a baker, but Italian bread must be forthcoming to have to send the length of the line for it." For a county which until a decade ago was practically unknown to the people in the rest of the State of which it is a part this wonderful Aroostook has had both an antique and a cosmo- politan sort of colonization. The Gauls came first — or the Norman-French, rather, as perpetuated in the Acadians — who, dispossessed b}- the English successfully in Nova Scotia in 1755, and in lower New Brunswick, in 1784, ascended the St. John river and found peace and permanency at Madawaska, from which their settlements have been extended for a distance of 100 miles up and down the St. John valley on both sides of the river. Eighty-six 3'ears later, led by " Father Thomas," a colony- of fair-haired Scandinavians, from the land of Thor and Odin, planted itself in an Aroostook township, where it has thriven mightily and made of the wilderness a fruitful garden, and now the Italians are here, building through the northern wilds a highwa}' more scientific and ser\'iceable than the ancient mili- tary roads which bound together the conquests of the Roman arms. Unlike their great ancestors, these modern legionaries, their appointed task completed, will peaceabl}' retire from the land they have invaded ; Init while they remain, though the world be laid to tribute to supply them, there must accompany their march the macaroni, the goat's milk cheese, the garlic and pepper, the salted sardines and the Italian-baked bread, the love of which abates not in their hearts wherever on the earth's face they may make their hal)itation. ^rg Now point meets point, and dipping bough gazes in rapture at herself. The mountain sees his mate below ; canoe and rock their image show — all Nature's breath is hushed and low'. CHAPTER II. ASHLAND AND ITS GREAT SAW-MILL. THK IMPOUNDING OF A MOOSE. 'A /^T is hi.i;h noon, and at Ashland Junction I am to <^ make a new departure. I have decided that be- jff j fore x'isiting the more settled parts of the count}^ I <^ will turn off into tlie woods, taking the branch .'C^'^^o^ road to Ashland, and thence continuing ni}- jour- ney- along the Fish river chain of lakes, to Fort Kent and the Acadian villages. Beyond Ashland I must travel by wagon, for the railroad extension now building to Fort Kent will not l)e completed before the end of tlie autumn of this year. F'rom Ashland Junction the l)ranch road, turning northward, plunges at once into the woods. F"or o3 miles, to Masardis, the route lies through a forest of spruce and cedar, broken by saw mills and stations in clearings, and with vSt. Croix lake and river lying for most of the way parallel with the track. From Masardis the road follows the valley of the iVroo.stook river ten miles down to Ashland with farms becoming more and more frequent on the broad slopes and intervales, as the train advances. But the character of the country is still dis- tinctly forest, and I glance at the "Big game record" in my Bangor & Aroostook folder, that I- ma}' judge of its capacities as a hunting ground. From this record I learn that during the three months of the hunting season, last year, 592 deer and 79 moose were shipped from seven stations on the Ashland branch, 20 IN FAIR AROO.STOOK. of which 52(5 deer and 74 moose were shipped from Masardisand Ashland stations. It is to a hunter's paradise, indeed, that I have come. At Ashland station, the present terminus of the branch, while the other passengers went up to the village on the hill in buck- boards, I waited for the carriage of Capt. Orcutt, the leading livery proprietor of the place, who was there to meet Mr. Burpee and myself. The little delay gave me the chance to talk with the station agent who told me the trouble that a gang of section men had l:)een put to the day before by a moose, a two-3'ear-old bull, which persisted in trying to walk straight through the wire fence that encloses the railroad's right-of-way. The section men had found him tangled in the wires, and once had extricated the creature and sent him on his way. A little while after he was again involved in difficulty with the fence. This time the foreman had taken the moo.se into custody. "Here's one of the men now," said the station agent. " He'll tell \ou all about it." \vhi:kI': mokk i-vn than at i'dutac.!; l.\kk IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 21 " 'Twas a thankless job a-helpin' from throuble a cratbur that could not understand that your intintions were mint in kindness," said the section man. "An' what with the worruk of unsthringin' him b}' main strinth an' dexterity from the woires, a-watchin' all the toime that he didn't kill some one of us which he was thryin' his best to do, our patience was sorely thried. But we got him clear once, an' we were on the safe side of the fince, an' the boss siz kindly to the baste, 'It's a bad job, well inded. Go, an' good luck go wid yes.' We've lost toime an' patience, but we gets to worruk an' afther a while the Frinchman, Tony, goes down the line to fetch up some tools that are left behoind, an' he calls back : " ' Sacree ! Here's dat a-dam moose a-thryin' to lug the whole fince along.' " It's the same baste sure, an' he's fast agin in the woires, an' this toime the boss he siz : "'We can't spind the ointhire toime of the company's imployees in shovin' mooses away from the finces," siz he. *' Since this one can't be made to respect the property of the B. & A., oi'll impound him for safe-kapin.' Fetch a rope one of yez.' "We ties up one of the crathur's fore legs, an' we gets a rope around his neck before we clears him from the woires. Thin' we lade him, wid some pershuasion, to the village an' puts him in a barn. An' there he be, a charge on the town, a-awaitin' for Mr. Carleton, the game connuissioner, to sind worrud what is to be done wid his trespassing baste." Here was a man in this Maine back settlement telling of the tying of a bull moose and taking him to the barn much as a farmer might speak of restraining a breachy cow and he was talking in the best of faith. "I'll take 3-ou round to see the moose, before we leave," said Capt. Orcutt, as we started from the hotel, after dinner. We found the animal tied to a post in a stable peaceably munching hay. At this season, his antlers had not sprouted, but he was a big fellow who looked as if he would be a formidable assailant should he take it into his head to turn hostile. As it was, he 99 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. did not take kindly to strangers but. at their approach woukl rush savagely at them as far as the length of his rope would per- mit, although he already was on such terms of acquaintance with his keepers that he would take food from their hands. In his rushes to attack, he did not advance with head down, as a steer would do with the purpose of tossing the object of attack with his horns, but with nose ad\-anced and his liod>- held in readiness that he might rear and strike forward and downward with his sharp edged hoofs. I left the moose to the care of his keepers, who seemed more worried o\'er the situation tlian he was, as they were liable to a legal penalty for having a moose in their possession, and yet were loath to let this one go free to wreak further devastation on the h. isi A. railroad fences. A week later I heard at Presque Isle that the moose had ])assed through Bangor on his way to Monmouth, Me., consigned to Hon. L. T. Carleton, game commissioner, who probably will present liim, in Ixdialf of the State, to some zoological garden. NEW Sweden's homes are cozy. IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 23 The town of Ashland, which is twenty-five miles above Presque Isle, on the Aroostook River, contains 1,0S0 inhabi- tants, and it is the snpplyin.i^: point of a wide area of fanning, lumber and sporting territory. It contains the great plant of the Ashland Manufacturing Company, a starch factory and black- smith, millwright, a caq^enter and boatbuilding estal)lishments, and it is the centre of an extensive business in transportation of people and supplies in and out of the game and lumber woods. Two of its stores which I visited, carry large stocks of hardware, paints, oils and stoves, and the smooth, deadly looking rifles and hunting knives, the trim varnished rods and the belts and ammunition and tackle in vast variety exhi1)ited along with the mill and lumbering ware was effective testimonials of the game and fish po.ssibilities of the country about. Ashland is a point of departure for Coding (S: Walker's sporting camp at vSquare Lake, Patter.son & McKay's camp at Machias Lake, Leon Orcutt's camps at Greenlaw and Big Fi.sh Lake and T. J. Bennett's Camp Pleasant. Ashland already has become the re.sort of a considerable num- ber of summer and autumn visitors drawn to it by its clear, bracing air, the charm of the surrounding scener>' and by the facility with which desirable fishing and hunting grounds may be reached from it. The village, numbering GOO inhabitants, stands on a plateau connnanding extensive views up and down the Aroostook valley with the forests and mountains beyond. It contains two hotels and three churches, a Methodist, a Con- gregationalist and an lipiscopalian church, and there recently has been completed a public hall that will comfortably seat 500 people. A more attractive site for an inland re.sort could scarcely be desired. The houses of the village are newly built and well kept up ; the water excellent, and the breezes that visit the town come cooled and perfumed acro.ss vast areas of woods and waters. Ashland, with its elevation of 700 feet above the sea, .stands pre-eminent among the sanctuaries through whose portals the sneezing, snuffling demon, hay fever, cannot enter, and the cheapness with which comfortable living maybe secured is making this woodland oasis yearly more and more the refuge of the victims of that malady. 24 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. Forest episodes mix quaintly with the everyday life of a town in which one finds so generally the comforts of a high civiliza- tion, may use the telephone and may read the morning papers from Bangor at 12.30 o'clock p. m. At the Exchange Hotel, where I dined, some of the towns-people were talking of the pretty adventure that had befallen an Ashland physician a night or two before. Driving in the dusk through the woods in the suburbs of the village he was aware for some time that an animal was running beside his carriage. vSupposing that his Irish setter had followed him from the house he did not investigate Ff'Kr KKNT HAS MANY FINE KF-'^I DENIES. until, on coming to a hill the horse .slackened pace, and he leaned over the wlieel to .speak to the supposed dog. It was a deer which, at the sound of his \-(^ice, turned and bounded away into the woods. Three miles ])el()\v the \illage on the Aroostook River and connected with the railroad by a .spur of track, is the great mill of the Ashland Manufacturing Compan}-, which manufactures and deals in all kinds of luml)er. For miles up the cliannel extend the booms that liold the logs .sent' down the river from the various lumber "operations" of the winter before on its IX FA IK AROOSTOOK. 25 headwaters. These logs are drawn up the long incline, through the entrance to the band saws, which cut them into long lumber, with an ease and swiftness that suggests the slicing of cheese. From the band and the edging saws the boards, planks, joists and beams pass out, on rollers through the rear end of the build- ing along a raised platform that extends far down from the mill. All along, as far as the rollers travel, a planked slide slopes sharply down to a parallel platform beneath, and as the stick of timber arrives at its appointed place a touch of a lever within the mill throws it from the rollers and it slides down upon the plat- form below in readiness to be loaded upon the Bangor and Aroostook cars drawn up at the siding alongside. :^if 'F Asm. AND MANfFACTURING CiOIPANV While the band saws and edgers are turning out the long lumber, other machines are sawing out laths and clapboards, and stripping the bark from the spruce slabs and butts which then become merchantable as pulp wood for paper stock. Every product of the log is utilized, for the bark and sawdust supply the fuel for the engines that run the mill. A hundred men are employed who turn out 130,000 feet of lumber a day. Last year, working from Feb. 5, to Dec. 1, the company sawed and shipped at this mill, 25,799,119 feet of long lumber, about 4,000,000 laths, about 5,500,000 clapboards, and from 5,000 to G,000 cords of pulp wood. 26 IX FAIR AROOSTOOK. The Ashland mill is the largest sawmill in Aroostook county and one of the largest in the state of Maine. There are 50 saw- mills in the country which in 1900, according to the U.vS. Census Report, manufactured 79,550,000 feet of lumber. In the same year 1 12,500.000 feet of logs cut in Aroostook county were floated down the vSt. John river into the British provinces where they were sawed into long and short luml^er. With the completion of the extension of the Bangor & Aroostook road to Fort Kent there will be opened an avenue of transportation from the vSt. John \'alle\- that will transfer a material part of the manufacture and shipment of this vast \-olume of lun:ber from Canada to the territory of our own state and nation. Two miles below Ashland the railroad extension crosses the Aroostook river at a grade GO feet above the bottom of the channel. The bridge, a noble and shapely structure. 