Maine history a success> Book explores colorful past of Pine Tree State

MAINE: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present, edited by Richard W. Judd, Edwin A. Churchill, and Joel W. Eastman, University of Maine Press, 616 pages, $50 hardcover, $30 paper.

In his preface, Richard W. Judd, a professor of history at the University of Maine and the editor of the Maine Historical Society Quarterly, explains how this long-awaited comprehensive history came to be.

At a conference at Bethel in 1985 on the subject of rural Maine history, the point was made about how “Maine educators at all levels suffer from the lack of a good survey history of the state.”

Thanks to two major grants from the Maine Humanities Council, the efforts of 27 Maine scholars and the resources of the University of Maine System, the Maine State Museum, Bates College, Bowdoin College, the Maine Historical Society, and the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, the book came to fruition — and a handsome volume it is with its lovely cover design featuring a painting of Skowhegan by Yvonne Jacquette.

The last comprehensive history of Maine was published in 1919 in time for Maine’s Centennial in 1920 by Louis C. Hatch. Since then, there have been lots of other histories, such as “Maine: A Guide `Down East,’ ” originally published in 1937 as part of the Federal Writers Project and updated and reissued in 1970 by Dorris A. Issacson. There was a children’s history titled, “The Story of Maine for Young Readers” (1962) by Melville C. Freeman and Estelle H. Perry. There was Louise Dickinson Rich’s popular history, “State O’ Maine” (1964); and in 1976, “Maine: A Bicentennial History,” by Charles E. Clark, noted Maine historian and adviser on this new work.

In his introduction, Judd writes, “History is never written in stone; differences of opinion among scholars studying the same topic generate the debates that keep scholarship ongoing, dynamic, and, indeed, argumentative. In this volume, for instance, readers will encounter not only descriptions of the past, but arguments about the mental outlook of French colonists, the role of diplomacy in the English-Indian wars, the importance of women in Maine’s economy, and other topics.”

Maine was in the mainstream, of course, when the boat was the sole means of transportation; but when railroads were built and Maine’s golden age of shipbuilding and shipping was over, “Maine became geographically insular,” according to Judd. There was a time, however, when the old expression, “As Maine goes, so goes the nation,” meant something.

“Maine’s fishing activity fed and its textiles clothed the nation’s people. Maine loggers contributed heavily to the technologies of cutting, hauling, and driving timber. Maine led the nation in the production of wooden ships — and supplied the expertise to sail them. Maine’s 19th-century political leaders, among the most powerful in the nation, illustrate the importance of Maine in national politics, and Maine’s contribution to 19th-century reform, especially temperance, brought national recognition.

” … Historic change in regional cultures often comes from the outside,” writes Churchill, chief curator of the Maine State Museum, in his chapter on “The European Discovery of Maine.” Churchill recounts the visit of Italian explorer Verrazano to Maine in 1524 when he found Maine Indians “anything but cordial. Accustomed by Indians farther south to a warm reception, Verrazano paused to trade, perhaps at Bald Head at the tip of Cape Small. The Maine natives refused to allow the ship’s crew to approach them. Ensconced on cliffs above the breakers and waving the small boat away from the land, they passed the items they saw fit to trade to Verrazano’s crew using a rope, and accepted only a few items in return. `We found no courtesy in them.’ Verrazano complained, `and when we had nothing more to exchange … the men made all the signs of scorn and shame that any brute creature would make … such as showing their buttocks and laughing immoderately.”‘

So Maine’s natives mooned the earliest visitors. Today we have natives’ bumper stickers greeting the tourists with: “Welcome to Maine — Now Leave!”

In the essay, “Turmoil on the Wabanaki Frontier, 1524-1678,” Herald E.L. Prins, professor at Kansas State University, writes, “The history of Maine’s Indians in the years following their first contacts with Europeans unfolds as a tragic story brimming with vice and violence, decay and despair. Virulent diseases, transmitted unknowingly by the Europeans, ultimately killed at least 75 percent of Maine’s Indian inhabitants. Survivors in these ravaged lands hardly fared better; by stages they were uprooted by the neverending inflow of colonists.”

Some of the other chapter-essays are “English Beachheads in Seventeenth Century Maine” by Churchill, “Acadian Settlement, 1607-1700” by Alaric and Gretchen Faulkner, “Maine in the American Revolution, 1763-1787” by James S. Leamon, “Family and Community Life in Maine, 1783-1861” by Joyce Butler, and “Maine and the Arts” by William David Barry.

Three of the 27 scholars are women. There are 24 maps and a number of pictures and photographs, one of the latter being a wonderful photo of the late Margaret Chase Smith taken at Skowhegan after her election to Congress in 1940.

This new, well-written, and comprehensive history of Maine is excellent and does what any good history book should do: It provides clear perspective on our state’s colorful past, new information not available in other sources, and is thought-provoking and very interesting to read. This work proves that good books can be written by committees, after all.

Sanford Phippen is a writer who teaches English at Orono High School.