Reshaping Maine's Landscape: Rural Culture, Tourism, and Conservation, 1890–1929

I n August 1929 Herbert K. Furbush, self-styled "ordinary working man ;' stood before the Joint Legislative Committee on Water Powers of the Maine Legislature and voiced his views on how the state's most valuable natural resource should be conserved. The power of the rivers, controlled, transformed into industrial energy, and diffused into the countryside, he reasoned, would provide Ma ine's small towns and villages a means to fulfill their economic destinies. Conserved in this manner, waterpower would place the entire countryside on even terms with the largest industrial users and permit the spread of rural industry. Furbush's vision of a thri ving, diversified rural economy was clouded bygrowing monopoly control over this important resource. "Why am I not supplied with that power?" he asked the committee. "If I could get that power I would start a business in the State of Maine, a citizen of the State. Failing to obtain that power since 1920, I am at a standstill as a manufacturer, being an inventor of novelties and of medicines [made from] the natural resources I draw from the State of Maine,"!