777 feet long, is composed of four central and four shorter end .spans resting on piers of quarry-faced ashlar granite, with concrete foundations carried up as far as the water surface. A few miles further along, near Little Machias lake, the line passes the crest of the Aroo.stook river water shed and descends to Portage, on Portage lake 18 miles from Ashland, h'or the remaining 38 miles to Fort Kent it follows the Fish ri\er waters. .l.I^riNIM. I .VKI'S I-KOM HILL ID HIIL, CHAPTER III. FISH RIVER WATERS. PORTAGE LAKE AND CAMP IVERSON. ISPI Ri\er is a picturesquely wiudin"- waterway on which are struno' like turquois gems upon a silver cord, the lakes of a chain unique in extent and lorni and beauty. It is a river of most original turn, an expansionist of the first water, which ap- parentl>- has l)ent its course expressly that it might annex every water-sheet in sight. From its headquarters in Clayton lake, 20 miles west of Ashland, it flows northward into Big Fish lake from which it emerges, at the north end. to pass in an easterly course through Hat Pond, and thence meander southeast, 'JO miles, to Portage lake. From Portage it bends northwest to catch vSt. Froid, and northeast to enter Eagle lake. Then, having trav- ersed the long northerly arm of Eagle lake, and the reach of still water known as Soldier pond, as if satisfied with its acquisitions, it narrows again to a river to dance a quickstep down its channel to the St. John river. There are far more lakes than the water-sheets through which the river passes, that go to constitute the Fi.sh river system. Into Eagle lake, through wide thoroughfares that lead from lake to lake, comes the outflow of Square lake, Cross lake, Mud lake and Eong lake. They are parts of a water chain unmatched in all the world, a chain so linked and looped that b)* taking a canoe at Eong lake one may voyage without a carry for 100 miles, keeping with the current all the time, till having passed through these five lakes, and down the Fish and the vSt, John rivers, he finds himself at Van Buren on the St, John, only 10 miles from the point of starting. Taken altogether the lakes and ponds composing the fish river system are 15 in number. They cover an area of 89 square miles and drain a water shed of 890 square 28 IN FAIR AROOvSTOOK. miles. They all have the common characteristic of deep cool waters, and abundant game fish which in these lakes attain an extraordinary size. We came to Portage from Ashland, Mr. Burpee and myself in a two-seated wagon, with Capt. Orcutt as driver with his pet span of spanking bays. The road lay mainly through woods with clearings and farmhouses interspersed, and camps of rail- road laborers. Now one may ride to Portage in the cars, and before the snow flies this year may go by rail to Fort Kent. Where the turnpike conies to the lake the country opens, bring- ing into view some farms, a store or two and a hotel. By the shore, with verandas fronting the lake, stands Camp Iverson, and here we made our quarters for the night. It was the sun- down hour ; out upon the lakes fishing parties in row boats and canoes were drawing troll lines through their rippling wakes, and between the house and the shore was a pleasant bustle of fishermen and talk of the day's catches. From the wharf a group of swarthy laborers from the railroad camps were catching chub and shiners, for all is fish that comes to Italian hooks and finds its way made straight to the frying pan. It was late for fishing by the time supper was ended, but I rigged my rod and with Osgood Smith, timber inspector on the railroad construction work, went out in a canoe to try my luck. A pound-and-a-half square tail which struck in the last gleam of da}' was all that fell to my line, 1)Ut we paddled in the light of the rising moon four II. I. 1 A.\D 1 liiLIJ IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 29 miles down a shore on which the woods were broken in several places by clearings in which stand the cottages of city residents, who make Portage their summer home. Among the trees on the high opposite shores glowed the lights of two .sporting camps and the lake, even in the night, seemed far from lonelv. IN MADAWASKA — A LAND OF PLENTY. Portage lake, bending almost in a loop from west to north, is seven miles long by three in breadth, with .shores that rise into high hills on all sides. On the face of the high point opposite Portage round which the lake curves northward are the sporting camps of D. O. Orcutt, and up the shores on the left of the settle- ment are other camps. This lake, like all the larger ones of the Fish river system, abounds in square-tail trout and togue and landlocked salmon, and its shores are a cho.sen resort of big game. Camp Iverson, at Portage, comprises two frame cottages which will comfortably accommodate sixteen guests. They are supplied with water of uncommon purity and coldness which is led into the house through pipes from a hillside spring. The proprietor, Capt. A. Iverson, is a sturdy Norwegian, who once was a shipmaster, but who many years ago quitted the sea and cast his lot in Aroostook county. His fishing fleet, of which his steam launch Brunhilda is the flagship, contains four canoes and nine rowboats, and he keeps it in commission with true nautical 30 IN FAIR AROOvSTOOK, precision and attention to detail. The liousekeeping at the camp is pleasingly homelike, and it seemed a passage from the Kdda to hear the names Ragnhild and vSiegried of his fair- haired daughters, and Aagot. the name of his comely wife, spoken in this American Northland. MKE A TcillCH liH THE FATHERLAND — THE SKIDOK IN NEW SWEDEN. Portage Lake is safe and pleasant to navigate with any craft, and u]) Fish River, which enters it from the west, a launch capable of carrying twenty-five persons may ascend four miles from the lake. With the opening summer, the landlocked salmon, which at the melting of the ice from the lake followed the schools of smelts in their migration uj) the river, return to deep water and may be caught by trolHng with spoon or minnow. The square-tailed trout keep near the shore so long as the water is cool and, until the middle of June, may be taken at almost any point up or down the lake. Later they take to the spring holes in the lake, and the deep places off against the mouths of the inlets. They are abundant and eager, and in spring and early summer respond well to a spinner baited IX FAIR AKOOST(JOK. 31 with a minnow, trolled with 75 or 100 feet of line along the shore. On the morning of my stay at Camp Iverson I went out alone in a canoe at five o'clock and came back at six with three fine square-tails, all taken fighting within a short distance of the landing. Then, after breakfast, came our start, made under a lowery sky with frequent sprinkles of rain. But the da.\- gave nuich |)romise of interest to nie, for its journey was to bring us into the Madawaska territor}- — the Acadian French region of Aroostook where dwell in primitive simplicity the descendants of the expatriated people of Evangeline. Our way lay over an hisioiic highwav of Aroostook, the old military road to Fort Kent. Its course over the hills affords magnificent lake and forest and mountain views wdiich today were obscured l)y mist and rain. The road was through woods from the time we left the farms near Portage until we came to an opening in which were some unpromising looking farms, which, with several buildings grouped somewhat closel>- together by the roadside, evidently constituted a connnunity. This, Capt. Orcutt informed me, was Buffalo. " But wh\- is it called Buffalo?" I asked, thinking the name an exotic one in the Maine woods. " It's more than I can tell,"' said the captain. " All I know is that that's the name it goes by." " I can tell you the answer that a boy on the road here gave to the same question once," said Mr. Burpee. " He was an honest looking lad, and he plainly meant to tell me as well as he could. ' Why is the jdace called Buffalo? ' I inquired of him." "He studied for a moment over the framing of his answer. ' If you were there once, and knew the people, you wouldn't wonder,' he said." This was expressive but indefinite, and, with the mystery of its christening unsolved, we left Buffalo-in-the-\Voods to the glory of its name. Tiiere was more forest and much of it to traverse, but when we struck clearings again it was another region that we had entered and the houses that we saw were the habitations of the x\cadian French. CHAPTER IV. INTO MAINE'S ACADIA. THE FISH OF THE EAGLE LAKE CHAIN. THE ROMAN INVASION OF AROOSTOOK. ROM the woods we emerged into an open country that witlened as we advanced, and by the road- side, among tilled fields and grass lands, stood little unpainted frame houses, with shingled roofs and walls. It is not the habit of the Acadian to rush the building of his home after once it has been rendered habitable, and thus the outer covering of the houses often presented a variegated pattern of shingled patches, boarding, and tarred paper or birch-bark sheathing. The barns were small, and among the out-buildings of the newer frame house often stood the log hut, now relegated to the uses of a granary or a potato bin, which had been the earlier residence of the owner. The farms were apportioned into potato and pea and buckwheat patches, with always a pasture in which fed a little flock of sheep ; for in the homes of this quaint region the arts of spinning and weaving, like the folk tales and songs of the older Acadia, still survive and in the farmers' cots one finds that : " The wheel and the loom still are l)U.sy, Maidens still wear their Norman caps, and their kiitles of homespun, And by the evening tire repeat Evangeliue's story." Equally faithful to old tradition are the onion patches by the houses, and the balm-of-gilead trees the buds of which, when steeped in aqua-vitae, afford a tonic most salutary to the Acadian's constitution in sickness and in health. The looms and the spinning wheels at this sea.son, before the time of sheep shear- ing and the flax harvest, were not much in evidence to the passer by, and the maidens that we met on the highway, or who peered at us from doorways, tended rather to American sailor 34 IX FAIR AROO.STOOK. hats and to braided hair than to Norman caps. A prett}' cus- tom, not learned from the Americans, is one the children have of alwaj's saluting the stranger whom the}' meet — the girls with a courtesy, the boys by lifting the hats. At one place, near Nadeau, we passed a school house from which, it being near the noon hour and school dismissed, the children were swarming like bees from a hive in spring. The edifice was a degree or two larger than a sentry-box and I counted twent}^- three children of ages ranging from five to fourteen years, that emerged from its portal — all comfortably clad and pre- .senting an array of faces as l)right and pretty as any school of its size anywhere would be likely to furnish. After them came their teacher, a graceful, dark-e}-ed young woman, who sjDoke with a French accent and who wil- lingly sta5^ed to show us the school room. Even with the narrowness of the fiat boards that served for seats and desk tops, it was not easy to see how so many children could find a chance in this bird-house of a school room to recite and study. But that they did, and that they learned and understood their lessons, the teacher, a graduate henself of the training school at Fort Kent, assured us. The books used in the Madawaska common schools are mainly in the primer grade and to teach these children intelligently it is necessary that the teacher should know French as well as English. At Nadeau the military road, which has led over the hills from the time it left Portage, comes down to the Fish River again and cro.s.ses it between St. Froid and Eagle Lakes. Here the railroad extension, which has followed the valley from Portage, reappears and, passing the river, continues down the shore of Eagle Lake. The Fish River is crossed twice by the extension, LITTLE AC.\DIAN« IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 35 with bridges respectively 180 and 270 feet long. The only other important bridge on the new line is one of 75 feet span over the Allagash. All the bridges are of iron and of most approved construction, and they rest on piers of granite masonry or concrete. Few stretches of railroad in America lie for an equal distance through a region so replete with tranquil landscape charm and quaint historical association as that which is traversed by the last twenty miles of the Bangor & Aroostook extension to Fort Kent. From Ashland to Nadeau much of the route is shut from the view of the broad lake and woodland spaces to right and left b^- the dense forest growth. But at Nadeau and be5'ond come views of Eagle Lake, the blue oval centre of a vast amphitheatre of wooded hills as it stretches off to the east, and a long water reach where the road skirts its seven-mile arm extended to the north. Then Fish River narrows again to a stream and as once more it widens into placid Soldier Pond the woods on the slopes beyond open in clearings and Acadian farms. Thence for seven miles, to its terminus on the shores of the St. John at Fort Kent, the road follows the curves of the steep, high bank, first on the left and then on the right of the river winding in a clear rippling current down the gravelly channel at its base. With all the heavy work involved in its construction, the gradient of the road is extraordinarily even and its elevation at Fort Kent, after following the Aroostook and the Fish Rivers down for a distance of fifty-one miles, is but thirty-seven feet lower than at Ashland. More interesting even than the natural scenery is the human aspect of the community which we have entered. Planted by the refugees of Grand Pre, Pisiquid and Chignecto, in the valley of the upper St. John River at a date when the United States Constitution was as yet unframed, it peacefuU}' has con- tinued the customs of old Acadia, while on the Penobscot and the Kennebec the settlements of Bangor and Augusta grew from scattered backwoods cabins into civic existence and the frontier line of American civilization in .Maine advanced northward to Greenville and Caribou. The French is still the vernacular 36 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. tongue of the country and the faces of the women are of the piquant French type which often is pretty and which, however plain, never lacks some handsome feature effectively displayed. One has missed a phase of American folk-life, unique, antique and quaintly interesting who has not seen along the Fish River and in the St. John valley, the narrow farms, the gable-roofed houses and barns, the buckwheat fields, the grazing flocks and the primitive home life of the Acadians. Eagle Lake and the plantation of Eagle in which it partly lies, derive the name from the white-headed eagle which fre- quents this locality. By the postolfice and store in what may be termed the official center of population in Eagle Plantation, the railroad extension has crowded the military road to one side, taking the grounds occupied by the old highwaj- for a consid- erable distance, while the way for foot and wagon travel now lies over a finely graded turnpike newl\- made by the compan}-. HUMBLE — BUT "hdMk" TO AN KAKIA' ACAUIAN FAMILY IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 37 MAKING PLOGUES Here we began to meet teams with fishermen on the way from Fort Kent to their club house on the shores of Eagle Lake. A party of sportsmen came up from the lake on their return to Fort Kent, bringing a fare of twenty-five pounds to the man of square-tail trout and togue and a nine-pound landlocked salmon as trophies of their expedition. I admired the sil- ver fish, which was a beauty. " You should have seen the twenty-three pound salmon taken yesterday in Square Lake. It was caught by a man named Weltz — Kben Weltz from Caribou," said Dr. Edgar Flint, who was one of the party. " We saw it weighed. It was the biggest one taken so far; but there seems to be no limit to the size to which Square Lake fish will grow and no one knows who'll be ne.xt to break the record." I think it well might be biggest. Such a fish would be hard to parallel in any waters, even Sebago, the native home of the great fresh- water salmon. The story would have seemed incredible to me even from a source so authentic, but that I already had verified the account of the twenty and one-half- pound and the sixteen-pound salmon taken in Square Lake last autumn, in the nets set to catch fish for the hatcheries, and so could scarcely doubt the possibility of larger fish that had gained the growth of another 3-ear. The wonder of these Square Lake salmon is that they all have grown from fry placed in these waters only nine years ago. There is something marvelous in the abounding fish life in all these deep, cool basins of the Fish River system, but Square Lake holds precedence over the others. Its togue are the biggest known in Maine except those that swim in the mysterious depths of Moosehead, and from its waters were taken the twelve-pound square-tail trout, which holds the 38 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. world's record as the largest of its species ever caught. One gets used to big figures in Aroostook county — and with Eagle lyake at the foot of the slope at my feet stretching niysterioush' off among the hills, and in the knowledge of the wide thorough- fares that make it, and Square Lake, and the three lakes beyond, all one great water sheet, it seemed not difficult to credit any tale of leviathan trout that range the waters or to expect any Startlingly fortunate response to the barbed lure cast within its depths. From Eagle, our way, for all of the distance to Fort Kent, lay through a French settlement, a line of farms strung along the militar\' road, with seldom a cross road, or a sign of human kind to be seen away from that beaten highway, except the distant farms that came into view across the river after we had got beyond Eagle Eake. All the farms and buildings were of the same pattern, the fields stretching back after the old Acadian fashion, to the wooded hills on the one hand and down to the lake or river bank on the other. Drinking-troughs overflowing with cold, clear water led down to them from hillside springs, were frequent b}' the wayside, a provision inculcated b\' the good Saint Francis, who loved both man and beast. But the farms RICH MKADliW LAND AM) KOLLINt; HILLS" grew better, the buildings improved in aj)pearance and the popu- lation became denser as we drew nearer Fort Kent, and from IN FAIR AROOSTOOK, 39 Wallagrass, with its handsome church and convent, the remain- ing six miles into Fort Kent lay through an unbroken line of the farms, some of them with good hous.