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On view at Maine Historical Society from September 10, 2024 to May 17, 2025. Curated by Avery Yale Kamila, Vegan Kitchen columnist for the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram and vegetarian history researcher, and, John Babin, author and Visitor Services Manager at Maine Historical Society. Supported by MHS staff: Katie Alleman, Tilly Laskey, Jamie Rice, Sofia Yalouris, and Abby Zoldowski. Graphic design by Patricia Cousins.
Vegetarian History
Wabanaki peoples who’ve lived in what is now known as Maine cultivated vast cornfields and blueberry barrens, and stewarded maple groves across generations for over 13,000 years. Other people and cultures advocated for complete vegetarianism—Pythagoras in Greece, Buddha in Asia, and the Mahavira in India—and wrote about the practice of abstaining from animal flesh, 2,500 years ago.
In Maine, French Jesuit priest Father Sebastian Rasle reported in a 1722 letter that he ate vegetarian meals including corn meal porridge, tree nuts, and root vegetables during a time when he attempted to colonize Abenaki peoples in Norridgewock, and convert them to Christianity. Rasle recorded Abenaki peoples’ sophisticated agriculture and plant-based foods in a Abenaki-French dictionary. Over the centuries and often guided by religious movements, what vegetarians eat and their access to food has changed, in Maine and across the United States.
By the early 19th century, Maine vegetarians consumed whole wheat bread, butter, potatoes, cooked vegetables, and fruit. Early 20th century food processing innovations introduced packaged peanut butter, breakfast cereals, and plant-based meats. Today, in the early 21st century, tofu, tempeh, veggie burgers, and vegan ice cream flavor local vegetarian meals.
Early 19th Century Vegetarian Foods
During the 1820s to 1840s, vegetarianism was called Grahamism—named for vegetarian celebrity and Temperance lecturer, Sylvester Graham. Grahamite meals were simple: whole wheat bread, butter, vegetables, fruits, and pure water. Maine vegetarians of the time included Jotham Sewall (1760-1850) of Chesterville and Captain Peter Twitchell (1761-1855) of Bethel, who were both vegetarians by 1810 and 1816, respectively. James Gower (1772-1855) of Abott was a lifelong vegetarian, suggesting his Topsham parents were also vegetarians.
Reuben Mussey, a nationally esteemed surgeon and vegetarian, was an anatomy and surgery professor at the Medical School of Maine at Bowdoin College in Brunswick from 1830 to 1835. He encouraged students to try vegetarianism. One who took his advice was Dr. Horace A. Barrows (1809-1852) of Harrison, who suffered from a chronic illness and used vegetarianism to treat it. Dr. Barrows advised patients to do the same, and Dr. William Alcott’s 1838 medical book Vegetable Diet includes Barrows’ plant-based medical experience.
Vegetarian Mary Gove Nichols of Lynn, Massachusetts, gave a series of lectures in Bangor during 1839, prompting local women to form Maine’s earliest-known vegetarian society. Starting in 1845, Jeremiah Hacker of Brunswick and Portland, who grew up in a Quaker family, published the pro-vegetarian newspaper The Portland Pleasure Boat.
Grahamism
Sylvester Graham, 1880
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Celebrity vegetarian and Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham visited Maine from Pennsylvania in 1834, delivering a month’s worth of lectures to great fanfare, first in Brunswick and later in Portland. Since the word “vegetarian” had not yet been coined, he was said to prescribe Grahamism, telling audiences to abstain from meat, alcohol, coffee, tea, and sugar; to drink only pure water; and to eat vegetables and whole wheat flour.
His advice was so popular the flour became known as “Graham” flour, made into foods called Graham bread, a quick bread called Graham gems, and Graham crackers, the widely-marketed vegetarian health food product sold in Portland. While Graham lectured in Portland, proprietors advertised Graham wheat products in Portland’s 1834 newspapers. Allen’s noted in the Portland Daily Advertiser on June 24, “Graham Bread, Constantly on hand and for sale cheap.” John Pearson’s June 26 ad posted Graham Bread for sale at their Casco Street Bake House. Blake & Howe bakery boasted in the Eastern Argus on June 26, “We manufacture the bread recommended by Dr. Graham of good stock brought from New York expressly for the purpose.”
Horace Barrows was a trained medical doctor from Harrison who ate a vegetarian diet to alleviate his chronic health issues. In his diary entry for July 27, 1838 Barrows wrote about an experience spending the day with his spouse, Irene Bearce Barrows, replicating the laborious whole wheat breadmaking instructions from Sylvester Graham’s 1837 book, A Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making noting,
Finished reading ‘Graham’s Treatise on Bread & Breadmaking’ & last but by no means least (inasmuch as it occupied the most of the day) washing & drying 1 1/2 Bushels of wheat agreeable to Graham’s directions—an experiment we have never tried before since we kept house.
Map of Portland with illustrations of buildings, 1836
Item Contributed by
Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education
Daily Evening Advertiser, June 26, 1834
Graham’s lectures were persuasive. In Brunswick the meat market lost customers, while in Portland, commercial bakeries began selling Graham bread. According to Graham’s lecture notes, “A woman keeping a confectionary shop in Portland told Dr. J.W. Mighels that if she should meet Graham in the Street and had a pistol she would shoot him for he had damaged her more than a hundred dollars by his lectures.” The Portland Medical Association endorsed Graham’s system of living.
Despite his celebrity status, some did not appreciate Sylvester Graham’s message. On June 26 the Portland Daily Advertiser announced an anti-Graham lecture the evening of June 27, 1834 at Portland City Hall. In the next column, the newspaper advertised Graham’s sixteen courses of lectures on the Science of Human Life, to take place successive nights—excluding Sunday. Ranging from 25-cents for one night to four dollars for the course for a family, the cost was equal to about five to one hundred dollars in 2024.
Graham only delivered his controversial “Lecture to Mothers,” which taught female anatomy and counseled less sex, three times. While delivering the lecture in late June 1834, a mob gathered outside the Temple Street Chapel in Portland, threw rocks through the church windows, and stopped Graham from speaking. Protesters in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1833 and Boston in 1837 also put an end to his lectures due to the women’s rights concerns Graham raised.
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