Lumbering and the Farming Frontier in Aroostook County, Maine, 1840–1880

Abstract

umbering was an activity woven deeply into the L fabric of nineteenth-century frontier society. Cash-poor settlers in Pennsylvania, hardscrabble farmers in Michigan, backwoodsmen in Kentucky, and homesteaders in Washington State all relied heavily on nearby logging operations for income from the sale of crops and for work during the slack season for farming. The details of this relationship have never been clearly spelled out in frontier history. Although historians have traced the "lumberman's frontier" westward from Maine to the Pacific Coast, they have given little attention to the actual relationship between logging and subsequent regional development in frontier areas. Popular stereotypes-that the lumberman "let daylight in the swamp," thereby preparing the land for the husbandman, or that he left behind a legacy of cutover lands and rural stagnation-remain for the most part unchallenged. The northeastern frontier provides a clear example of the complexities of this relationship. In the agriculturally productive Aroostook and St. John river valleys in northern Maine, the progress of the spring drive of logs out of the heavily forested pine and spruce hinterland was noted anxiously by local farmers, who saw this in many ways as the culmination of their season's work. And lumbermen paid equal attention to the farmers' harvests of crops in the fall. In this last segment of the New England frontier, lumbering and agriculture developed in tandem, mutually dependent, although at times mutually suspicious. These links demonstrate that neither industry can be viewed in isolation. This fact was