^s and capacious barns, of the thriftier class of Acadians. Near Wallagrass we turned from the liiglnvay and went down a farm road to the shore of Soldier I'ond where Mr. Burpee had occasion to visit a point of the extension work, at which there was a camp of Italian graders. A frame barracks made tight with a tarred paper sheathing accom m odat etl about half of the gang of fift>- men. The others had built for themselves little huts of boards and saphng trunks and had covered them completely, walls and roof, with sods. These abodes were fitted with- in with one or two bunks and little else and were occupied by two, and in some cases, three or four workmen. The entire crew, divided into little messes, bought their provisions at the Italian commissary store and cooked and ate them in the open air — the bread being baked by the commi.ssary baker and sold fresh to the men daily. In the commissary store, partitioned from the rest of the barracks, was a profusion of the supplies particularly valued in the Italian workingman's cuisine — beans, pork, macaroni, freshly-baked bread with acces- sories quite as essential in shape of goat's milk cheese, olive oil, and strings of garlics, and of little, round, dried red peppers. By invitation of the commissario I broke and tasted a loaf of the bread. It was as light and cri.sp and sweet as bread could be, alike attractive to sight and taste. After eating of it I could understand why that, where unprovided with a baker of their own nationality in the camp, the Italian laborers on the Bangor & Aroostook road should choose to send away, as far even as to 'IK NliRTHLAM) 40 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. Bangor, when necessar}', to procure bread to their Hking. " Try a-thees, sir, tha sardine. It's a verra fine," said the com- missario. He was opening a tightly packed and covered keg or firkin, holding perhaps two gallons, as he spoke. It was filled with large salted sardines packed as solidly together as if put into place under a screw press. 1 took a sardine and divided it with Mr. Burpee. It was very sah, but it was not half bad to eat as an accompaniment to a piece of bread ; nor was a bit of the cheese, hard and dry as it was, with a flavor like that of new Roquefort. The bakery, in a house by itself, with its vast, glowing brick oven from which the fire was raked before the batch of dough was put in ; the table, half filling the room, piled liigli with fresh- ly baked loaves, was well worth the seeing, if onlj^ to realize the artistic possibilities that may attend the gift of our dail}' bread. A( ADIAN MAIDHNS OF TO-DAY IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 41 On a plateau back of the barracks were the tents of the civil engineers in charge of the northerly division of the railroad extension. Their families were with them, sharing the camp life that in the Aroostook seems to attain ideal conditions, with the cool, northern sunnner air and scenic surroundings in a land where no dangerous wild beast prowls or venomous reptile intrudes. As we drove away in the hush of the sunset hour the Italians by their fires were cooking their evening meal of beans boiled with macaroni and flavored with garlic and cheese and peppers. The white tents of the engineers, the long, low bar- racks, the sod huts, like grotesque earth mounds, and the swarthy figures grouped against the blaze of a dozen fires, with the background of the placid lake and forested hills beyond, would have served well as the mise-en-scene of some grand opera. Where the town of Fort Kent begins and its farming suburb changes into village, is not apparent in the southerly approach along the military road. But as we advanced on our way the farm houses became larger, and verandas and lawns becam-e a frequent feature ; then the buildings and grounds of the Madawaska Training School on the right, with handsome, half-foreign looking girls picturesquely grouped like wild flower clusters, upon its steps and verandas ; and the board sidewalk that bor- dered the roadside were notification that we were in the town. Ahead appeared stores and ofl^ices fronting us from the road that leads up the St. John valley, and, in a green, open field between the road and the river, stood the famous blockhouse the tutelary shrine in peace and the bulwark in war of the his- toric town of Fort Kent. It is a region fraught with martial reminders, this peaceful nook of Acadia at which we have arrived. We come to it over a military highway, a fortification confronts us at the end and the Hotel Dickey, at which we put up, was once a barrack. CHAPTER V. FORT KENT. ITS BLOCKHOUSE AND TRAINING SCHOOL. THE AROOSTOOK WAR. }?^^'yA\,:H- Acadian remembered, Fort Kent was settled by •C"' 7/ \ V' ^ ' .^^..vwcw. refugees and others. It was named from ^JS/Mi^Xx^^ the fort erected in 1841, which was named for Gov- ernor Kent ; was incorporated February 23, 1869, and embraces all of Township 18, Range 7, and most of Township 18, Range 6, and its population, by the cen- sus of 1900, was 2,528. It contains large general stores and stores for the selling of hardware and farming tools ; is the site of the lumber, grist and carding mills of the Fort Kent Mill Company, and of two other grist mills and a tannery ; has four smiths besides carriage and harness and paint manufacturers ; contains two hotels, the Eagle, since named the Dickey, and the Morneault, and the Madawaska Training School. As seen by the visitor the town is built in the form of an E, along two streets — one the military road from Ashland, and the other the St. John valley road into which it comes — in a spacious river and valley environment of exceeding beaut}-. It has several handsome modern residences ; its long river street is crowded with stores and shops and houses, and the names on its business signs might have been copied from a Paris directory, so essentially French they are. The town is on amicable terms with its sister village, Clairs, on the Canadian side of the St. John River, and a rope ferry connects them. The only rail communication that Fort Kent has with the outside world is by way of the Temiscouata railroad, across the river, by which, taking the train at Clairs, one may go to Edmundston. From there he may go, on the Canadian Pacific, west to Quebec, or east 44 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. to Fredericton and St. John, or, leaving the train at St. Leonard, cross the river to Van Buren, which is the northeasterly ter- minus of the Bangor & Aroostook railroad. Following the completion of the railroad extension from Ash- land, of which it will be the terminus, the town of Fort Kent will take rank among the foremost of the Aroostook towns. Its isolated position on the northern border of the State, with no railroad facilities except such as are afforded by the Temiscouata line across the St. John River, has so far retarded the develop- ment due the natural advantages of its site. Even under such conditions its growth has kept pace with the development of the country north of the Aroostook River and from the time of the Aroostook war, in 1839, it has been an important supply point for lumbermen and the trade center for a considerable population of Acadian farmers. The coming of the railroad will materially increase its availability as a distributing point, and as a place of customs entry from Canada, and will make profitable the exten- sive manufacture of lumber. Along this avenue of transporta- tion a considerable part of the more than 110,000,000 feet of Aroostook luml)er that yearly is driven down the St. John to be manufactured in New Brunswick will find its way through Maine to markets on American soil. Beyond the commercial prospects that are now at hand there is a promising future for Fort Kent in its eminent advantages as a health and pleasure resort. Its situation upon the pla- teau along which the military road comes into the town from the south affords many pleas- ing residence sites, and the beautiful valleys of the St. John and the Fish rivers un- fold a succession of charm- ing views from every point of approach. Across the St. John the railway station,' the :•-•$<. ^^•r 4*i.- HOliT KEN I IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 45 houses and the old church of the Canadian village of Clairs stretch along the base of the hills that roll northward to the "divide" of the St. Lawrence valley. Along the river valleys to the east and south, carriage roads lead away from the town in long day's drives through picturesque Acadian settlements. AN INTELLIGENT PEOPLE — APPKECIATIVE OF EDUCATION In the pure, clear air of this upland town, five hundred and fifty feet above the sea, pervaded with the health of the surrounding evergreen forests, are found rest and invigoration for shattered nerves and minds and bodies overwrought with the haste and tension of city living. As a headquarters for sportsmen it is an ideal place, situated as it is upon the border of the great north- ern game region of Maine, and receiving the Fish River after that stream has gathered the outflow of its fifteen lakes, all easy of access and teeming with the choicest fish. Once in its history, before the present advent of the railroad, with all the innovations that attend its coming, has the peace of this old Acadian town been invaded. Its blockhouse, standing picturesquely on the plateau by the junction of the rivers, is a memorial of the time when the Maine militia marched northward in 1839, to defend the border from Canadian invasion in the Aroostook war. Another blockhouse, built at the same period, but long since fallen to decay, stood by Soldier Pond, seven 46 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. miles up the Fish River and the railroad embankment now covers its ruins. Some famous names figured in this bloodless war. Gen. Win- field Scott, from his headquarters at the Augusta House, in Augusta, directed the movements of the American troops, and among the young officers who came up to the St. John with the regular troops to garrison Fort Kent, were George B. McClellan and Robert E. Lee, who, twenty-two years later, as commander- in-chief of vast armies were to confront each other on southern soil in the greatest and most sanguinary of modern wars. It has been the fashion to speak derisively of the Aroostook war, which, in some of its aspects, certainh' presented some ridiculous and opera-bouffe features. But the mid-winter march of hastil}^ levied militiamen, through deep snows and forest fastnesses, from Augusta and Bangor two hundred miles to the northeastern border, was neither easy nor mirthful. And it was recognized by the thoughtful statesmen and soldiers, who from Washington and Augusta directed the military operations and conducted the negotiations, how narrowly a storm-cloud of war threatening the peace of two great nations was averted, with no outbreak beyond the belligerent proclamations of the Maine and the New Brunswick governors, the massing of troops on the border, and two or three farcial arrests of individuals. It was the promptness of the State of Maine, supported by the National Government, to act in defence of its boundaries that brought the British Government to reason and saved a disas- trous war, for which, at the time, our antagonist was less prepared than we. The Ashburton treaty, which was the ending of the matter in dispute, while relinquishing our claims to ter- ritory beyond the St. John River, secured us the headwaters of that river, and boundary concessions of much value upon the great western lakes ; and Maine was substantially reimbursed by the general government for her outlay in war expenses. At Fort Fairfield, a hundred miles along the border to the eastward, is another blockhouse similar to that at Fort Kent. These archaic fortifications are interesting memorials which IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 47 properly are preserved and treasured. But the student of niili- tar}' science has but to look at tlie map of Maine to see in the Bangor & Aroostook' railroad the effective means of guarding our large northeastern frontier in these days of modern warfare, in which rapidity in massing men and supplies to the point of attack or defense is the key of victory. Built by a railroad company from its own resources for the development of peaceful commerce, this line fulfils every military strategic requirement, with its alignment as straight almost as the flight of an arrow from its stem at Brownville to Houlton. its course of a hundred miles along the frontier to Van Buren, with the spurs that bring it to the border at Fort Fairfield and Limestone and the branch now building to Fort Kent on our northern boundary. No road built in America could have asked and received a National Government subsidy, on grounds of aiding the national defense, with greater rea.son and justice than this masterful road which, of its inherent vitality, has grown and ramified through- out x\roostook and brought that fruitful and once remote reofion FORT KENT NDKMAL SCHOOL 48 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. into close coinuiunity with tlie rest of the State and tlie country at large. Of an interest and purport more modern and far more essen- tial to existing conditions than the old fortifications is another institution of Fort Kent, the Madawaska Training School. It was established twenty-one years ago under an act of the Legis- lature, which was modified some years later, authorizing the trustees of the State normal schools to locate permanently and to maintain for not less than eight months annually, the Mada- waska Training School for the purpose of training persons to teach in the common schools of the Madawaska territory. The people living along the valley of the St. John, from Grand