Maine History Online

These changes were both awesome and unsettling. Small-town life in Maine had never been completely homogeneous, but it was characterized by what historian Robert Wiebe called "clusters of likemindedness" – agreed-upon notions of family relations, religious habits, and personal practices. Maine's new industrial developments loosened these cultural moorings.

Fears of modernity were expressed in a variety of ways, but perhaps the most dramatic example was the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan in Maine between 1921 and 1928. Organized in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1915, the national organization spread rapidly after 1920 by advocating white supremacy and Americanism.

After 1921 local Klans appeared in places like Brewer, Lincoln, Randolph, Dexter, Milo, Bangor, Gardiner, and Portland. The organization grew under the charismatic leadership of F. Eugene Farnsworth, who toured Maine appealing for better government and stronger adherence to patriotism, Protestant values, white supremacy, the Bible, and Holy Scripture.

These anxieties were expressed in a more positive way in the growing public concern over the paper industry's effect on the forest. Market considerations had dictated a certain minimum size log for crews cutting for lumber production, given the costs of moving these logs to downriver mills, but pulpwood was marketable in almost any size. This brought fears that Maine would be stripped of its forest cover.

Mill owners argued that their huge investments in mills, dams, and infrastructure precluded reckless use of the wood supply: "we would be veritable fools if we went to work and destroyed the very fountain-head of our industry," paper mill magnate Hugh J. Chisholm explained, but fears of "cut and run" forestry persisted in the Maine press and the state legislature.

The tourist-oriented Portland Board of Trade Journal noted that it normally welcomed new industries into the state, "excepting in our heart pulp companies, for while recognizing fully the amount of money they bring ... we know also the terrible destruction [they] ... mean to our beautiful forests that now make Maine the playground of the nation."

Farmers supported conservation because they thought clear-cutting would bring droughts, since trees added moisture to the air and electrified the clouds. Tourist hotel and camp owners depended on forested vistas and natural habitat for hunting, while textile mill owners worried that heavy cutting in the upper watersheds would affect the stream-flow in the rivers that powered their turbines.

In the face of these powerful constituencies, Great Northern and International Paper Company both pledged to conserve spruce below nine inches in diameter and began pushing for conservation measures of their own: efforts to control forest fires.

In 1891 Maine became one of the first states in the nation to appoint a Forest Commissioner to promote fire safety, build fire towers, and recruit firefighters, and in 1909 Maine once again led the nation in creating a special tax on forest lands that was dedicated to preventing forest fires. The Maine Forestry District, created to administer this tax, brought down the incidence of forest fires dramatically and served as a model for similar agencies across the country.

Tourism

While paper production epitomized Maine's entrée into the era of monopoly capitalism, Maine's tourist industry was a mix of large and small enterprise. Touring was an old tradition in New England, often a beginning point for the European "Grand Tour" of North America extending west to Niagara Falls. At a time when crowding and sanitation problems in cities encouraged the search for respite during the torrid summer months, rail and steamship lines linked Maine to the great cities of the East.

Tourism began in southern coastal Maine among farm families who took in summer boarders, or "rusticators" from the city. While the experience did not always live up to the expectations of urbanites unfamiliar with early-morning rising, odors from the pig-pen, and the monotony of country table-fare, Maine offered pure air, rustic scenery, and peace and quiet as compensation. And so, as one rusticator put it, patrons made the best of their exile.

In 1837 Saco farmer Eben Staples enlarged his oceanfront house to accommodate summer boarders attracted to the broad sand beaches stretching between the Saco and Scarboro rivers, and in the 1850s he again enlarged his hotel –– reputedly the first "tourist" destination in Maine –– and renamed it the Old Orchard House.

By 1880 Old Orchard Beach, as this section of Saco was called, sported several hotels, each of magnificent proportions with a broad verandah overlooking the sea. Accessible by steamship and the Boston and Maine Railroad, Old Orchard became a kind of Vanity Fair offering camp-meeting facilities for religious revivals, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot Indians selling baskets and other curios, a miniature railroad to carry tourists to the hotels, a pier, an observation tower, and many other amusements.