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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Maine Hamlet, November 21, 2005
This review is from: A Maine Hamlet (Paperback)
A Maine Hamlet, by Lura Beam. illustrates the fact that my reviews are not restricted to new publications. Copyrighted in 1957, but again in publication, the author describes the Washington County village of Marshfield, near Machias, Maine, in the decade 1894-1904.
First copyrighted in 1957, the copyright was renewed in 1985, and an introduction was added in 1999, written by Jere Daniell, whose parents live in Millinocket, before the book was reprinted in 2000, thanks to the Maine Humanities Council, the Maine Historical Society, and Tilbury House Publishers.
The author, who was born in 1887, lived in Marshfield for twelve years with her grandparents, spent five subsequent summers there, and visited the community off and on thereafter, writing her book fifty years later, in the late 1950s.
In the first chapter, Beam describes the life that her grandparents had made in Marshfield. The chapter begins as follows:
"The land was a passion, magical in its influence upon human life. It produced people; nothing else at all, except trees and flowers and vegetable harvests. Life ran back and forth, land into people and people back into land, until both were the same."
"The two with whom the hamlet's story begins were truly of the land's forming: their origins, upbringing, education, occupations, and course of life were its gifts."
For me, living in Maine during the 21st century, in an era when everyone's children are finding it necessary to leave the state upon reaching adulthood, for reasons of jobs and opportunities that can no longer be found here, and at a time when one of the most significant issues is the decline of the forest industry, I find it interesting to learn that these were the issues at the turn of the last century.
Of her grandparents, Beam writes the following:
"They spanned the period 1826-1914, the last couple in the family to touch this rural American life in its undiluted form. All their children migrated and became urban. All their daughters would shiver when riding along little wooded roads, and sigh reflectively, 'I hate the country.'"
"The remarkable quality about Grandfather was his ability to adapt his occupation to local changes, an ability which he continued to have to extreme old age. His family was land-rich in lumber, and they had taught him their ways of abundance. When the lumber period ended, and they became poor, he was the only one of nine children who continued in the same environment."
The second chapter describes the place of Marshfield, perhaps from a child's eyes, given the time that she lived there.
"The place spoke first of Nature, afterward of living creatures. Beside the strong tree grew the strong man. Along with the human faces came the faces of the arethusa and the violet. The place had grown into the native looks, institutions, and beliefs."
Although history is described in every chapter of the book, the third chapter is devoted to it, from the discovery of the area by French explorers in 1604, to the founding of the town of Machias in 1763, the capture of the British schooner Margaretta in June of 1775, and the period between the end of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.
"Lumbering was always moving farther away. First it had been in people's backyards, then on the Ridge directly to the north. By the 1890's it was thirty-five to sixty miles away on the unnamed Plantations to the north, by distant rivers and lakes."
She continues:
"A few adventurers had left home in each generation from the time of the forty-niners. During the 1880's, all young people, girls as well as boys, began to migrate at twenty-one."
While the people of the hamlet show up in each chapter, the fourth chapter discusses them as a whole.
"There were 227 people in the hamlet, according to the United States Census of 1900, of whom the writer remembers 216 by name, home, family setting, and reputation; they lived in fifty-one households all of which I had visited. Three families were unknown to me because they lived at the end of the hamlet, and were tied to the town, rather than the hamlet, in school, church, and social life."
The author goes on to describe, with amazing detail and remarkable prose, the way that people lived, at home, in school, church, or elsewhere in the hamlet.
"Children were allowed to leave home before its restrictions grew too confining and no one ever lived with in-laws unless in the last illness. Living conditions had room enough for space to heal some wounds. Public opinion enforced stability and good behavior."
In the following chapter, Beam describes the work ethic that dominated the hamlet:
"Work was not for money or for possessions, it was for love, work for work's sake. Any old man too crippled by rheumatism to help on the farm would say, "Got to keep a-going," and shuffle off to saw wood for a widow or to tend the village cemetery."
Everyone in the hamlet owned and operated a farm, but the young men also worked in the woods during the winter, while others did other jobs on the side, as far as the demands of farming permitted.
In the sixth chapter, the author describes family and personality patterns in Marshfield, revealing her own capabilities as a sociologist, as she supplements her own remarkable memory with research done later, tracing the ancestry of her neighbors to the original settlers, and describing the societal changes that took place over the years, including the development of a social class system.
Next, she described the church - Congregational, which was only in session during the summer months, and the unique place that it held in the lives of hamlet residents.
"Church was the only occasion when the hamlet saw itself all together, both sexes, all ages, the handicapped as well as the strong. Out of this time came the feeling of belonging, the willingness to cooperate, and the solidarity which wanted to protect and cherish the group."
The hamlet hosted two schools, upper and lower, so that no child would have to walk more than four miles a day. Each was a one-room school house. Of the school, she said:
"It gave no tests, no examinations, no homework, no reports, required no excuse for absence, used no marching or other devices of drill. Children might sit where they liked. They were not promoted from grade to grade annually since there were no grades, only individuals. There was no graduation; pupils merely went to school as long as they wanted to. The only school reward was being known as a good scholar."
The ninth chapter describes the pleasures that were available to the residents of the hamlet, both inside and outside of the home.
Camp Meeting, the biggest summer event, was high on the list; as was the County Fair, which was for country people rather than townspeople. Those in the hamlet were apart from those who lived in the nearby town, so much so that there was very little interaction.
"I slept and dreamed that life was Beauty ... I woke and found that life was Duty." These words embroidered on the pillow shams were widely approved by the people in the hamlet."
Thus began the tenth chapter - Belief and Code. In this chapter, Beam talks about the codes that people lived by. The work ethic ranked high, of course; as did thrift. But there were other assumptions that were made, and accepted by nearly everyone.
Some of these include:
* Maine was still a Prohibition state and many people had never tasted spirits. People had convictions against the use of liquor except in illness and no one ever made wine or cider.
* Smoking was not considered in relation to health but as the indulgence of a useless habit.
Once a day was enough for coffee. While adults took tea for the other two meals, children were told, "Wait until you're twenty-one." They drank only water or, in winter, cocoa. All stimulants were deplored as taking away from an individual's ability to manage himself.
* Eating between meals, except for children and men at hard physical work, was against the theory of abstemiousness.
* Order was a virtue, always set as a goal in periods of let-up. Organization was an essential of work. People were rated even within their own families on whether or not they were good organizers.
Chapter eleven tells us about the arts, much of which would not be recognizable as such.
"Its citizens were striving for conduct, not art. They were creating themselves, by rules, by conflict, by appreciation, by recognition. Many of these unknown lived well, died well - silent, consistent, and organized to the end. Some of them talked well. In gossip, in humor verging on satire, and in certain attitudes toward personality, they were creative. This stage of artistic development was not peculiar to the hamlet. It appeared again and again in the building of new towns in the West."
"Yet it can be seen that there was some readiness for art. Everyone could do something in the practical arts, men in farm crafts, women in household arts. Everyone was supposed to excel in one or two of the tasks of his routine."
In the twelfth chapter, she speaks of migration:
"Migration began as a stern necessity, but time had eased conditions. By the 1890's, migration was sometimes two-way, the young going away to make new homes in the city but returning in summer, the parents going up to the city in winter. Whether the parents moved or not, both age groups lived in two places psychologically. It was not quite like the psychological division of the twentieth century caused by living...
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