Falls to Fort Kent, were at that time, as in a less degree, they are now, almost wholly a French speaking community. The purpose of this school, as announced in its catalogue, is to educate French teachers in the FvUglish language, especially for the common schools in the Madawaska territory. It takes from the schools existing teachers and some of the most advanced pupils and endeavors to give them a thorough knowl- edge of the elemental y branches taught in the common schools. It seeks, by constant drill, to so perfect them in reading, writing and speaking the English language that they may teach it intelligently in the schools of the Madawaska territory. Its buildings, situated in spacious grounds which front upon the Military road and extend back to the Fish river, comprise a school house and a boarding house. The school house, with large, finely lighted recitation rooms, includes a finely finished hall with a seating capacity for three hundred persons and a stage of 18 by 26 feet, which connects with two convenient dressing rooms ; the boarding house will accommodate one hundred scholars. Its rooms are free of rent to the student, except for a charge of $1.50 per month to cover the expense of lighting and heating. Tuition is free to all who live in the State. CHAPTER VI. MORE OF THE ACADIANS. THE GIRLS OF THE TRAINING .SCHOOL. "MADAWASKA." THE STORY OF THE ACADIANS. NOTHING in my visit to this fascinating Aroostook has im- pressed me more interestingly than its Acadian people whose ancestors have figured so famil- iarly in song and story. It was in my two visits made on the same day to the Madawaska Training school that I first felt that I was getting into touch with the natures of this quaintly primitive folk. The attendance at this time was small — only thirty-five pupils, I believe. In the winter previous there had been one hundred and twenty- six ; but it was now late in May and most of the pupils were away teaching, or helping their parents in the spring planting. In nn- morning call I heard some of the recitations in class rooms ; then met all the pupils assembled in the big general study room. They mostly were girls of about 16 3'ears, shapely of figure, with faces of marked intelligence and animation and well modulated, melodious voices. They were quick to compre- hend and they plainl}' understood their lessons. In tint of skin their number was about evenly divided between the blonde and brunette types. The children of French-Canadian strain were the dark ; the Acadian children were the fair ones — for the Acadians, it should be remembered, are of the Norman-French strain and Evangeline, as described in the old French poem. 50 * IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. preserved in the Hotel Fronteiiac, in Quebec, was blue-eyed with golden hair — " hair golden as ripened corn." Driving past the school in the afternoon where the girls were promenading on the sidewalk b\' twos and threes, it was pleasing to find that they all recognized the stranger of the morning with a cordial smile and bow. Pleasanter still it was to sit on the schoolhouse veranda in the hush of the long Aroostook twilight listening to old French melodies, songs of the voyageurs and the coureurs des bois, sung with much expression and feeling by a bevy of prett}' Acadian girls gathered in impromptu grouping on the steps. Songs such as " Rouli Roulant Ma Boule Roulant," which has rung out everywhere that a French boatman's foot has stepped in America, from Hudson Bay to Florida ; and another song to a beautiful, semi-plaintive melod\- of which b}' grace of that charming training-school graduate, Miss Elizabeth Ann Daigle, of Saint David, I have a translation I will repro- duce in all its naive poes}^ : MADAWASKA. I\Iadiiw;i«ka, dear native laud, 'I'liou whose sonorous and beneficent nainc The billows of St. John river repeat to tlic tlowe) y b,inl<. When gazinji at your grand nature, For as the source of all rejoicing Our heart gently murmurs. ll(jw good it is to 1)6 an Anici'lc-iii. Let the great voice of our mountains Which vibrates amidst the fir trees, And the echoes in the valleys IJepeat to your distant shores, Tlie flowers and the green i)ralrle, I>lke unto those of Eden, All sing to our softened hearts, Ho.w good it is to be au American. Wlien o"er the tombs of our torcrathcrs, The evening breezes passing. Of their serene and proud vei-dure. Gather the sweet perfume ; It carries away like the dittany. The souvenirs of by-gone days, And they sing ever in our lieait. J low "ood it is to be an American. IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 51 Tlie word " dittany " used in tliis song suggests an interesting train of association. The plant of this name is found in the middle and southern states but seems not to grow east of New York state. It is a homely, old-fashioned, fragrant plant of the mint variety which is held in favor in the old style southern and western gardens, and grows naturall}^ in rocky woods or on hills ; in July and August it produces abundant flowers of a red or purplish tint. To find its name in use so far from the home of the plant, and among the descendants of the banished Aca- dians, suggests that it may have come back with one of those homeless wanderers to the eastern scenes that he loved — or it may have been transplanted from west to east by some followers of ha Salle or Tonty or some others of the devout French mis- sionary priests who traversed the west and south and cheer- fullv gave their lives to estab- lish the cross among the Indi- ans. The Acadian settlement of the Madawaska region had its origin in the famous and sorrowful removal of the Nova Scotia Acadians from their homes by the English who scattered them through other parts of the English colonies. It was done as a war measure, in 1755, to prevent the Aca- diansfrom assisting theFrench and Indians who were then at war with the English. Here is Dr. Parkman's description of the Acadians of that time: " The Acadians were a simple and very ignorant peasantry, industrious and frugal, till evil days came to discourage them; livinof aloof from the world HIlK THE GOOD OF HIS FEL1.I)\VS — MADAWASKA 52 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. with little of that spirit of adventure which an easy access to the vast fur-bearing interior had developed in their Canadian kindred, having few wants and those of the rudest ; fishing a little and hunting in the win- ter, but chiefly cultivators of the soil. They made clothing of flax and wool of their own raising, hats of similar materi- als, and shoes or moccasins of moose or seal skin. They had cattle, sheep, hogs and horses in abundance. For drink they made cider or brewed spruce beer. French officials describe their dwellings as wretched wooden boxes, without orna- ments or conveniences and scarcely supplied with the most necessary furniture. Two or more families often occu- pied the same house ; and their way of life, though simple and virtuous, was by no means remarkable for cleanliness. Marriages were early and popula- tion grew apace. They were a litigious race and neighbors often quarreled about boundaries. "The whole number of Acadians removed from the province (Nova Scotia) was a little more than 6,000. Man}' remained behind ; and while some of these withdrew to Canada, Isle St. Jean and other 4i'^tant retreats, the rest lurked in the woods, or returned to their old haunts, whence they waged for several years a guerilla warfare against the English. Of their exiled countrymen one party overpowered the crew of the vessel that carried them, ran her ashore at the mouth of the St. John, and escaped. The rest were distributed among the colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia. Many of the exiles eventually reached Louisiana where their descendants now form a numerous ..\i;i:ii-i I 1. IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 53 and distinct population. Some, after incredible hardships, made their way back to Acadia, where, after the peace, they remained unmolested, and with those who had escaped seizure became the progenitors of the present Acadians now settled in various parts of the Maritime provinces, notably at Madawaska on the upper St. John and at Clare in Nova Scotia." It is not unlikely that the first of the Acadians who made their homes upon the St. John river were the deported company which, in Dr. Parkman's narrative, overpowered the crew of the vessel that was taking them away, and made their escape at this river's mouth. What is certainly known is that the first Acadian settlements on the river were at St. John and Frederic- ton, the principal one being at the last named point. Here the immigrants lived in peace until, during the war of the Revolu- tion, many of the loyalists banished b}^ the patriots of the revolted colonies, came to New Brunswick and settled about PVedericton. Soon, coveting their lands, they made things so uncomfortable for the Acadians that that much crowded-out people, were once more forced to "move on," going this time further up the St. John river to the Madawaska valley, above Grand Falls, past which the British war vessels could not follow them. This migration occurred principally in 178-t-5. In their new homes the Acadians were left at peace and, being a prolific people, they have multiplied so exceedingly that their settle- ments now extend for a hundred mil-es along the upper St. John valley on both sides of the river, and for long distances up the tributary streams. There is a great sameness and at the same time a constant picturesqueness in the general appearance of an Acadian com- munit3\ One may ride for twenty miles along a road on which the line of houses and farms is continuous and of which all the places seem to have been laid out and built on the same model. Fvverywhere there are repeated in unending succession the same fashion of little gable roofed houses, destitute of all ornamenta- tion, except the gay red and green barring, like lattice work, upon some of the doors; everywhere there are the same narrow farms stretching from the road or river far back over the hills 54 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. LEARNINti KOK THE V()IN(; MADAWASKAN with the pea and buckwheat fields, the onion patches and flocks of pasturing sheep. About the houses or met with in the road- way, are the characteristic troops of handsome, polite children who are so nearly of a size and who look so much alike. Some of the grown-up girls who peep from the doorways or smile and courtesy from the roadside as the traveler pass- es, are prettier than others — that is the only difference in appearance among them. Go into one of the houses — anj^ one. You will find very clean floors and little furniture. Many of the houses have but a single room ; others have two rooms — perhaps a third one. In the partition between the two principal ones a large opening has been left, extending from the floor half way up to the ceiling, so that the great stove in the middle of the house shall warm both rooms. There is alwa^^s a spinning wheel ; per- haps a loom with the unfinished web of woolen cloth or of flaxen crash upon it. If you are there at the meal hour you will be cordialh' asked to eat. The table is simpl}^ set. In the humbler houses the family eat from one large dish placed in the centre of the table. Every one in the household is provided with a large tin or wooden spoon, the bottom of which he or she carefully scrapes at the edge of the dish with every spoonful taken, le.st some of the pea soup, which is the usual provision, be spilled on the table. In other houses the tables are more pretentiously furnished. There are two standard articles in the Acadian's fare, and they always are well cooked and good ; these are pea soup and buckwheat plogues — round griddle cakes which are eaten with molasses, and with these two staples go, if he have it, boiled pork, either salt or fresh. At the Madawaska Training school, Miss Nowland, IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. o;> the principal, told me that every Acadian girl that came tliere as a pupil could make pea soup to perfection. These people make great use of buckwheat in their cuisine, in which it appears in the form of cakes and bread and mush and puddings — and in an Acadian settlement it might be the only grain that you could obtain for your horse. For the rest, the Acadian farmer to help out his bill of fare has his pigs to kill at Christmas time and lamb and mutton from his flock. Sometimes if he be unusually enterprising, or of a sporting turn, he will take the trouble to go out to kill a moose or deer ; or will go with a party up the Fish river in the autumn with nets and torches to capture white-fish by the barrel to salt down for winter use. He is all right in any event, for content- ment always goes with the pea soup and plogues ; and with all the mouths to be filled in this land where the new child comes yearly to the household with the regularity of the seasons, want is as little known as riches among the happy Acadians. GRAND ISI.F — A ST. |(>HN RIVER SCENE 56 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. )FF FOR THF, HAY Two points there are of pride and luxurj^ that are essential to the dignit}^ and happiness of everj' Acadian householder of low or high degree — that his children be gayly dressed for christening and confirmation, and that he have a horse and bugg}^ — a top-buggy if his means can be made to compass it — for the holiday afternoon drive with his wife or sweetheart. The Sunday that I spent in Van Buren several weeks ago was entertained by the long procession of pleasure drivers that, throughout the afternoon, passed with- out intermission along the main street. One would have said that all the Madawaska territory had turned out to drive through the town this day. The hor.ses were of all shades and colors, farm horses mostly, with now and then a roadster; the carriages, many of them, might, from their appearance, have come to Madawaska with the Fredericton emigrants ; but all who were in the parade, in tlie enjoyment of the ride and the blessed con- sciousness that the}^ were upholding their social position, were satisfied and happy. On the Maine side of the St. John the French .settlements extend from Caswell plantation opposite Grand Falls, for a full hundred miles up the river. But the principal towns and the most of the French population are found within a radius of 25 miles from Madawaska, which is the northernmost town in Maine, and the place first settled by the Acadian emigrants from Fredericton. Hither, in 1784, came Jean Baptiste Cyr and his nine sons, who made for themselves homes at the mouth of the Madawaska river on what is now the Canadian bank of the vSt. John, but which then was claimed by Massachusetts as a part of the district of Maine. They were the first, or among the finst, of the comers in the general movement of the Acadians IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 57 from Fredericton into the Madawaska territory. They have thriven and increased until to-day the Cyrs are the most numer- ous and influential family in the Madawaska territory, with its name perpetuated in the name of the flourishing plantation of Cyr. Among the Maine Acadians in more recent years have come a considerable infusion of French Canadians from across the border, who mostly