MONROE — The tale of Smith’s Log Smokehouse is as much a personal odyssey as it is a story of business success.

The year was 1980. The economy had gone from bad to worse. Andrew Smith was working in the woods with a team of oxen, but there was no one who wanted the logs.

“We were four months behind in our mortgage,” said Smith. “I knew that we needed some kind of cash crop. All of a sudden, I got this idea to build a log smokehouse. It was one of those ideas that was irresistible.”

It was a startling revelation for Smith, then a vegetarian. He had dropped out of the modern world more than a decade before, after a series of electrical blackouts in his native Philadelphia left him feeling utterly powerless to control his life.

Smith moved to Maine with his wife, Kay, and their three daughters. They built a cabin out of pine logs and lived for years without telephone or electricity.

Before Smith could even begin to think about the smokehouse, he had to stop the bank from foreclosing on their land. He went to a neighbor’s house, called his mother and told her about his plan.

Smith expected her to be skeptical. But he came from a long line of butchers, so the idea was not so bizarre.

“My mother said it sounded like a good idea,” recalled Smith. “She gave me a check for $1,500 to settle with the bank.”

The following week, one of Smith’s neighbors stopped by the house and asked him to go to a livestock auction.

“He had no reason to do this,” said Smith. “He knew I was a vegetarian. But I said I would go.”

As a boy, Smith had worked as a butcher with his father in Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market. That’s where he first saw smoked hams, brought in from the Amish country around Lancaster.

“You could just smell that hickory coming off the hams,” he remembered.

But Smith had never bought or raised livestock. With the neighbor’s help, Smith bought two piglets. His daughter, Samantha, had just outgrown her log playhouse; out went the toys and in went the pigs.

As the animals grew, he built a smokehouse out of pine logs and searched for recipes on smoking meats without chemicals.

The pigs, the smokehouse and the recipes were all ready around Thanksgiving. He slaughtered the stock, cut it, cured it and smoked it. And most importantly, he liked the finished product.

For five years, the Smiths operated a small-scale, custom smokehouse for themselves and a growing circle of neighbors and friends. The work was hard; the family still lived without electricity or phone.

“But the smokehouse became an object of intense joy,” said Smith. “I could not believe the feeling I got from the smell of damp sawdust and pickling spices.”

It seemed that everything the family did helped to create more business. But as the workload increased, the Smiths found it necessary to make concessions with their independent lifestyle.

In 1985, they took the intimidating step of hiring their first employee. For the next four years, the smokehouse expanded continually but never turned a profit.

“That’s the problem in a cottage industry,” he said. “Once you take on that first employee, how far down the tunnel do you have to travel until you see light at the other side?”

The Smiths also bought an electrical generator. It was probably the most profound decision they had to make. For the first time in years, modern conveniences would be an important part of their lives.

“We knew that buying the generator was the first of probably many compromises,” said Smith.

The outside world continued to intrude in other ways. The family got a $10,000 bank loan to convert their oxen shed to a retail store and their barn to a warehouse.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture came into the picture when the smokehouse’s products were sold through retail outlets. Previously, the smokehouse was inspected by state regulators.

An inevitable result of the growth and regulation was more paperwork. Their daughter, Samantha, became the business manager and they hired a part-time bookkeeper.

As production increased, the expense of operating the generator continued to rise. In time, it was costing the Smiths about $100 per week.

If the smokehouse was to continue growing, electricity provided by Central Maine Power Co. was the only alternative. By late 1986, they were hooked into the Maine power and telephone grids. And they realized it was time to build a bigger smokehouse.

Before they could convince a bank to advance a major construction loan, though, they needed to prepare a detailed business plan. They had to decide how much production would be necessary to carry the costs of the new building, and how many extra employees were needed to meet the production goals.

“By making that step, we were into an area totally unknown to us,” said Smith. But they learned and eventually persuaded a bank to advance the cash.

When the newest building was finished, the smokehouse began to add workers steadily. It had eight employees at the end of 1988 and 15 full-timers by November 1989.

But on the night of Dec. 16, the day after the Smiths made their first shipment abroad, a disastrous fire leveled the new smokehouse.

“We had just gotten up to capacity two weeks before the fire,” lamented Smith, who saw about $200,000 go up in smoke.

Insurance covered their loans on the building, but the Smiths were shocked to find that their bank would not provide them enough money to rebuild. The economic climate in New England had grown chilly. Financial institutions had become much more conservative in their lending practices.

With the help of Eastern Maine Development Corp. and the U.S. Small Business Administration, the Smiths went shopping for new financing. They found it at the Belfast office of Key Bank.

The family’s new smokehouse will open this month. The two-story building is tailor-made for the production of beef jerky, which has become its most popular offering. But the Smiths will continue to prepare smoked ham, bacon and sausages. And customers can still bring their livestock or game animals by for smoking.

Andrew Smith and his family have traveled a long road — both physically and philosophically — from the asphalt of Philadelphia to the muddy backroads of Monroe. The journey began with their rejection of many of the trappings of modern life.

But Smith is no longer an oxen-working woodsman. He is the head of a successful business, one that distributes smoked meats from Maine to Ohio and hopes to expand its distribution in Europe.

While the family has embraced some of the things they once shunned, Smith remains committed to a philosophy of independence and rural life.

“Our destiny as humans is not with science,” he says. “We are part of the land. We’ve got to accept that concept. The federal government needs to develop programs that make it easier to farm the land for themselves.”