From a talk at the Thomas Means Club in 2015
Sam Smith, 2015 - You’re
lucky to be living in Maine now. If you had chosen to be born or move here
12,000 years ago you would have found yourself under a mile of ice.
Today
Maine has thousands of islands and if its coastline were stretched taut it
would reach the Panama Canal. But nowhere is it more jagged and idiosyncratic,
nor its waters more jammed with the potsherds of glaciation, than in Casco Bay.
Our
friend, the late Jack Rand, the state
geologist, explained to us in a letter:
"Kathy
Smith's bedrock is primarily metamorphosed felsic volcanic rocks whose age may approach more than 500 million
years, and whose original home, prior to being jammed into what they now call
Maine, may have been west Africa."
These
are some of the oldest rocks you’ll find visible anywhere in the world.
And as the park’s director, Andy Hutchinson put it, glaciers were
the world’s largest bulldozers
You can still find the remains in random large rocks known as erratic boulders. They moved down here from as much as a hundred miles away during glacial period.
Beginning
in 1675 Indians retrieved much of the land along the western Maine coast from
the European usurpers in a series of bloody clashes that were part of King
Philip's War. By 1703 there were no European settlers east of York County.
Although King Philip's War doesn't get much attention, it was actually the most
costly American war based on the percent of male casualties among the
colonists. Not until 1715 did Europeans return to these parts and reassert old
land claims settled by a committee in Massachusetts.
As
late as 1870 Indians summered on Great Chebeague Island. But they were long
gone by the time we arrived although you could still see shell heaps they had
left. If you look carefully you can find remains of middens opposite Googins
Island in the state park and down by the stone pier at the end of Wolfe’s Neck
The first Europeans to visit
these waters were probably Scandinavian fishermen, who could make the northern
transit of the Atlantic and never be more than a few hundred miles from shore.
John
and Sebastian Cabot, five years after Columbus, passed through and charted
Casco Bay on their way from Nova Scotia to the Carolinas. Among other things
they found on this voyage were 1,000 Basque fishing vessels working the coast
of Newfoundland having kept it a secret for about 500 years.
By
1602, when Bartholomew Gosnold arrived at Cape Neddick, his presence was
considered by the Indians to be less than remarkable. John Bereton, the
chronicler of the voyage, wrote:
One who seemed to be their commander wore a coat of black work, a
pair of breeches, cloth stockings, shoes, hat and band.... They spoke divers
Christian words and seemed to understand more than we, for lack of language,
could comprehend...They pronounced our language with great facility.
As
far back as 1524, Giovanni da Verrazano, arriving to the west of Casco Bay near
Ogunquit, got a reception from the Indians that suggested possible previous
contact with Europeans. The Indians insisted on standing on a cliff and trading
with Verrazano's crew by use of a rope. "We found no courtesy in
them," Verrazano complained. Worse they rounded out the transaction by
"showing their buttocks and laughing immoderately."
And
Captain John Smith may have been the first person to put in writing the
attraction the Maine coast would have to centuries of later arrivals:
Here are no hard landlords to racke us with high rents; no tedious
pleas in law to consume us with their many years deputations for Justice; no
multitudes to occasion such impediments to good order, as in the popular
States. …Here every man may be master and owner of his own labor and land; or
the greatest part in a small time."
The
Maine I first came to as an eight year old was quite different from today.
It
was right after WWII, for example, when the Atlantic coast had been far more
dangerous than Americans still realize. Only
years after the war would it be revealed that in the first months 46 merchant
ships were sunk off the east coast. Another 126 would be sunk before the war
was over. And Portland was among the first targets for U-boats after war was
declared. At least three U-boats were sunk near here - one five miles southeast
of the Portland sea buoy, one off Small Point and the other seven miles off
Halfway Rock.
During
World War II, the Navy formed transatlantic convoys and moored as many as 60
vessels off Portland including the USS Missouri The islands provided a natural
barrier to storms and enemy subs, with anti-submarine netting strung between
them completing to complete the task.
On
April 23, 1945 the 200 foot USS Eagle
was sunk less than five miles southeast of Cape Elizabeth by U-853. Thirteen of
the crew survived only to be informed by Navy officials that the sinking had
been caused by their ship's boiler having exploded and thus they were not
entitled to the Purple Heart. It took 40 years for the crew to get its proper
credit.
And
the U boats came even closer. Emily Rhoades lived part of the war on Bowman's Island off the end
of Wolf Neck. One night, around midnight, she went out to get some water at the
well. Standing by the well was a man all dressed in black including a black hood
and mask. He put his finger to his mouth and pointed her back to the house.
There was little doubt about how he had gotten there. And there was even a U boat
spotting station on the Haraseeket River
When the Navy left, the economy around Portland went bust. I
remember going to numerous auctions of farmers and others who had gone bust.
In
1954 there were 23,000 farms n Maine; by 1987 there were only about 6,000…in
1950 there were almost 5,000 dairy farms; by 1998 the number was less than a
tenth that. This decline has contributed to a state anomaly: Maine has the
highest percentage of its land in forest but the smallest average diameter of
trees.
You could not
have had Maine agriculture without rural schools. They were inseparable. One study reports,
"During the 1930s about one-half of all children in America went to school
in rural areas, where the proportion of children to adults was higher than in
the cities."
But the farm didn’t have the capital to carry out its great idea, so WNF worked out a long term license for its brand and leased its land to the much larger Pineland Farms Natural Beef. In September 2009, Pineland Farms removed its cattle from the farm. Pineland is now linked to about 300 farms.
Today, Wolfes Neck Farm is an natural campus providing education,
recreation, and agriculture. It is not just a farm , it is a community farm. For
example, our teen ag program has provided 12,000 pounds of food to local low
income food kitchens over the past three years.
With thousands of children and adults visiting it and many participating in its
programs, it is helping to redefine the relationship between the urban and the
rural. For a century we increasingly separated the two and it didn’t work. Now
we’re looking for ways to help more Americans grow food, learn about nature, do
less damage to the natural, become smarter about ecological issues, and
redefine our relationship to our environment.