have settled to the north of Madawaska township. One township on the north of Eagle Lake they have colonized so exclusively that it has received the name New Canada. They are of a t3'pe quite distinct from the Acadians, and by the initiated are readily distinguished from the people of Evangeline, by their names as nutch as by their black eyes and hair. The French population of the Madawaska territory, which comprises six towns and ten plantations besides several unorganized townships, is about 15,000, a number 6,000 in excess of the Acadian population in Nova Scotia at the time of its deportation and scattering in 1755. It is in the wagou trip from Van Buren to Fort Kent, such as 1 made in the last days of last July, that one finds the truest and best scenic expressions of Acadian home life. The road lies along the river, with Madawaska as a half-way station. With me on the trip was Mr. Howe, the photographer, and our vehicle was a surrey driven by the Van Buren livery-stable proprietor ST. ISRI'NO CI M I 1 I.I 58 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK, ■I liiiuself, M(jiisieur Marcel Langlais, Acadian, who tended the horses and acted as our guide and interpreter. The roads were ])erfect, tlie weather presented the divinest t^'pe of the Aroostook niidsu miner. We crossed Violette brook in Van Buren at seven o'clock in the morning ; then on past the convent and St. Bruno church and St. Bruno college — Van Buren was St. Bruno before its old Acadian name was usurped by the name of an American president — and soon we had left the half- Americanized community and were spinning along the long village street that extends forty-five miles to Fort Kent. In places as at lower and up- per Grand Isle, at St. David and Madawaska, and at lower and upper Frenchville the houses would draw more closely together toward the red-roofed church, with spire and cross, that stood by the wayside, with near it a merchandise store or two and some handsome homes of well-to-do Acadians. But practi- cally for all the way the small houses of the Acadian farmers appeared with mathematical regularity by the roadside, with the fences of the narrow farms leading up over the high cleared crest on the south — some of them extending for a mile-and-a-half back from the road, so the driver told us. It is a land of streams, the Madawaska territory', and we crossed many bridges, with often a buckwheat mill near them, its high overshot wheel fed from a narrow wooden sluiceway leading down the brookside. And all the way the long blue reaches of St. John river were in view, with its green islands, and its further bank dotted with farms and villages as it sloped upward into the green hills of Canada. A mile out of \'aii Buren we stayed to make a photograi)li of the gilded iron cross, with the figure of the bleeding heart at its THK laLDKD CROSS IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 59 centre, that rears from a great boulder by the wajside. And down near the river bank a row of bahn-of-gilead trees marked the site of the old church that the cross was placed to commemorate. A few miies further on we passed another cross, an ancient, half- fallen, wooden structuie, which stood by the gateway of a stone wall enclosing a dense thicket, and among the young trees and under- growth we could dindy discern a grave-stone. "It is hoi}' ground,' ' the driver said ; ' ' n UK GA(.NON the cemetery of the old church which once stood there." He pointed as he spoke to an open space by the roadside opposite, as smooth to the eye as an}' space of the adja- cent fields. Whatever saint's name it had borne and what time had passed since its doors had stood open for worshippers only the church records could tell. It liad been, and had vanished and left no sign save the countryside tradition of its existence and the lonely cemetery which had received its dead. It was a late season, and in the fields by the wayside the Aca- dians were cutting hay with scythes and sometimes with a mow- ing machine. The growth was luxuriant, and the heads of the tall herdsgrass that grew to the edge of the roadway were on a level with our horses' backs. In relief against the verdurous grass tints stood the ta.s.selled blue of the tufted vetch, which the Acadians call le jardeau, the flaming red of the fireweed and the sheeted ruddiness of clover fields. Seen through the doorwa\s or seated in front of the houses that we passed, matrons and maidens were busily spinning with the small Norman wheels which are turned with a treadle by the foot, while sometimes within doors we could catch glimpses of the flying shuttle of a loom. Teams were few on the highway, but gathered in front of the church at Upper Grand Isle, where a funeral service was in progress, we counted more than fifty teams and carriages as we passed. Women and girls we sometimes met, knitting as LITTLE SIMCINNE 60 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. they walked, and parties of children coming from school who greeted us, the girls with a courtesy, and the boys by taking off their hats. The element of French politeness is in the atmos- phere of Madawaska. Strangers meeting on the road bow to each other, and the welcome is simple and cordial at the houses one enters on the way. The dogs languidly watch the traveler from the dooryards, not offering to bark at his heels, and the pigs and the geese in the pastures continue their avocations as he passes, regarding his presence with well-bred indifference. It is ou\y when the crops have been gathered, and they have been turned out to range at large, that the pigs lapse from their good breeding and vex the traveller's soul by occupying the roadway and tripping him and his horse by unexpected sorties when he attempts to clear the way. Common schools occur with frequency along every Mada- waska roadwa}', and it is a perpetual man-el how so many pupils can be gathered in such tiny boxes of houses. The teachers, generally young women and Acadians, con- duct the recitations wholly in the English language. The school at St. David we found out was taught by Catherine Albert and Annie L,ebrun — the name of the first teacher is Acadian, that of the second, Canadian French — but all the other schools that we visited were taught by Acadian teach- ers. In no New England rural tract similar in extent and population are the connnon schools more numerous, the ratio of attendance greater, or the pupils apter to learn, than in the Maine Acadia. We staved to visit several of the schools in our .A1'.K1I:K AM) IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 61 progress through the Madawaska territory with the same expe- rience in all. At our entrance the scholars all would rise to their feet and remain standing while the smiling, fair-faced teacher bade us welcome. Usually there was a bouquet beside the school-globe on the table and often potted flowers in the windows. Indeed the love of flowers seems general among the Madawaska French, for we saw beautiful varieties filling the windows of manv of the farmhouses whatever, wav we took. MOIII'KN From Madawaska town at the head of the great northward bend of the river St. John, where we stayed for dinner, we jour- neyed through lower Frenchville, and upper Frenchville with its great church and pretty houses and convent of Saint Rosaire to Fort Kent where we arrived before nightfall. Here are sev- eral fine houses and grounds near the old barrack that has been transformed into the hotel Dickey. Near the river, on the level plateau that includes the famous blockhouse, is the handsome residence of Vincent M. Theriault, Esq., a wealthy land propri- etor who is one of the leading lawyers in the Madawaska terri- tory. He is of Acadian descent, and his wife was the beautiful Marguerite Elise Cyr of the family so prominent in all the annals of the Madawaska territory. From my visit to his place I ])rought pictures of his house and family which represent the most cultured phase of Acadian home life ; also I took from Fort Kent with me a photograph of the house and grounds of €2 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. Mr. Charles Dickey, .son of the Hon. William Dickey, " Duke of Fort Kent," and father of the Madawaska Training vSchool, who for forty-four years represented his French-American constitu- ■ency in the Maine legi.slature, and vigilanth' guarded their rights and secured for them their lawful privileges. We returned to Van Buren on the second day of our trip by wa}' of Saint Agatha, the pro.sperous French-American town at the head of Long lake, five miles south of F'renchville. The twenty-mile drive to St. Agatha, over the hills, revealed the same fashion of houses and farming that we had seen in the river valley, but more and more primitive. The farm-hou.ses still were ever in view, b}' the roadside and in the far distance, and the verdurous landscape unfolded itself as we advanced in every shade of field and forest green. We pau.sed at the house of Denis Roy, Acadian — I write the name as his wife, whose maiden name was Marie Caron, spelled it for me — but iirst she tried to Americanize the surname as " King," a foible connnon to the Acadian and Canadian French alike. It was the hight of the haying season and three buxom young wives and their stalwart young husbands, to say nothing of some odd boys and girls, all were taking their ease in the farmhou.se shade at nine o'clock in the morning while the tall herdsgra.ss, over-ripe, awaited the cutting in the fields around. There is but little of the modern hurry call in life in Mada- waska, which is perhaps the principal reason that the Acadians lead long and happ}- lives. After our stop at the house of Denis Roy two especial experi- ences marked our way over the route to. St. Agatha. The firsi was the visit to the school of pretty, laughing Kmma Raymond, Acadian, of course, of whom, with her scholars grouped about -MK. 1 IIKKIAILT ANU Wll-li IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 63 her, we took away a picture ; the second was the view we cap- lured of the log-house and outbuildings, of the type of the earli- est settlers' places, and of a French Canadian girl making plogues. There was a primi- tive little fireplace outside the house, built of loose stones, with a piece of sheet iron across them, which served as griddle. The batter of buckwheat meal and water was in a little wooden tub, and she spread it upon the grid- dle with a wooden paddle, turn- ing the cakes with the same implement. They were of the size of an ordinary dinner plate, and as fast as they were cooked were laid, layer upon layer, on a wooden plate. Her movements were watched with eager interest, by a flock of hungry hens which were unceasing in their endeavors to capture the ])logues, and which were quite as vigilantly watched and ' ' shooed ' ' away by a bevy of the cook's equally hungry young brothers and sistens. A long stretch of road between flax-fields, flowering purple, l)rought us to St. Agatha with its handsome church and priest's house and wide blue reaches of Long lake extend- ing .southward from the town. Here Father Henri Gory, the parish priest, gave us a cordial welcome, in which he was THERE AKE CiOOD TIMES AMCING THE ACAUIA> INTELLIGENT GIRLS OF OUU NORTHLAND 64 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. joined by his visitor, the Rev. LeP.Ch. L,eFlem, assistant priest of St. Bruno church. Van Buren. One might linger long in description of this pleasing abode, the excellent dinner served in which such mutton was served as rarel}- can be matched in any of the great city markets, with the rare cheese from the Oka trappist monastery near Quebec for the dessert, and company which was better than the viands ; and of the after dinner cigars smoked on the veranda watching the fishhawks as they circled in pairs or singly above the lake. But we had the long trip yet to make to Van Buren and unwillingly we left St. Agatha, its church and flax-fields and its benign and hospitable priests. 1 m 1111 Kl H 111- -il . AI.A IH A CHAPTER VII. FROM OVER THE SEA. NEW SWEDEN — THE FRUITAGE OF A GREAT COLONIZATION IDEA. O make the tour of Aroostook couiit>- without visit- ing- New Sweden, would be to leave out one of the most important and interesting features in the county and in Maine. It is not merely the beauty of the landscape, the thrift)- farms and the pictur- esque spectacle of Scandinavian folk life transplanted into this country which constitute the interest of the community to the visitor. With these features stands the fact that this Swedish settlement is the only successful agricultural colony founded with foreigners from over ocean in New England since the Revoli:- tionary war. The results of its establishment have been to add to Aroostook county 2,000 Swedes, all industrious and moral and thrifty, who have turned forest into farms and made the. wilderness to blos- som as the rose. It has distributed as many more of the same people throughout the state beyond Aroostook. And, by turn- ing the current of immigration, it has given New England 20,000 of the same desirable population — and all these results evidently are but the beginning of far-reaching and greater ones to come. No public undertaking, until the building of the Bangor & Aroostook railroad made all other sources of development seem small by comparison, has done so much industrially^for Aroos- took county and the state as the founding of this Swedish colony, thirty-two 3-ears ago, in the wilds of eastern Maine. I got far-away views of the rolling hills and stately groves of Stockholm and New Sweden off to the west of the track in com- ing southward from Van Buren. That I went on to Caribou 66 IX FAIR AKOOSTOOK. before visiting tlie vSwedisli settlements proved most fortunate for my ultimate visit for there I met the Hon. William Widgery Thomas, United States minister to Sweden, who was on his return from a visit to this colony which he founded. From him I got many interesting particulars concerning it. But it was only when I went to Stockholm and New vSweden and saw the farms with their comfortable houses, great barns, broad fields and fruitful orchards, with the general air of smiling prosperity that pervaded all, that I fully could realize the success that had attended the scheme of vSwedish colonization in Aroostook. It was the un])leasant fact, revealed by the census of 1870, that the po^oulation of Maine was diminishing that led to the founding of the Swedish colony in Aroostook county. It was found that while in the ten years previous the United States had gained more than 7,r)00,000 in population, the state of Maine had 1,:}64 fewer inhabitants than in 1860. To remedy this state of things the Maine legislature took the matter in hand. A IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 67 board of immigration was established. William Widgery Thomas was appointed commissioner of immigration and a township was assigned for the settlement of the immigrants that he proposed to bring from Sweden. As a result of this action a colony of twenty-two men, eleven women and eighteen children, in charge of Mr. Thomas, sailed from Gothenburg, on June 25, 1870, to make new homes in Maine. The commissioner was authorized to "take the Swedes into our northern forests, locate them on Township Number 15, Range 3, west of the east line of the state, give every head of a family one