Maine's combination of natural resources and geography put it in position to make a large contribution to feeding and housing the nation and carrying its goods in the early 19th century.
In the long run, seasonal work in the woods and mills anchored people to lands that should not have been cultivated, perpetuating a cycle of low wages, indifferent farming, and rural poverty.
Introduction
In the years after statehood Maine grew rapidly as markets opened for its farm, forest, and mineral products. At a time when industrial production depended on hand-labor, Maine enjoyed rapid population growth, and in an age of seaborne commerce, it boasted some of the best deep-water harbors in the world. In a material culture built of wood, Maine's 17 million acres of forest stood within a few days sail of any port in the East, and in a time when water turbines drove American industry, Maine had the most powerful rivers east of the Mississippi. The times could hardly have been more propitious for Maine's economic ascent.
Farm plan, Congin, ca. 1840
Maine Historical Society
Improving the Land
Like the rest of America, Maine was an agrarian society. After 1820 farming spread into the fertile central lowlands and northward into the lime-rich soils of the lower Aroostook Valley, while the St. John River region, settled by Acadian farm families in the 1780s, grew weather-hardened crops of buckwheat and potatoes.
Maine farms were typically small, family-run operations, averaging around 100 acres, and they faced formidable natural obstacles, including geographical isolation, thin soils, dense forests, and unpredictable weather. Except for Aroostook County's potatoes, farmers found no great staple crop for export, and accordingly they devoted a significant amount of time to subsistence production.
They grew a variety of grains along with potatoes, corn, fruits, and vegetables, and raised poultry, cattle, and sheep. After the fall harvest men produced hand-crafted items like clocks, buggy whips, furniture, horse collars, barrels, and shingles, and women made brooms, baskets, and palm-leaf hats and wove cloth or took in cut fabric or leather to sew into clothes or shoes.
"Mixed husbandry," as this approach to farming was called, was a response to Maine's small, easily saturated markets and to the great risk in raising crops in Maine; if one source of income failed, another took its place. Workers in other areas – fishing, lumbering, and more – use a similar tactic of taking on a variety of jobs to ensure economic viability.
Winter scene near Portland, ca. 1848
Maine Historical Society
With subsistence as a primary goal, the farm family focused on the long winter months when humans and livestock lived off the bounty of the previous season's work. Households were fortified with bushels of potatoes, oats, wheat, buckwheat, and corn; barrels of salt pork, corned beef, and sausage; bins of vegetable and root crops, crocks of butter, loafs of maple sugar, rounds of cheese, and jars of preserves.
Winter dominated the farmers' psychology, as Robert P. Tristram Coffin noted in his poem "This is my country":
These are my people, saving of emotion,
With their eyes dipped in the Winter ocean
The lonely, patient ones, whose speech comes slow,
Whose bodies always lean toward the blow,
The enduring and the clean, the tough and the clear,
Who live where Winter is the word for year.
Women's work was central to this subsistence-based system. Mothers and daughters ran the farm in winter when husbands and sons worked in the woods, and they exchanged various products and skills with neighbors to supplement the family's harvest. They extended the bounty of one season through the next by processing meat, grains, and produce, and they nurtured the farm's primary labor force, instilling the strong work habits so vital to the farm's success.
Hannah Pierce letter about farm operations, Baldwin, 1855
Maine Historical Society
While husbands and sons worked in the fields, barns, and woodlots, wives and daughters made meals, milked cows, churned butter, fed livestock and poultry, carried wood, tended smaller children, mended grain sacks, washed and ironed clothes, cleaned milk pans, tilled the garden, gathered fruit, and, when time permitted, cleaned the house.
To augment their self-sufficiency and their limited market purchases, men and women bartered skills like blacksmithing, candlemaking, weaving, dressmaking, health care, and carpentry with neighbors; they shared machinery, exchanged use of pastures, borrowed tools, and stood by others in birth, sickness, or death.
These patterns of work and trade shaped a unique rural culture for Maine. Strong inter-generational bonds gave Maine farming a conservative cast, as sons and daughters followed the practices set down by fathers and mothers, and the intense interaction among neighbors and extended kin gave this rural culture a close-knit and somewhat tribal character. Suspicion of outside influences left farmers slow to innovate. Mixed husbandry also inspired a distinctive form of architecture in which farm buildings were connected, house and ell to shed and barn.
