Maine Memory Network

Red Ball Potato Company Red Ball brand 10 pound potato bag.

In the 1940s potato farmers started packaging their potatoes in distinctive bags. The wide variety of bags illustrates the strong interest in distinctive marketing efforts that is still evident today.

After the potato digger extracted the potatoes from the ground, potato pickers gather the crop into baskets, then dump them into barrels.

A picker is paid by the barrel. Pickers place a numbered ticket on each of their barrels for identification. At the end of the day, pickers' tickets are counted and they are paid accordingly.

Northeast Potato Dist., Inc. Blue Jean brand 10 pound potato bag. Depicted on the bag are three Littleton girls; Tracy Fitzpatrick, Debbie Schools and Heather Schools.

In the 1940s potato farmers started packaging their potatoes in distinctive bags. The wide variety of bags illustrates the strong interest in distinctive marketing efforts that is still evident today.

This picture shows how a potato harvester lays out potatoes. ready to be picked. This is a one-row harvester. During the 1940s and 1950s, two-row harvesters became more popular.

The potatoes were hand picked into baskets and dumped into barrels. Full barrels were then transported and emptied into a potato storage house. A few barrels can be seen in the photo.

This photograph was taken on the David Merritt farm on the Pease Road in Mapleton.

Catherine Bell, born in 1919, remembers potato harvests in Aroostook County.

Titled, "Potato Field, Aroostook County, Maine," this postcard illustrates the potato-harvesting process and the bounty of Aroostook Count farms.

A potato digger has gone through the rows turning up the spuds. The potato barrels are full and the crew is posed with their brimming potato baskets.

H. Smith Packing Co. Vacationland brand 10 pound potato bag.

In the 1940s potato farmers started packaging their potatoes in distinctive bags. The wide variety of bags illustrates the strong interest in distinctive marketing efforts that is still evident today.

The E. L. Cleveland Company was a large seed potato grower in Houlton. This picture shows the wide variety of potatoes commercially available at that time including: Green Mountain, Irish Cobbler, Spaulding Rose, Chippewa, Pontiac, Red Bliss.

Potato plants in Aroostook County were sprayed for the Colorado potato beetle. Farmers sprayed the plants with a solution of water, lime, blue vitriol (copper sulfate) and arsenic.

In 1922 Olof O. Nylander assembled a display of photographs, maps and charts of the Maine Swedish Colony which he displayed at the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of Gothenburg, Sweden. The series of display cards, or samlats, each featured several photographs of homes, businesses and community members from New Sweden, Woodland, Perham and Caribou.
This photograph is from samlat 5.

A photograph showing how full barrels of potatoes are loaded onto a truck during potato harvest. The man on right runs the battery powered hoist while the other man is ready to place the barrel onto the truck. This truck can carry 40 barrels.

The box on the right holds tickets that are deposited on the barrels by the potato pickers, who can be seen in the background. Notice the ticket on the rim of the barrel. Workers on back of the truck are from left, Steven Giberson and Myron Nickerson.

Also in the background is a tractor hauling a digger, which removes potatoes from the row and lays them on the ground, ready to be picked.

Maine potato growers dumped potatoes at nine Maine-New Brunswick border crossings at dawn, March 27, 1980, to blockade Canadian potatoes from entering the U.S.

Maine growers said they can't compete with the lower Canadian potato prices.

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Bangor and Aroostook Railroad built special cars that were equipped with conveyor belts for both loading and unloading bulk potatoes.

Information source: Bangor and Aroostook Railroad's magazine, "Maine Line," v. 14 #1, p. 5.

International Fertilizers promotional photograph. F.W. Osborne and Son farm, Fort Fairfield. 2000 pounds of 5-8-12 fertilizer per acre, yielding 150 barrels of potatoes per acre.

Working against the calendar, Maine potato growers were in the field at dawn on September 20, 1982, as the annual potato harvest began in earnest. Summer drought periods slowed the growing of the spuds, but Linwood Gray of Presque Isle, on the tractor, reported his potatoes in "good shape."

This item is in copyright. Rights and reproductions for all UPI (United Press International) images are currently managed by Getty Images. The Maine Memory Network includes this and other UPI images for educational purposes only, and cannot broker its use. For more information, please contact Getty Images Customer Support.

Group photograph of potato workers on a shipment of potatoes for the starch factory.

This picture is a display of Aroostook County potatoes. Note the ruler to indicate their size.

Grown by John Crawford, Littleton, from the crop of 1909 using 1400 pounds of Buffalo 4-6-10 fertilizer to the acre.

