Dexter historical Society publishes oral history

OUR NEIGHBORLY NEIGHBORS: 200 Years of Life in Rural Dexter, Maine, 1800-2000, published by Dexter Historical Society, P.O. Box 481, Dexter 04930, 206 pages, $19.95.

Whoever said you can’t judge a book by its cover should read the Dexter Historical Society’s oral history of rural life in the western Penobscot County community. Pictured, with a facial expression torn between terror and joy, is 6-year-old Benjamin Spizuoco at a 1995 pig scramble in neighboring Garland.

Ben’s grandfather is Frank Spizuoco, the book’s co-author and a founder of the local historical society. Spizuoco’s love of family traditions and Dexter’s rich farm legacy goes far beyond the wonderful cover photograph. The book’s 206 pages and 130 illustrations sparkle with his admiration for the tenacious farmers who began tilling Dexter’s soil in the early 1800s; sadly, only Laurence Hartford and 14 other Dexter families are farming today.

Carol Feurtado, a writer and genealogist, and Spizuoco, a timber manager and farmer, dedicate their book “to the few remaining Dexter area farmers, the survivors.” There’s a bittersweet quality to their chronicle of country living. Families worked hard, and played hard when time allowed. Any feeling of nostalgia for those days is tempered by the harsh reality of infant mortality and back-breaking farm work.

Four years in the making, the book’s anecdotal and statistical information was gleaned from library research and hundreds of hours of taped interviews (both audio and video, available to researchers at the historical society) with many residents of the town’s four sections (southeast, northeast, north and south). Spizuoco said Feurtado had never set foot in a barn before interviewing a farmer doing his chores. He videotaped another man while his charred farm building smoldered in the background.

A fine complement to the historical society’s 1995 photographic history in the Images of America series, the new book is just the right mixture of scholarship and entertainment. Not that Volume II doesn’t contain pictures. Images show old farm buildings, families, schoolhouses and other town landmarks such as the Seba French homestead and Silvers Mills.

Many of the old pictures were taken by local photographer Bert Call, who arrived in Dexter as a farm boy in 1886 and lived long enough to cross paths with Spizuoco in the 1960s. The young historian picked the old man’s brain and persuaded him to donate his images to the historical society and to the University of Maine Special Collections.

There are anecdotes drawn from Our Neighborly Neighbors Club, which was founded by Ellie Hurd in 1908 and lasted into the 1930s. The authors stress the mutuality of the old farming neighborhoods as well as their independence. It’s startling to realize that in Dexter’s early years the only imported products were salt and steel. Townspeople produced everything else needed to stay healthy and wise, if not always wealthy.

Readers should be prepared to laugh and also shed a tear. There’s an amusing tale about an alcohol-free barn raising, apparently a rare event. Teetoling farm wife Nancy Keene Additon promised a work crew she’d serve a hearty meal with cold ginger water if they’d stay on the wagon. Her ploy worked.

Another chapter addresses the feared scourge, tuberculosis. A letter written after the 1851 death of 22-year-old Diantha Crowell is a heartbreaker.

“It was hard to part with her,” wrote her mother, two sisters and a brother to Diantha’s sister Temperance, “but to behold her at rest, sleeping in sweet happiness, it was a comfort …”

The authors live up to their promise to describe, explain and give meaning to the past to better understand the future. Their book, with a clean design by Mike Mardosa, proves again that small towns, through community spirit and hard work, often produce big books. It is available at the historical society (dexhist@ctel.net) and at area stores.