hundred acres of woodland for a farm, and do what- ever else might be necessary to root this Swedish colony firmly in the soil of Maine." The company arrived at Halifax on July 13, crossed the peninsula of Nova Scotia and over the Bay of Fund}' to St. John, ascended the river by steamer and flat-boats to Tobique Landing, and thence traveled by wagon to their des- tination at the township whicli Mr. Thomas baptized New Sweden. Here is his description of the township: "New Sweden lies in latitude 47 degrees north, about the same latitude as the city of Quebec. There are few better towns in Maine for agricultural purposes. On every hand the land rolls up into gentle hard wood ridges, covered with a stately growth of maple, birch, beech and ash. In every valley between these ridges flows a brook, and along its banks grow the spruce, fir and cedar. The soil is a rich, light loam, overlying a hard layer of clay, which in turn rests upon a ledge of rotten slate, with perpendicular rift. The ledge seldom crops out, and the land is remarkably free from stones." In preparation for the coming of the settlers a chopping of five acres had been made on each of the 100-acre lots assigned them, and an 18 by 26 foot log cabin built and furnished with a cooking stove. This was the sole gratuitous aid given by the state to the Swedish settlers who had paid their own passage from Sweden. They came with scanty equipment, having not even so much as chairs in the way of furniture; and the onlv animals taken into the woods by the colony were two 68 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. kittens, picked up by Swedish children on the ilrive in from Tobique. It was the conimunit}- planted under such conditions that I came to visit on an afternoon soon after my interview with Mr. Thomas; and I Vjnre a note from him to the Rev. Olof P. Foge- lin. pastor of the Congrega- tional church there, who was to be my guide and referee during the time I was to spend in New Sweden. Instead of taking the usual, and gener- ally preferable route, and traveling the eight miles by team from Caribou, I chose, on account of rain and muddy roads, to go by rail to Jemt- land, where the stage, I was informed, would take me to Peterson's, the one hotel in all the vSwedish settlements. Alighting from the train at Jemtland station — Jemtland is the northern part of New Sweden, as Nelson is the southern part — I found the stage to be a one-seated wagon, driven by a small boy who spoke very imperfect English. Fortunately I was the only passenger, so there was room for all. We bumped and splashed for some miles over a road that led westward through a spruce and cedar swamp and then, at the base of the hills that rolled up ahead, came to a little settlement composed of a group of mills, two stores and several dwelling houses. The boy stopped the team at one of the .stores and handed out the mail bags to an old man who came to take them. " Is this Jemtland? " I asked the boy. "Yes," he answered, nodding. I got out of the wagon and went into the store. The old man had taken the mail bags into a rear compartment and came back to the front. I asked him where Peterson's hotel was. He looked at me cautiously. SII'KIIV (HII.DHHN IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 69 " It is a poor place," he said. "All right, I'll take a look at it, anyhow," I answered. " Would you mind showing me where it is?" He led the way to where, a little distance in the rear of the store, there was a story and a half cottage, and entering, showed me some sleeping rooms. The whole place looked tidy and comfortable. "Are you Mr. Peterson ?" I asked. "Yaw," he answered. But I did not stay at Peterson's after all. My letter signed by Mr. Thomas, "Father Thomas" the New Sweden people all call him — was an "open sesame" to the hospitality of the com- numity. Mr. Jacob Hedman, storekeeper, mill owner, postmas- ter and principal business man generall}- in Jemtland, volun- teered to drive me in his carriage over to Mr. Fogelin's home, five miles awav. IF A MAINK-.SWEDEN HOME 70 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. But first we must see Stockholm, and we drove northward two miles along a ridge with fine farms on either hand. All was change from Acadia which I had left so recently — yet strangely enough, I was among a people of the same strain of blood as those whom I had left in the Aladawaska territor\', for both were of Scandinavian origin : the Acadians of Norman- French stock being separated from the Swedes le.ss in consan- guinity than by the influence of a thousand j^ears' residence in France and America. Here the people whom I met or saw in the fields and houses, were larger of frame and more stalwart than the Madawaskans ; the men brown-bearded and tall ; the women and children i^londe-haired and fair of face ; and all tak- ing life more seriously than do the light-hearted Acadians. There was everywhere a visible prosperity. At one house where we stayed to call, the mistress of the house was attired in a black, well-fitting gown as au}'^ lady in a town might be who was prepared to receive visitors in the afternoon. Her two daughters of 18 and 14 years presently came into the room — I wish I could remember their names, though I am sorry to say, they were Americanized — and while a trifle timid in the presence of a stranger, they carried themselves quite as becomingl}' as anj^ well trained American girls might. There was a piano, and the elder girl, to her own accompaniment, sang some Swedish hymns very sweetlv. Both of the girls spoke perfect English with only a little of the crisp vSwedish enunciation, and softer voices, to distinguish their accent trom that of the average edu- cated American girl. We found things more farm-like at other places where we called, but everywhere there was neatness and plenty and comfort. The fine horses that we met on the road, the blooded stock that fed in the pastures — all these things were a great transformation from the time a quarter of a century ago when the early settlers were living in log huts, with furniture of their own making, and were doing their plowing and hauling with a single gteer or cow harnessed with ropes. From Stockholm we drove five miles over hills to the house of Mr. Fogelin in New Sweden — a farmhouse set against a hillside IX I-.\IK .\K()OSTO()K. 71 with woods above that ran from the yard up to the top of the eminence. I deliv'ered my letter which was sufficient to secure me a cordial welcome. I was pressed to stay all night and it was arranged that I should do this and that Mr. Fogelin should drive me through New vSweden to the railroad station in the morning, showing me the town as we went. There is nothing of the austerity of the oldtime Calvinistic minister in this big, hearty, unaffectedly pious man who on his farm, like St. Paul with his tentmakers' tools, works as well as prays. His family is large, and from the circumstances attending his vocation, the duties of entertaining visitors oftentimes falls heavily on him and his stout and comely wife, l)Ut nothing can disturb the cheerfulness of this excellent and jolly couple. At supper, in accordance with old Swedish custom, the farm help and all the children sat at the table, and when the meal was over, Mr. Fogelin told me many things of New Sweden, and of his parish work as a Congregational minis- ter there. New Sweden is in Irulli a conununity of church-goers. Nearly every adult Swede is a church member, and nearly every one in the settlements, old and young, attends public religious services every Sunday the whole year round. The pervading atmos- phere of life in New Sweden is temperate, industrious and relig- ious, and there never has been a rum shop in the settlement. That the Swedes are a healthy and prolific race is shown by the fact that from the date of settlement of New Sweden until now the births have outnumbered the deaths in the ratio of 8.43 to 1, which is a good showing even in Aroostook. As for their industrv. entering as they did an unbroken forest scarcely any one of the Swedes has cleared less than HO acres, most have cleared from 30 to 50 acres, while a few who have acquired more than one lot have 100-acre clearings. In the aggregate these Swedes have cleared and put into grass and crops more than 8,000 acres. In 1894 the value of their farm products was- $173,730; of their factories and mills, ^.(J9,070; and the value of their buildings, clearings, tools and stock, $528,89;"). To-day these values, at a very moderate estimate, must have tloubled. 72 IX FAIR AROOSTOOK. And all these values have been created where not the worth of a dollar was produced 32 3'ears ago. For most of these figures I am indebted to Mr. Thomas. But they crystallize the substance of my conversation with Mr. Foge- lin. After our talk came prayers, an early bedtime and then in the morning after a breakfast in which the cream, butter, fresh eggs and berries attested the productiveness of his farm, the start was made with Mr. Fogelin in an open wagon, to drive through New Sweden on the way to the station. In this morn- ing trip there was the same panoramic succession of well tilled farms, good houses, great barns and orchards that I had seen in my drive of the day before. And with the farms appeared the schoolhouse. There are seven schoolhouses now in the town, which is a great im- provement on the time, a quarter of a century ago, when some of the children came to the single school five miles through the woods, slip- ping over the snow on skidor or Swedish snowshoes. They still use the skidor in the heav}' winter snows, but there are no such dis- tances now to travel to the school- house as there were then. We did not visit an\- of the mills — but there are grist and lumber and starch mills in the town ; and, above all, shingle mills where shingles are sawed out by machiner\' instead of being shaved into shape by hand as they were in the early days of the settlement. The Swedes made famous shaved shingles and many of them, then, as the\- well might, when bundles of shingles were their only currenc_v with which to Imy goods of the American traders. The village of New Sweden, with house;? and stores in appear- ance quite like those of most other Aroostook villages of its size, runs largely to churches, of which there are four — a Baptist, a A I.ITTI.E SWEDK IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 73 Coiigregationalist, an Advent and a Lutheran church. A fea- ture of ever}' church, suggestive of the distances the people have to travel to attend divine worship, and also of their care for dumb animals, is the great horse shed in its rear — a long, low, frame stable in which, even in the coldest days of winter, the horses stand warm and comfortable in the long double row of stalls, while their masters worship within the church. "That is the capitol," said Mr. Fogelin, pointing to a build- ing that stood at the cross-roads in the center of the village. It was a two-story, frame building, about 45 feet long by 30 feet wide. "It is the oldest public building in New Sweden. It was built in the first year of the colony as a sort of general headquarters and it has served since for many purposes — as church, schoolhouse, town house and general meeting place for the colony. It used to have a tower but that went long ago." It is the central point, this old building, of the Swedish colon- ization in Aroostook, standing as it does in the fifty-acre lot reserved for public uses in the precise center of the original settle- ment. Since its building the little band of 50 Swedes who dwelt around it has become a population of 867 in New Sweden, and has spread in still greater numbers beyond its borders into the townships of Stockholm and Westmanland, organized as plantations by Swedes, and the adjacent parts of Woodland, Caribou and Perham, so that there is now a compact settlement of at least 1800 Swedes about the "capitol." Beyond these are the Swedish 'artisans and skilled workmen drawn to Maine b}^ New Sweden who have found work in the slate quarries of Piscataquis county, in the great tanneries and sawmills of Penobscot and in stores and workshops of the towns and cities of Maine. "Since the founding of the colony," I am quoting from Mr. Thomas, "the Swedish girls have ever furnished needed and valuable help in our families in all sections of the state. Some Swedish immigrants who came to us in independent circumstances purchased improved farms in Aroostook county ; while many Swedes with less means, settled on abandoned farms in Cumberland, York and our other older counties. These deserted homesteads have been placed by the vSwedes in a high 74 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. state of cultixation : indeed vSwedish ininiigratioii is proving to be the happ>- solution of tlie ' abandoned farms' question in Maine." F"e\v immigrants tliat come from over sea a.ssimilate themselves so readil> witli American ways as do the Swedes, and the people of New Sweden are no excep- tion. Besides this the stern necessities of the situation during the first years of the colonization, compelling rigid economy and toil almost un- ceasing under new conditions, tended to bring old country- customs into disuse.. The lan- guage, the wooden shoes, the skidor, or snow skates, the heavy silver spoons and some odd bits of silver or wooden ware brought from Sweden were the chief survivals in their daily life of the things and customs of the land they had quitted. But as their means increased and the fear of failure and famine pa.ssed the settlers found time to re- new some of their old customs ofv pleasure taking. In their greater prosperity' they now were able to entertain the visitors with cake and coffee, without whicli, to the vSwedish mind, hospitality seems a barren form. The}- ne\-er had l)een so poor but that when Christmas came the sheaf of oats was put out on a pole for the birds, and the domes- tic animals got an extra allowance of feed; but now they could observe the da> for themselves. They looked on approvingly while the >-oung people celebrated the day with dancing, ring games and l)lind-man's buff and other harmless sports, the girls ^^IPF ^Mk > m igf ^ ^^^HbK Mir «^H f ^^^^MK^^^ ^^^^B'^V^^^H ■ '^""-J ^- IN DHI.NAKA II I N V A IK A K ( )( ).STOO K , /» often \vearin,y; lor the occasion, some jJ'old or sil\-er ornament that at other times was jealously hoarded as an heirloom. But even in these nierrymeetino^s the deep religious nature of the Scandinavian asserted itself for they were preceded !