This July 1910 photograph shows a farmer at the J.F. Moody farm in Monmouth putting "bug-death" on the potato crop.

This is part of the Freeman photograph collection that includes photographs and negatives by Harry Miles Freeman taken between 1895-1915 of Portland and vicinity.

Two Penobscot women and three girls harvest potatoes on Indian Island near Old Town.

Willis Longstaff is pictured with a McCormick Deering tractor which was purchased from the Houlton Implement in 1936.

Longstaff's farm, located on Carmichael Road off Long Lake, was later sold to Houlton Potato Company.

Camp Houlton provided laborers -- German prisoners of war housed there -- to local farms to harvest peas, pick potatoes and do other work.

The prisoners were paid a dollar a day in scrip that they could spend at the post exchange.

This image depicts workers processing potatoes for canning at the H.C. Baxter cannery. The workers are from left Enzer Lewis, Lillian Towle, Verna Furbush, Annie Hughes, and Donald Hollister.

The cannery was founded by Hartley C. Baxter in 1887 and the headquarters were located in Brunswick.

Initially H.C. Baxter's only product was canned corn but in In 1923 a branch was opened in Hartland which processed peas and string beans in addition to whole kernel corn. Over the years H.C. Baxter continued to expand its product line offering such products as frozen vegetables, dehydrated potatoes, and frozen french fries.

By the late 1950s-early 1960s, the company could no longer compete with canneries in other areas of the country and concentrated on processing potatoes. After the Hartland plant ceased operation in the late 1960s, it was acquired by Irving Tanning and became known as the Tannery Annex. The tannery ceased using the building in 2012.

Joke photograph that promotes Aroostook County potatoes and the Caribou region.

In 1922 Olof O. Nylander assembled a display of photographs, maps and charts of the Maine Swedish Colony which he displayed at the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of Gothenburg, Sweden. The series of display cards, or samlats, each featured several photographs of homes, businesses and community members from New Sweden, Woodland, Perham and Caribou. This photograph is from samlat 14.

In 1944 a major part of the Houlton Army Air Base was made into Camp Houlton, a Prisoner of War (POW) internment camp.

Some of the prisoners at the camp volunteered to work on local farms to harvest peas, pick potatoes.

Many farmers came to see the POWs who worked their fields as good laborers rather than enemy soldiers.

Camp Houlton was established in 1944 for the internment of prisoners of war to provide laborers for local farms to harvest peas, pick potatoes and other work.

The prisoners were paid a dollar a day in scrip that they could spend at the post exchange, the base store, for toiletries, tobacco, chocolate, and even beer.

Not all POWs were allowed to work on the farms for security reasons.

Many farmers came to see the POWs who worked their fields as good laborers rather than enemy soldiers.

In this picture, the POW farm workers are posing for the picture with the farmer's wife. Pictures of POWs are unusual because photographing POWs was not allowed.

Searsport was the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad's connection to the world enabling it to directly export timber, potatoes and other products and more economically import the coal it needed to power its locomotives without having to jointly arrange rates with Maine Central Railroad.

The SS Pioneer Dale at the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad pier in Searsport taking on a load of Maine potatoes.

The Taber Wagon Gear Assembly Prototype seen from the perspective as it was drawn in Taber's patent application.

The truss-supported axle and the "king pin" brace were Taber's patented improvements.

This wagon gear assembly clearly shows the "drop-axle" construction of the Taber Wagon. The drop-axle roller bearing Taber Wagon (patent #719531) could transport 75 11-peck barrels of potatoes weighing 165 pounds each for a load of over 6 tons.

Manufactured by Silas W. Taber in Houlton, the drop-axle construction gave the wagon a lower center of gravity than traditional wagons for more efficient use of the horses' work and the lower height of the freight bed made it easier to load. The picture is of the model built for the patent application.

Silas W. Taber patented his design for an improved wagon-gear for drop-axle wagons in 1903.

A drop-axle wagon has "U" shaped front and rear axles with the wagon bed below the height of the wheel hubs.

The advantage of the drop-axle wagon is that it produces a lower center of gravity giving the wagon more stability and making it easier for horses to pull. The low wagon bed also makes it easier to load barrels of potatoes or other heavy freight.

Other drop-axle wagon designs include the jigger wagon, invented in Bangor in the 1850s, and the sloven, thought to have been invented in St. John, New Brunswick and used throughout the Maritime Provinces in Canada.

Taber's patent improved on the design of the drop-axle wagon-gear by strengthening the axle with a truss-bar that increased the axle's resistance to canting and improving the attachment of the wheel-gear to the wagon bed with a link-brace.