`Acadian Hard Times’ examines farm program in 1940s

ACADIAN HARD TIMES: The Farm Security Administration in Maine’s St. John Valley, 1940-1943, by C. Stewart Doty, University of Maine Press, 184 pages, softcover, $24.95.

1940 to 1943 were hard years. They had been preceded by even harder years for northern Maine farmers, as they were for North Americans across the continent. In the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was attempting to help recovery and the Farm Security Administration was one of its many programs.

C. Stewart Doty’s “Acadian Hard Times” depicts the difficult times in northern Maine through his research and the camera lens of FSA photographers John Collier Jr. and Jack Delano. The book also includes a series of contemporary photographs taken by the late Jack Walas of the University of Maine.

The FSA was trying to fight poverty in rural areas of the country and the works of Collier and Delano depict the bleakness of the times in rural northern Maine. The people, whose descendants now remember the hard times also as happy times, were attempting to eke out a living for themselves and their families. Doty, a history professor at the University of Maine, found the photographs in the Library of Congress.

Doty’s research showed how the New Deal program worked. The photographers worked for the FSA documenting the hard life rural America was going through. It was a time when northern Maine agriculture was on the brink. A child of one family in Doty’s book remembered his father not having the 3 cents needed to mail a letter. Yet, a few years later in 1943, the family had a new ard time through pages of black and white photographs that are stark visuals of the time. He does so by using pictures of the natural setting of the then small farms and towns and using photographs of two families in particular; the Leonard Gagnon family of Frenchville and the Oneil Daigle family of Fort Kent.

Fort Kent of the early 1940s is also recorded in Collier’s and Delano’s photographs. They also included farm pictures of the time. The two made several trips to the St. John Valley and the collection in the Library of Congress, according to Doty, is extensive.

Contemporary photographs by Walas are also vivid and give the story a current perspective. He shows the St. John Valley today along with present day pictures of people who were children in Collier’s and Delano’s days.

Doty explains the workings of the FSA programs and what they meant in the agricultural development of the St. John Valley. The work is interesting because he was able to take a particularly hard to understand government program and give it an easily identifiable explanation through the use of people and photographs.

Much of Doty’s work involves information gathered from survivors and descendants of the people in Collier’s and Delano’s pictures.

The book is an interesting work on northern Maine’s ethnic Franco-Americans and serves as a historical record of their struggles, desires and endurance.

Beurmond Banville is the NEWS St. John Valley Bureau Chief at Madawaska.