>>■ church service and often were begun or ended with prayer. And New Year's among the Swedes is observed wholh' as a religious day. A pretty winter custom prevails among the New Sweden children, which is the l)urningof the vSno Lykta, the snow light. A high conical house made of loosely packed snowballs is built, and a lighted candle placed within it causes the structure to glow in the night time with a strong and mellow radiance. With these snow lights the children in the early evening exchange signals l)etween houses from hill to hill, and the effect of these sotth- luminous beacons crowning the hilltops is strikingly beau- tiful. The youths and maidens watch and help the children, often l)areheade(l and barehaniled, while their elders stand in the doorway to enjo\- the spectacle — for the cold of an Aroostook iHi-: ^tlT)■■^^lMl•K fi>ii\a1- — m:s\ swi'Dkn 76 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. winter has little dread for people wlio traveled southward through 14 degrees of latitude to come from Stockholm, in Sweden, to their American homes. The boys welcome spring, I HI-: Ni:\V SWEDEN HANI) on the eve of Ma\- 1, b\- bonfires built on the hilltops. Midsum- mer, the da}' of which is June 22, is, next to Christmas, the most merr}' festival. There are green boughs and festoons of evergreens and wild flowers al)Out the farmhouse verandas and gateways in joy of the day, and a public celebration with music and song and oratory and a collation is a customary feature of the occasion. In all the joyousness of these festivals the elderly people are sharers, for the fondness of the old for the young is a marked and pleasing trait of the Swedish character. My ride with Mr. Fogelin through New Sweden, enlivened by his apt descriptions of the scenes we passed, was drawing to an end. We were be}'ond the village and before us the high lands dropped into the lower le\-els where the road for the rest IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 77 of the way to the station led through a cedar swamp. At a farmhouse by the roadside a farmer, driving with his famih^ to town, had halted his team to make a neighborly call. While their elders talked within doors the young people had gone out into the orchard and, grouped beneath the trees, chat- ting and laughing, were seven or eight girls whose ages would range from 14 to IS years. The apple blossoms were on the trees, and the girls" complexions — that Swedish clear, blonde tint that the sun caiuiot burn — lost nothing by the contrast. Fine of form, full of health and strength and animation, and happ}' in the sheer delight of living, with white teeth flashing as they laughed, they made a charming tableau — and I felt that this flower scene that closed m\' visit to New Sweden was best of all. Forth the pilgrim eager started Fi-oin the settled southern country, Set his steps toward the northward, To the region of Aroostook ; '!"<) the land ot farm? and woodland. Oats and hay and big potatoes. Horses, sheep and Durham cattle. Here tlie tields are smooth and spreading, And the homes are rich and happ}' : Here the people, well contented, Feel themselves not small potatoes; Living in the biggest county Of the state, and eke New England ; Biggest and the most productive. Here the spruce and pine trees tower. And the cedar spreads its fragrance: Beauty flashes from the waters Of the rivers, lakes aud lakelets; Majesty eniolds the forests, Aud the inedian-al customs Tvinger in Acadian hamlets Wliere bright-eyed Evangeline, Jeanne, Aimee and fair Delphine Gossip at their spinning wlieels, \Vhile spun flax grows on the reels. — The Aroostook Pihjrim, Canto 1. CHAPTER VIII. AGRICULTURK — THE BACKBONE OF AROOSTOOK PROSPERITY. COMING TOWNS OF THE COUNTY. i/EXVOI. ^(I^N the farniiiii,^ ])elt of Aroostook there are six lead- ing towns, or, I might better say, in that part where the farming possibilities of the county haYe been deYeloped, for eYerywhere in its wooded uplands is the soil of rich yellow-brown loam, aboYe the bed of porous limestone, that has made the name Aroostook the synonym of agricultural producti\-eness. These towns, named with their populations, are Van Buren, 1878 ; Limestone, 1131 ; Carilxni, 4758 ; Fort Fairfield, 4181 ; Presque Isle, 3804 : Houlton, 4686 ; and all are connected with Bangor and the west by the lines of the Bangor & Aroostook railroad. Fort Kent, with its 2,528 inhabitants, has an Acadian population within and about it which carries agriculture scarcely beyond the point of supplying products for home consumption. Houlton, the oldest and handsomest of these towns, has some line houses and the Ricker Classical institute, an admirable seminary ; but all haYe a westernism of character hard to match in any state east of the Mississippi riYcr. There is wealth and liberality and public spirit in all, but, except Houlton, the towns seem to haYe been rushed along so fast through the growth of business that they haYe not had time or leisure to stop and set- tle themselYCS into shape, and grow beautiful. All are thriYing ; all haYe the telephone and boards-of-trade ; all haYe good hotels ; and those that liaYC not already got the electric lights and water- works are hustling toward that end with all possible speed. 80 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. The development of Van Buren has features that differ char- acteristically from those of the other towns named, for, instead of growing from the wilderness, its modern expansion is founded upon the old and conserv^ative civilization of the Acadian French, who founded the town as St. Bruno more than a hundred 3'ears ago. But the irrepressible energy of the presiding genius of the place, the progressive, the energetic, the genial Peter Charles Keegan, is equal to the overcoming of all obstacles, and at the time of n\\ visit to Van Buren he was closing the arrangements with a company for the building of waterworks in the town. It is not ni}' purpose to describe the towns in detail. In Van Buren the great lumber mills and the mercantile trade of a wide rural district constitute the chief industries. In the other towns are starch and lumber mills, but the impetus that drives their business comes from the inpouring of the crops of Aroostook. In its present state of development the productive agricultural belt of Aroostook is a strip from six to twelve miles wide, extend- ing from Houlton to Stockholm, a distance of about 75 miles, and bisected, lengthwise, by the Bangor & Aroostook railroad. While there is land equally fertile in every part of the county, this narrow strip is the part that has been rendered productive, and from it comes substantially all of those enormous 3'ields of wheat, potatoes, oats and ha}' that already have placed Aroos- took in the foremost rank of agricultural counties in the United States. Practically all this productive strip has been hewn from the forest within the last 30 years, but from its appearance it might have been cultivated for centuries, so smooth and settled does the face of nature appear. There are three towns. Fort Fairfield, Caribou and Presque Isle, that may be termed the garden towns of Aroostook. All are in the Aroo.stook River valley, Fort Fairfield with its old blockhouse built in 1839 to defend it from invasion, lies upon the frontier, and from the hilltops of the town one may look forth upon the slopes and valleys of New Brunswick. Above it on the river are Caribou and Presque Lsle. Such a picture of pas- toral peace and plenty as these townships present I believe is not surpassed in all the world. Along the river teeming with logs IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 81 on the \va>' to tht lumber mills, are reaches of intervale as level as a table. From the high i)anks that rise from river or inter- vale stretches back the valle\-, with slope behind slope rolling upward from it in those low, rounded contours that are t^-pical of the Aroostook landscape. The open lands are as smooth and even as a laid carpet: the forest reaches of towering hardwood trees stand against the sky like groves. When I was there in Mav the tree-tints were pale green, the earth-carj^et was soft 1)rown where the potatoes had l)een planted and the grain sown and rolled. In July the whole land is a riot of green. The woods foliage has deepened in tone: the wa\-ing fields ol wheat and oats display a thousand \erdurous tints as the tall stalks sway in the breeze ; already the clo\er aftermath is hiding the stubble of the early-mown hayfields. Only in the potato fields, which now are a-l)loom in tints of white and yellow, can the l)rown earth still be seen between the rows; but next month, when the grain fields turn golden for the reaping, the potato vines, then at the height of their growth, will have changed the face of the ground into the aspect of long, s>'mmetrical ridges of green. "Let vour pen gallop; write everytliing good ycni please. You can't overdo Aroo.stook," said a very matter-of-fact Bangor frientl to me on learning that I intended to visit New England's Garden. POTATOES FOK THK MIMTONS — MILLIONS IiiK 'IHF: GKOWl 82 IX FAIR AROOSTOOK. He knew whereof he spoke, and I, seeing, now l)elieve. There is an opulence, a luxuriant energy in nature here that seems to he iniparteti to everything that moves or grows. The people that have grown up here are fine, sturd>- t>pes of human- ity, energetic, open-hearted, frank and cordial of manner. Wages are higher m Aroostook than anywhere else in New England, and the farmer and the man who works for day's wages alike live better and have more comforts and luxuries than men in the same spheres have almost anywhere else. There is a ])ropert3- to the lime- stone soil that is the element of growth and fine qualit}' in vegetation, and not merely does it respond to the planting with i)lentiful har\-ests hut the Aroos- took oats and ha\- and wheat, like the potatoes, from their excellence all command a special value in the I'll 1,1' I II \ KI IS KKI'I.AN ' markets of the nation. Horses and cattle attain an unusual size anil sleekness, and in the growing of hunhs and fine nuitton sheep Aroostook is not surpassed by any state of the Union. Here are my notes of two farms that I \'isited in the Aroostook valley. Alfred Bishop's farm at Fort Fairfield contains :K)() acres, and I visited his oO-acre potato field. He raised 4000 barrels of marketable ])otatoes last year, besides (iOO l)arrels of inferior ])otatoes that were sent, to the starch factory ; his crops included 2.1 tons of ha\-, 200 bushels of wheat, and SOO bushels of oats. E. E. Ha\(len of Presqtie Isle; his farm of GOO acres includes a lOO-acre hardwood lot. He has 225 acres under cultivation, apportioned this year as follows : Sixty-two acres potatoes, 50 acres grain, .'^0 acres pasture, 83 acres hay. He raised last }ear 7000 barrels of potatoes, and he wintered 52 cattle, 14 houses, and 45 sheep. His sheep are of the Cotswold variet}', kept for the production of Uunbs and mutton, but he gets from them also an average shearing of eight or nine ])ounds of wool apiece. IX FAIR AROOSTOOK. 88 wortli l(i cents a ])ouiul. He lias 25 inilk-i;iving Holsteiii cows, and sells cream to the valne of from $100 to #125 per month. His income last year from the sale of potatoes, oats and hay, was $14,680. It was at Houlton, in May, that I saw the ])lanting of ]iota- toes. Coming eastward from Ashland Junction I had been impressed with the farms with their great tillage fields that spread broader and broader as I approached Aroostook's county town, and on the da^- of my arrival I accepted gladly an invita- tion from Mr. William Martin to drive out to the farm of John Watson, merchant and starch manufacturer, a mile and a half from the village. Houlton is a handsome town even for New Kngland, with its trees, fine residences, ])ublic buildings and the beautiful Meduxnekeag river that winds through the heart of the township. Be\ond the village houses the country 0))ened out into the typical Aroostook laiulscape of farms, with small houses, great barns and vast stretches of open, cultivated coun- try, which at this season was alive with men and horses engaged in " ])utting in the crops." Arri\-eil at the farm we passed along a lane, through broad fields .sown with oats and wheat, to the nearest potato field, which was 85 acres in extent. Here his men were planting pototoes — witli a machine, of course, for from the time the seed potatoes are cut for planting until the crop is dug all the work in the field is done by machin- ery. The land has been })loughed and then harrowed smooth ; the planting machine was about four feet long, with a magazine of commercial fertilizer in front, and one of seed potatoes in the rear; a man on the seat in front drove the horses and a boy on the seat behind kept the cylinder clear through which the pota- toes found their way, one by one, to the furrow. Tiie machine, as the horses drew it steadily along, made the furrow, dropped a portion of fertilizer in it, covered it with earth, dropj)ed a seed potato upon the earth above the fertilizer and covered it, and repeated this process at intervals of a foot to the end of the row. The field after the planting appeared as smooth almost as before, with the planted rows indicated l)y tiuv ridges 80 inches apart. S4 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. I 1 the course of three or four weeks tlie potatoes have rooted ami tlie huddiiig vines have appeared at tlie surface, niarkiu"' the field in dotted Hues of tureen. Then a ciiltiv^ator is run between tlie rows to loosen the soil, and the hoeing machine fol- lows which makes a hill above each ])Otato-shoot, burying it to a depth of four or five inches. This covering of the vines, which is done to cause the potatoes to root strongly, is a wrinkle bor- rowed possil)l\' from the Acadian French who practice it. About the first of July, wlien the i)otato tops have pushed through the earth abo\-e them, the potatoes again are hoetl and hilled and this time the tops are not covered with earth. The hill is now about eight or ten inches high, and as many inches in length and breadth, and it serves the two-fold purpose of holding the growing tubers above all wet and dampness, which would rot them, and of affording a bed sufficientl\- large for all to cuddle and grow in without crowding (jue another from under their earlii coverlet into the sunlight which would turn them green. This second hoeing concludes the tillage of the crop. For the refection of the jjotato bug, who appears in the fields punctuallv in his season, a solution of paris green must be pre- pared with which the ])otato vines are sprayed, once in July and once in August, which in ordinar\- weather is sufficient provision for his visit. As the color of paris green is much the same as that of the vines, the bug does not perceive the addition, and attacks them cheerfully, Init does not get far along in his feast before he falls to the ground to fertilize with his remains the plant he sought to tlestrow More insidiously tleadlx- to the growing potato vines is the fungus, which comes in stillness and unseen, like the thief in the night, and blights the field as if in a breath. This enemy can make his attack only in certain conditions of the atmosphere. So long as tlie weather is clear and dry the vines are safe ; but when the day turns overcast and humid, within certain degrees of teuiperature, the fungus, beginning at some one point, will sweep over a .")0-acre potato field in two da,ys. At its fatal touch the i)lant blackens and dies outright or lingers through the season in a teehle stru*;gle lor existence tlii:. With the coming of vSeptember the danger from enemies of the vines has pa.ssed and the jiotato harvest begins. The tubers liave not yet got their full growth, but there is a cry for Aroos- took potatoes from all over the American land, and it is early in the season that the>' fetch the highest prices. The harvest time 86 IX FAIR AROOSTOOK. lasts until the 10th of October, by which time it is safe to assume that all of Aroostook's potato crop is garnered. The potatoes are dug with a machine which turns them from two rows at once into the common furrow i)etween. The picking is done by hand, and is tlie only part of the field work for which no prac- ticable machinery has lieen as yet invented. Bands of men and women from distant localities appear in the fall in the Aroo.stook farming countr\' to engage in potato picking, much as the stroll- ers swarm from the New York cities into the hop-growing coun- ties to pick hojis in the harvest season. The small and the damaged ])()tatoes are hauled to the starch factory- ; the mer- chantable ones are sold to the potato-buyer or stored in frost- proof dug-outs, underground structures which the farmers call "greenhouses," to await a better market in the spring. With the beginning of the potato harvest the starch mills are started up, and they are run at full pressure, often night and day, for al)out two months, or until the potato supply ceases to pour in. Then they are closed down, and they are not opened up again until the next season. The farmers hauling to these mills their small and damaged potatoes, receive for them from 25 to 30 cents a bushel, which they regard almost as clear gain. There are 54 starch mills in Aroostook county, which produce annually from (5, 000 to 7,000 tons of starch. T. H. Phair, of Presque Isle, is the largest individual starch manufacturer in Aroostook ; he has 13 factories situated in nine different towns, and their annual output of starch is from 2,000 to 3,000 tons. To prepare new land for a potato cro]) it is plowed in the fall so that the frosts and thaws of winter shall thoroughly disinte- grate the sod. Then b\- harrowing in the spring the land is rendered sufficiently smooth and mellow for cultivation. Land ordinarily is planted with ])otatoes for two \ ears, then sown with grain and grass seed, and one croj) of grain and two crops of grass are taken Irom it belore it is planted again with potatoes. Tw(j potato crops in succession are regarded by some farmers as too exhaustive to the land, and the method pursued by Mr. J\. ly. Hayden, of Presque Isle, one of the most successful farmers in Aroostook county, is to ])lant one croj) of potatoes, followed IX FAIR AROOSTOOK. 