|Penny Hilton|
This is the second installment in a series on Farming in New Gloucester, written by Penny Hilton. Read part I here.
Unless otherwise noted, photographs are courtesy of the New Gloucester Historical Society. Thanks to NGHS curator Tom Blake for sharing these wonderful old photos.
Between the rapidly growing embrace of “scientific management” of farms and their crops, innovations in packaging, and the addition in 1870 of several Maine Central Railway stops in New Gloucester between Auburn and Portland, the next few decades became an agricultural heyday for the town. Dairy products and apples became the big cash crops.
Apples might not have become a cash crop if New Gloucester farmers were not so stubborn. From the beginning of their settlement, most farms grew a couple of apple trees for themselves, for eating, but more importantly, for making hard cider. David Nelson came to New Gloucester in 1787 where he settled on 250 acres on Bald Hill, with a log cabin and a cider mill. We don’t know whether the people who bought his apples dried them, or ate them, or pressed and hardened them off. But clearly, apples were an important part of local life and economy.
In 1850, Benjamin Rollins, a New Gloucester native, returned from several years in Boston to try his luck with apple growing. It was the work of several years to bring old trees into production with scion grafts, and they weren’t ready to sell until 1860. Which was good timing, because…
In 1851 the Maine Dry Law against sales of alcoholic beverages, promoted fiercely and relentlessly by NG’s own General Samuel Fessenden and declaimed from pulpits all over Maine, became law – the first legal prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the country. Then as now, drunkenness undermined families and civil order. While tipple salons and taverns sold beer, rum, and gin, in the country they drank hard cider. Eventually farmers were convinced – or pressured to say so — that the hard cider brewed in farm kitchens was indeed an instrument of the devil. Some even cut down their apple trees in dramas of commitment. But by and large, the law was ineffective and ignored. Hard cider was made and sold from kitchens, and reframed as a medicinal tonic. Tavern keepers reconciled themselves to paying occasional fines, and kept serving.
According to an article in the Smithsonian Magazine, only four years after Maine went “dry,” what became known as The Rum Riot in Portland brought a big shift in public opinion. Portland mayor Neal Dow, a Quaker, was a founding member of the New England Temperance Society. Dow had taken advantage of a caveat in the law that created the designation “appointed purchasers,” and bought $1,600 worth of rum which he then hid in the City Hall basement. He explained later that he had bought the “medicinal “ beverage to distribute among Portland doctors, who were allowed to prescribe it to their patients. Nice story, but, true or not, there was still the matter that Dow himself was not an “appointed purchaser” and the public was incensed by the perceived hypocrisy. Three thousand people stormed City Hall and raided the stash. Many bottles were broken, and some of the liquor was poured out onto the street. Dow ordered his militia to fire on the rioters, which resulted in seven injured and one dead, as reported the next day in The State of Maine newspaper (June 5, 1855). Maine’s unique effort to stop the “sin” of drinking and drunkenness was repealed in 1856, just after the Rum Riot, about the time that Benjamin Rollins’ apples trees were coming into production. The law was re-enacted in various forms and eventually folded into the state Constitution in 1885. The Maine law laid the foundation for national prohibition, which wasn’t repealed until 1933.
Scientific management
During the later years of the 1800’s, there was a campaign among leading farmers, educators, and elected officials to convince Maine farmers to manage their farms using scientific data and methods for better crop yields and higher profits. Leaders in the various areas of agriculture spoke out at conferences and traveled to promising towns, making speeches and enlisting peers in the new approach called “scientific management.”
New Gloucester was in the vanguard of the scientific management of orchards. When in 1874 John True inherited the Shady Lane Farm on Cobb’s Bridge Road from his father, Winthrop, he added an orchard, and apples quickly became his specialty. With years of business experience in Boston, True served as president of the State of Maine Pomological Society (SPS) for several terms. He promoted the switch from growing a few of several kinds of apples for local use, to growing mostly the kinds that survived well over time, for outside markets. He developed better packaging to protect apples en route to far off places. He also he pitched switching from the traditional Baldwin apple that populated most orchards, to the Ben Davis variety. Farmers said the Ben Davis tasted like sawdust, but acknowledged it lasted longer, travelled well, and therefore got better prices. At the 1890 SPS Convention, True delivered a paper that argued for a new farmers’ organization that would create a cooperative fruit exchange for shared cold storage, oversee grading the fruit and even “inspect” European markets. It was a vision that became reality in 1914 with a Portland cold storage facility, and the emergence of the state-wide Maine Fruit Growers Exchange.
So when the Maine Central Railroad put several stops in New Gloucester on its Portland to Montreal run in 1870, New Gloucester farmers were ready. In the year 1880, New Gloucester could claim two admirable statistics. NG dairy farmers, having switched to scientific management and the more productive Holstein and Ayrshire breeds, supplied 12% of the milk sold in Cumberland County. And in the same year, True reported that apples, sent by train to Portland, and then by ship to London, Liverpool, and Glasgow, had become twice as valuable as any other Maine crop. True then began arguing for some kind of shared cold storage structure so that apples could be stashed away after harvest, when the market was flooded, and sold in the off-seasons for more profit.
True Merrill, another local orchardist, initially made his living selling fruit trees, but became an accomplished apple grower. From an office in Portland, he also became a successful wholesaler of fruits to Europe through the ports in London, Liverpool, and Glasgow. He won prizes from the State Board of Agriculture for “superior cultivation” and became a lifetime member of the Pomological Society. He was also a member of the New Gloucester School Board. In 1903, in support of the MSP’s goals of educating school children about growing fruits and flowers, Merrill and True organized the first Horticultural School in Maine, here in New Gloucester, a two-day event that attracted wagons full of children to the Town Hall on the first day, and to Centennial Hall the second. It was a crash course in everything about growing plants, from propagation and pests, to how to get better harvests and bring them to market. By 1905, nearly 30 local farmers had joined the organization.
Another orchard was added in 1906 when Mike Thompson’s great-great-grandfather established a farm on what we know now as Gloucester Hill Road. His grandfather was “into everything,” says Thompson. He logged, he owned a sawmill, raised cows, and had an orchard. Of those endeavors, it is the orchard that remains – and more about that in a later installment, “Who’s Farming Now?”
The newest orchard in town was started in 1963 when Richard Clark bought the Paul Woodbury Farm on Peacock Hill Road. Woodbury had successfully raised a small number of much-admired fruit trees on the property, but Clark added another 22 acres of apple trees and built a packaging and storage building. (And more about this orchard in a later installment as well.)
Ironically, three severe winters between 1906 and 1934 killed or badly damaged over 600,000 Maine apple trees, and the apple type that suffered most was the Ben Davis. In fact, the record Maine 4.2 million pound apple harvest of 1900 was not equaled again until the 1960’s. Still, Maine’s apple harvest grew from about 4% of Maine produce in 1928 to 60% in 1943.
Facts About Apples from the State of Maine Pomological Website
- It takes about 36 apples to create one gallon of apple cider
- Apple trees take from two to ten years to produce their first fruit, depending on the variety and whether they are dwarf or full-sized trees
- There are well over 100 varieties of apples currently grown in Maine, but most farms grow 20 to 30 varieties
- McIntosh is the most grown apple variety in New England
- Two apple varieties, Black Oxford and Brock, originated in Maine
- Eighty-four farms produce about one million bushels of apples each year in Maine, on 2,000 acres
- Most apple trees are propagated by bud grafting, a technique that joins two plants into one. Since apples do not come true-to-type from seed, and do not readily form roots on cuttings, they are grafted onto easy-to-root stocks that serve as the root system.
