Frenchville builder, tinkerer reflects on years of hard work

FRENCHVILLE – Starting his eighth decade, Fernand Martin doesn’t want to think of not having something to do each day, especially during the warmer months of May through November when he can work outside.

So unless something else happens to his health, Martin still will be making cylindrical cement risers, concrete fireplaces and other products next spring in the side yard of his decades-old farm home at the intersection of Routes 1 and 162.

The cylindrical cement risers are used as tubs for shallow wells, smaller than normal manholes, and for outlets of private septic systems.

Martin also makes 2-inch-thick cement covers for all sizes of tubs. His fireplaces, made in three pieces that include a cooking grill, are movable.

Some of the concrete pieces he makes weigh as much as 700 pounds, yet he manages to move them with the help of the youngsters he hires part time and his old Massey Ferguson tractor.

“I made some this past year, and I will next year if I am able to,” he said recently, sitting in the warmth of his Route 1 home. “I do it for the money because my pension is not too large.

“But what would I do with my time if I had nothing to do?” he said. “I would just smoke one cigarette after another.”

His wife, Norma Martin, was quick to add: “He doesn’t stop, probably because he would die if he stopped. … He never watches TV; instead he sits at the kitchen table making sketches and drawings of things he wants to make.”

Martin is known locally as a patenteux, an “inventor of sorts,” who has made his own tools for years. Many of the tools he uses are ones he himself designed and made for specific jobs.

Martin designed his own steel forms from half-inch-thick steel plate for his cement creations. He also has designed his own tools, such as the small cement mixers he has used over the decades.

The Martins raised four children, all college graduates, but Martin has been a farmer and a tinkerer much of his adult life. He has always worked for himself. On the farm, he raised oats, grain and potatoes and always had cattle and other animals around.

“I have two sons who are engineers,” he said. “Me, I still operate a square hand shovel.”

Wringing his large hands, made strong by years of work in all kinds of weather and conditions, Martin remembered how he started his cement business.

“I needed tubs for a well I was digging,” he said. “I made forms for it, mixed the cement in a wooden tub I made. “I made one each evening,” he said. “After seeing them, people asked me to make some for them.”

That was in 1961. He hasn’t slowed down much, after making the original cement riser tubs he needed for the family home. Previously, people used stones to line the shallow wells.

Most years, he sells 50 to 60 of the larger tubs, but he has produced as many as 100 a year in the past. Customers come to Frenchville all the way from Patten for the tubs and his other creations.

Martin made the equipment on his 1952 Massey Ferguson, including the front snowplow, even the hydraulic cylinders. In the summer, the plow is removed and the contraption on the front is used to lift the cement tubs. For years, Martin and his sons lifted them by hand.

Martin and his wife have lived in the same farmhouse since 1947. He bought the farm for $7,000. Until a few years ago, he heated the home with the sawdust he hauled from mills in Fort Kent.

The hard life has taken its toll. Time has slowed Martin’s hardened body and he has lost his sight in one eye; the other one is bad, and he has a pacemaker to help his heart.

“I’ve always worked hard,” Martin said, wrinkling his forehead in a frown. “Some people are afraid of hard work, but it’s never killed me, or anyone else I know.”

The Bangor Daily News is profiling people age 70 and older who choose to remain in the work force. We welcome suggestions for people to profile. Contact us at 990-8138 or e-mail bdnnews@bangordailynews.net.