87 1)v a crop of grain aiul two or three years of clover aiul herds- grass, before planting again with potatoes. The land is fertil- ized for a potato crop by plowing the aftermath of clover under in the fall, and by the use of commercial fertilizers containing the potash, the nitrogen and phosphates which the potato requires for its growth. Barnx ard manures are not regarded as of advantage to the potato crop, although the\- enrich the land beneficiallv for the grains and the hay. FRIIST-FKCIOF STORAC.K Ff>K III.IKM) BARRELS OF POTATOES Prof, Charles D. Woods, head of the agricultural department of the Maine vState University, is conducting a series of experi- ments at Mr. Watson's farm, in Houlton, with reference to the potato and its enemies, and particularly to the application of fungicides. Also this year there is in process on this farm an interesting experiment in wheat culture. Five varieties of wheat have been planted in five separate acres with the view of testing their merits by comparison. To make the experiment conclusive a portion of the wheat from each acre is to be sent to 88 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. the Miniieaj)()Iis mills to be made into flour there, and equal portions are to be orround in Aroostook flouring- mills for com- parison with the flour made in the western mills. In recent years wheat culture has ])ecome an important feature in Aroos- took farming, to the great advantage of the land and the farmers' present j^rofits as well. Crops of )}0 bushels to the acre are common, aiid the Aroostook wheat is of the best quality. Flouring mills have been established in various parts of the count\- and their ]noduct bears comparison wilh the flour Ijrought froni any other part of the country. It is well that wheat planting is on the increase, for oats and potatoes are products exhausting to the land, and incessant cropping on the same lines might in time wear out even the fertile Aroostook soil. At Pre>que Isle I visited the warehouse of Mr. George E. Kobins(m, a potato buyer, and the establishment gave me some idea of the scale on which the potato industry is conducted in Aroostook. His potato hou.se is a building 120 feet by 60 feet in length and breadth, so situated on a slope that the loaded teams ma\- l)e driven in on the second floor and the potatoes sluiced to the floor below, which is on a level with the car floors of the Kangor and Aroostook tracks in the rear. The cellar is frost-proof and it has a capacity of .storing 18,000 barrels or 35,000 bushels, of potatoes; also he has two other warehouses in Presque Isle, the united capacity of which is 0,000 barrels. His firm, the Robinson Company, has warehouses in the ten ]irincipal Aroostook towns, and its potato shipments during ihe i)ast season were 1 ,009 carloatls, or 5.")."). 000 bushels, which were bought at an average price of ()()i| cents a bushel. A great and constant demand for the Aroostook potato is for seed in the Middle and vSouthern States, and of ihe 1,00!) carloads of potatoes shipped by the Robinson Compan\- 150 carloads went for seed to IS different states extending from Penn.sylvania and Ohio southward to Texas. The seed potatoes are carefully selected and asserted so that oi'dy the variety desired shall l>e sent in response to an order^for of varieties of the ])Otato in Aroostook there is no end. In a list that Mr. Robinson handed me ai e|27r v;arielies, man\- of which bear names as poetical as IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 89 flowers. Indeed three of tlie potatoes are roses, the I^arly, the Late and the Hampden Rose. Then there is the Beaut}- of Hebron, the New Queen, the Pride of the vSouth and the Pearl of Savoy, and in the way of ponderous dignity the Polaris, the White Elephant and the Empire State, and named in some moment when the prose muse had her inning, the Early Harvest, the Dakota Red and the I'ncle vSam. It is a wonder that with all its wealth of titles the Aroostook tuber is content to remain in business as a plain potato, instead of giving itself airs as a pom me de terre. There seems no limit to the demand for seed potatoes in the Southern vStates, for there the potato degenerates so fast that the seed has to be renewed from the north almost yearly. The same is true in a modified degree of the Middle vStates and, as scien- tific potato culture is carried in Aroostook to the liighest degree, with the frequent intro(hiction of new varieties, there can be little doubt that the Garden County eventually will be depended on by the entire countr\-, aiul, ])erhaps the world, for seed pota- toes. Tlie variet\- most in demand in the south is tlie Early Ro.se, while in the Middle States the potatoes that mature later in the season are more in favor. In Aroostook county the Beaut\- of Hebron, the Cxreen Mountains and the Dakota Red seem the most in favor at present; but the popularit\ of a i)otato is as transient as the reign of a society belle, and no one can predict what new varieties will have come to the front five \ears from now. From April 1, 1901 to April 1, 1902, there were shipped from Aroostook county, via the Bangor & Aroo.stook railroad, 4,431,- 739 bushels, or 1, (ill, 540 barrels of potatoes. There were raised in the county in the same year .■),582,r)()o bushels or 2,030,024 barrels of potatoes, besitles the potatoes used in mak- ing more than 6,000 tons of .starch. In the same _\ ear there were shipped over the Bangor & Aroostook road, from Aroos- took, It), 340 tons of hay : and there was cut in the county, by the mo.st reliable estimates, 59,631 tons. Of wheat there was brought to the mills last year 99,000 l)ushels worth $79,200 ; of oats, buckwheat and barley there was ])r()duced 1,200,000 90 IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. busliels. leturning $550,000. From stock, wool, pork, poultry, dairy products and eggs, $300,000 was realized. The report of the census bureau from which these figures are taken, .shows that Aroostook stands fourth among all the counties of the country in tlie number of her farms and, so far as computed, second in tlie total value of her farm products. The following figures from the United States census report of 1900 show the value of the farm and lumber products in Aroostook in the \ear 1900: Potatoes $:],512,000 Starch 420,000 Hay 715,000 Lumber 1,9;}0,000 Ties. Shingles, Bark, etc . 500,000 Cereals and Fruit (555,000 Stock, Wool, Pork and Poultry 300,000 Total $8,032,000 Of this magnificent total, $5,602,000, the value of the agricul- tural product, was taken from the 400,000 acres of improved land in the county. There remains of unimproved land 4,440,000 acres, much of which, when its valuable forest mantle shall have been removed, will be as good for agricultural purposes as that which now has been developed. While all farming may be said to pay well in Aroostook, the profits in some cases are astonishingly great. Instances are numerous in which the buyers of improved farms, costing from $4,000 to $(),000, have paid the entire amount of the purchase money in two years from the products of the land, and cases in fact are not infrequent in which the entire pa\'ment has been made from the gains of a single year. The average j'ield of Aroostook potato fields is nearly 200 bushels an acre, and there have been cases in the Aroostook valley in which a crop of 700 or 800 bushels has been taken from a single acre. Probably the greatest ])rofit ever derived from a single crop on a field of similar extent anywhere in the world was' made last year by the firm of Cleveland & Ludwig from a 40-acre potato field on their IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. 91 fanii at Houltoii. They sold 1,400 barrels of early potatoes for $5,600, and 2,000 barrels of later varieties for $3,200, besides $55 of inferior potatoes sold to the starch factories. When the expenses of cultivation which, all told, amounted to $1,749.44, were deducted, there remained a net profit of $7.105.5(), or $177.64 an acre. From another Aroostook farm, that of Iv. H. Parkhurst tv: Co., Prescpie Isle, the gross receipts last year from the sale of potatoes, hay and grain, were $22,400 : in the same town the gross receipts of the eight leading farms, from the sale of the same three staples, averaged Sll,36o apiece. These figures serve to illustrate the rewards that go with intelligent farming in Aroostook, and explain the immigration through which mainly the ])opulation in this county increased from 49,589 to (iO,744 in the decade between 1S90 and 1900. At the Exchange hotel, where I sta_\ed during my visit at Houlton, both Chicago and native beef were on the bill-of-fare on the day of my arrival, and I chose the native. Next morn- ing oidy native beef was servetl at breakfast and, after the meal, the landlord came to me aild apologizecl lor the lack of Chicago beef. " The supply of Chicago beef in town gave out yesterday, ' " he said. "There will be some more along later in the da}'." "Don't trouble to apologize," I answered. "The native beef, when properly prepared, is vastly better than the western beef. Why don't \'ou serve it altogether? " " The farmers will not fatten the animals for market as the western animals are fattened, for one thing," he said. " f^ut the' main reason we do not use the native beef more is that there are no facilities for keeping it long enough before using. We have no cold-storage plants in Aroostook. So we have to rely upon Chicago — or the Boston shippers from that cit\-, rather — for our supply of tender, well kept beef." Thus for lack of cold-storage plants, and l)ecause the farmers will not fatten cattle for the market, Aroostook county, with her grain fields and superabundance of grass and hay, exports oats and hay and potatoes to the westward and has to look to Chicago for beef. And her fields are manured almost wholly with imported 92 IX KAIK AkOUSTOOK. fertilizers, instead of llie waste products returned to the so through the niedimn of domestic animals. But I find that stock farming and dair\ino; are steadily coming into vogue in Aroos- took, and that in them, more even than in " King Potato," lies the agricultural lulureol the countw The advantages of Aroos- took for these industries are manifold. Its grasses are the richest and most luxuriant in the state ; its pasturage is the finest in the whole eastern country ; and the scorching droughts of other sections are entirely unknown. As soon as the hay is cut the next crop springs up, and in September, when the fields in other parts of New hjigland are brown and bare, Aroostook is cover- ed with a rich verdure affording abundant feed until late in the fall. Stock comes to the barn in excellent condition, where ample mows filled with the best of hay. provide their winter keep- ing. The Aroostook .soil, so prolific of all vegetation, is especi- ally adapted for the raising of vegetables in a high degree of perfection, and if the farmers utilize their blessings the culti\-a- tion of the carrf)t. the turni]) and the sugar beet for stock feeding will ex'entually become an industry of great y^roportions. It isjencouraging to the lover of fine stdeirs herd of o'i aiiiiiKils at Presque Isle. The largest stock farm that I visited in the Aroostook was that of the Hopkins Brothers at Fort Fairfield. Here on their o()0-acre farm, sitnated on a l)eanliful eminence, sonthwest from the village, the\- have (il Durham cattle, the head of the herd being tlie lordl\' Shorthorn hull " NelsDii." which at four vears old weighs 2700 pounds. On the place also - the Mexi- cans — and in like measure Aroostook's incomparable charms must draw 1)ack to her whomsoever has once fallen under her .spell, though seas and continents divide. I n the \ast woods and garden lantl the types of humanit\- are as composite and satisfying as the blending green and brown and gold of her harvest fields. Here one finds New F^ngland. moral and religious, with her harsh and narrow aspects of human character softened and broadened into harmonies akin to the landscape charm of the >ri> 1 '1- ri' M IN FAIR AROOSTOOK. rounded fertile hills that roll back to the sky line on every hand. Plere is vScandinavia, trans]ilanted into New Sweden and Stock- holm and Westnianland. with roots that have struck deep and l)ranches that ha\e waxed and spread until the slender colony that settled in the Maine forest thirt\-two >ears ago has become a large and ])rosi>erous connnunity made up of the best of citizens. And here, on the 1>ank of the St. John, is mediae- val France merged in harmony with our institutions, its sons and daughters eager learners at American schools, and its note of patriotic sentiment expressed in the refrain of its Acadian folk- ,song, " Mndawaska," "How good it is to l)e an American." II At i ill HOW TO GET TO THIS '^ACADIA OF AROOSTOOK" That is the next thing >ou will naturally want to know after you have read in this book of the scenic l:)eauties. the domestic and industrial advantages and the fish and game possibilities of Maine's northern- most territory. The answer is simple : RIDE TO IT IN THE SOLID VESTIBULED TRAINS OR PULLMAN PALACE CARS OF THE BANGOR & AROOSTOOK R. R. The K. . .^^ c » " ^ -I'tii:^ DOBBS BROS. LIBRARY BINDINS ST. AUGUSTINE > f LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 013 995 663 1