“LANDINGS, LOGGING & LUMBERMEN: MEMORIES FROM ST. JOHN, ME., 1901-2001,” by Shirlee Connors-carlson, published by the author, Part I, 110 pages, $15; Part II, 24 pages, $7.50.

New England is teeming with historians and folklorists, but did you ever meet a historian of folklore? Maybe it’s time you did, in the person of Shirlee Connors-carlson of St. John Plantation, a close-knit river community located 11 miles southwest of Fort Kent.

Like a chef who slips a dash of this and a pinch of that into her cuisine, at times straying from time-honored recipes, Connors-carlson breezes through her eighth book, published in two volumes, with a mixture of historical fact and oral tradition gleaned from hours spent in neighbors’ kitchens jotting down town happenings and storing the rest in her ample memory.

As with many other self-published books, hers is loosely organized and edited, but rich in the ways of the Franco-American, Scottish and Irish families who were drawn to the St. John Valley to work the fields, mills and river. The sight of the brawny log drivers who drove spruce and pine down the St. John River during Connors-carlson’s youth was a rite of spring. Each had a story; the author relates some of the best.

“I live in the [135-year-old] John Wheelock House in St. John, and from my east window is where I gaze at the St. John River [nicknamed “the Rhine of America”],” writes the 66-year-old author and lecturer. “The river carries all my memories of and the people and things that I store in the special regions of my mind.”

Wheelock, the first area mill man to produce sawed shingles for the marketplace, is one of the many characters profiled. Others – the village peddlers, musicians and midwives – are showcased, and highlighted in sepia-toned photographs loaned by the Patten Lumberman’s Museum, the Ashland Loggers Museum and the Bangor Historical Society. Other images came from the Library of Congress and from private collections, including her own trove of pictures, unearthed at favorite antique shops and flea markets. Her late parents, James R. and Rose McBreairty Connors, also left behind photographs.

Many of the images have been displayed this year at the University of Maine at Fort Kent and will move to other campuses throughout the spring.

Connors-carlson includes some of her own oil paintings and sketches of characters and places she remembers. Some picture horses, valued members of her community before, and after, the dawn of the internal combustion engine. Her grandson, Jake Carlson, sketched a picture of a man gripping a tree with his teeth, showing how the loggers gritted their teeth and “worked like a horse” to get the trees down and into the river.

Not all the log drivers were men; during World War II women were pressed into service. Three photographs show Jeanie Mullins McBreairty, resembling a young Lucille Ball in work clothes, from a magazine pictorial of her moving logs with a peavey, and handling a bucksaw with ease.

There’s a dramatic view of a mammoth logjam on the Big Machias River and a homemade sluiceway at Shin Brook Falls. Others were taken on the Penobscot and Kennebec rivers. A remarkable portrait shows the head cook at a logging camp at Churchill Lake on the Allagash, “sleeve jackets” protected his pressed white shirt from grease splatters. Horseplay was strictly forbidden at the dinner table.

Potato picking and maple syrup seasons are highlighted, along with a watershed event in the Valley – the 1903 arrival of the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad, which literally moved the potato and logging industries into the 20th century.

Each picture has a story, told with humor and style by Connors-carlson, an Allagash native. Her talent sparkles when writing about logging, a topic typically covered by men, and in her comments about midwifery.

“… The midwife was always available for delivering the expectant mother of her child,” she writes. “I was told that the doctor brought the baby in his black bag, which I deemed quite inappropriate. I mused that I could at least put a blanket around the baby, but mother assured me that it was warm enough in the black bag.”

Lyd Taggett and June Brownell Hafford were honored as skilled midwives, the latter astute with folk medicine and in knowing how to stop bleeding and infections.

There are frequent references to the Bangor Daily News, long a presence in the St. John Valley. At age 9 the author had a letter to the editor published in the paper. Returning the favor, she reprints stories by Madawaska bureau chief Beurmond Banville on a pea soup recipe served on New Year’s Day; and another by environmental reporter Susan Young on the raging debate over accessibility to the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. Stories from the St. John Valley Times also are reprinted.

Both volumes are available at the Country Cottage in Fort Kent, Bookmarc’s in Bangor, the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Mr. Paperback stores, the Owl & Turtle Bookshop in Camden and The Personal Bookshop in Thomaston. They also may be purchased from the author postpaid at P.O. Box 115, Fort Kent Mills 04744.