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WE OWN AN OLD WHITE farmhouse in Mid-Coast Maine. When I have work done, I tell contractors to make it look exactly the same, as if the house were sealed in a snow globe.
Up here, the rural past seems close at hand. The artist Andrew Wyeth painted one peninsula over. His depiction of the Olson farm perfectly captured the rustic ideal. Christina Olson and her brother Alvaro sold vegetables out of their kitchen door. Their 18th century clapboard home decayed picturesquely around them. They couldn’t afford paint or to replace the cast-iron stove with something more up to date. It made a great setting for paintings.
Around the same time, E.B. White wrote from a picturesque old farm in Brooklin, also in Mid-Coast Maine. He celebrated the quiet life in articles for The New Yorker and in popular children’s books like Charlotte’s Web. Rural Maine became a celebrated ideal in popular culture, and people like my parents left the din of Manhattan every summer to vacation in peaceful Maine.
Until recently, I hadn’t realized that the main ingredient in Maine’s rustic charm was poverty. Practically every Maine industry crashed in the late 19th or early 20th century. Small farms couldn’t compete with the big spreads on the Plains. Lumber companies left Maine for Georgia, where the pines grow faster and straighter. The block ice business was wiped out by mechanical refrigeration. Thanks to overfishing, the lobster, cod and salmon catches all crashed at various times.
Shipbuilding had been a mainstay of coastal communities. The business fell apart in the transition from sail to steam. Nearby Waldoboro gave it one last try, building enormous five-masted wooden cargo ships. They foundered in far-off seas when the deckhands couldn’t haul in the sails fast enough when a storm blew up.
When the Great Depression arrived in 1929, it didn’t scar Maine, as it did other places. “Maine’s coastal economy had been in decline for so long that it had nowhere left to fall,” writes historian Colin Woodward. “Many Mainers, especially in rural areas, were already as depressed as they could get.”
No one tore down an old house to build a new subdivision. “Make It, Make Do or Do Without” was stitched on samplers. Because she lacked cash, the woman who owned our farmhouse paid the local boy who cut her lawn in the 1930s with delicious homemade pies. If a windowpane broke, it might be stuffed with a rag. Old wooden boats lay in fields all about. Who knows? Maybe they could be caulked for one more season.
There’s a magnificent sea captain’s house open for tours in nearby Wiscasset, which bills itself as the prettiest little village in Maine. The man who built the house in 1807 went bankrupt shortly thereafter. President Thomas Jefferson imposed a trade embargo with all foreign nations in December 1807. It devastated the sea trade, the house guide explained, and the town has never recovered. Which is why it still looks quaint and charming in every direction.
There is a classic tendency among those of us who are overworked and urbanized to wistfully look at the what we consider the idyllic life of rural people who had a lot more leisure time (including our ancestors) and to aspire to their lifestyle. This is a very simplistic worldview.