Edward L. Hawes
Development occurs where economics and ecology meet --- at least it did up to the 1860s. Several periods can be distinguished. Native Americans established a balance that provided for a subsistence that was based upon hunting, fishing and shifting agriculture. Early British and Huguenot settlers in the Bay region set up another balance in the areas they farmed and lumbered. With the conclusion of the French and Indian Wars in the early I760s, more aggressive development occurred, documented by an Episcopalian minister, Jacob Bailey. Saw mills and grist mills were erected by entrepreneurs in the best places on the rivers and tidal creeks. Good soils and flowing waters provided the basis for a growing economy.
Before the age of coal and chemistry dissolved the limits of growth imposed by nature, the impacts of development were not unforgivable. In the 1820s a Southerner, Henry Putnam, looking for business possibilities and recreation in the Brunswick-Topsham area, described the mills for processing the woodland harvest and for textiles. Nothing he saw in mill or on farm indicated any environmental problems.
By the 1880s things were different. Coal was brought in by ship, now making it possible to transcend the limits of water power on mill size and operation. A range of chemicals were used in paper and textile production that had adverse impacts. The waterways were used for waste disposal. In 1910, an observant local historian in Bowdoinham looked about, concerned with the impacts of the divorce between economics and ecology. He realized that a great transformation of the ecology of the Bay region was underway and he was worried.
This Merrymeeting Bay Note explores what happened in this great transformation after 1760. It is in tended to serve at several points in the comprehensive planning process --- in defining community character, in survey and inventory of a variety of resources, including cultural ones, and in thinking about appropriate policies and their implementation. The method of using cross-sections of time to define development and give form to community history is explored more fully in the Merrymeeting Bay Note on Community Character, as are the applications of the data.
The transformation of the landscape and the ecology of the Bay region through development had begun just about the time Jacob Bailey, its acute observer, lived at Fort Richmond in the 1760s. The conclusion of the wars between the British and the French, and the subduing of the Native Americans, brought peace for the British settlers and developers in the region. Economics and ecology would now be moved into a new balance, one far different than the one that existed when the region was occupied by Native Americans who practiced hunting, gathering and some horticulture and British settlers who did some farming, fishing, lumbering and trading.
Sitting at his writing desk, Reverend Bailey was filled with awe. "On this side of the river, raging fires had caused a terrible destruction among the trees. In one place you might see the trunks and sooty heads of enormous pines lying in wild confusion upon the ground. In another, naked hemlocks towering to the skies in awful majesty." This was pioneering country, and as elsewhere, early settlers found an effective way to ready the land for agriculture was to set fires that they hoped to control, then to plant among the charred trunks.
On the other side toward Frankton, now Dresden, where he was to move in a few years, willows on the banks "excited a kind of pleasure." Yet when he contemplated the wildemess beyond, he could only write: "I confess I was ready to shudder with horror" [Charles E. Allen, History of Dresden. Maine (n. p., 1931), pp. 279-80]. This wilderness, he clearly believed, need to be tamed. Many of the settlers along Merrymeeting Bay must have shared Reverend Bailey's thoughts. In effect they believed that "development" was necessary and it led to "progress."
There was no romanticism in the way he described the trees cut for masts for the Royal Navy, no desire to preserve virgin growth, even a small grove to leave examples for the following generations. White pines twelve to fifteen feet in circumference and one hundred and fifty feet in height were commonly cut for the King's ships. The stumps he was told would remain in the ground for one hundred years.
Maple sugar making was a new process then, and his description of this form of woodland use was matter of fact. "When the sun, by its approach towards the line . . . the sap begins to ascend, and may be extracted either by cutting a notch or boring a hole in the trunk of the tree, and placing a vessel under a hollow tube prepared for the purpose, through which the sap drops into the vessel." He described boiling down the sap, and went on to say that "I have known a single tree about four or five feet in circumference yield eight pounds of sugar in a season" [Dresden, p. 277]. The trees were giants then, but he took little notice.
He was excited by the cultural landscape that was emerging on Merrymeeting Bay. He marveled at the "perpetual succession of fields, pastures, spacious woods, humble cottages and elegant buildings" that "exhibit all the charms of variety." Bailey, a careful honiculturalist, observed over the years the crops grown in the area. "Maize, or Indian com, may be grown in perfection, and is raised quite extensively, oats and barley are more common. Wheat is raised with success, although insect pests are a discouragement." Drawing from Bailey's papers, Dresden's historian Allen states further "Of leguminous plants, peas and beans are the more common, the latter being raised in abundance" [p. 14].
Reverend Bailey did not have an eye for industry. But others certainly did, and all round the Bay in the tributaries where the water fall was sufficient, saw and grist mills were set up to take advantage of the power. Sylvester Gardiner furnished the capital to set up mills in the 1750s on the Eastern River at what be came Dresden settlement [Dresden, pp. 200-201]. According to local historians, down on the Nequasset, over at the Brunswick Falls on the Androscoggin, on the Cathance in what became the Richmond settlement, entrepreneurs set up places to convert the product of woodland and field to lumber, flour and meal. Others set up shipyards on a modest scale, and began that industry that was so important to the Bay in years to come.
By the time of statehood, economics and ecology were reaching a new balance, one set in part by the availability of water power, the typical pattern of the early industrial era. Henry Putnam, a Southerner visiting the Merrymeeting Bay area in 1820, marveled at the dams and mills erected at the falls on the Androscoggin [A Description of Brunswick, Maine (Brunswick, 1820), pp.16-17]. Mills for sawing lumber lathes, clapboards and shingles were in operation; so was an up-to-date flour mill and a cotton textile establishment. Putnam was intrigued by the circular saw used to produce the clapboards and the ingenious system of sieves in the flour mill. The logs came from way upstream, and the Southerner was fascinated by the spectacle of the wide place in the river above the falls filled with logs retained by booms held by six stone-filled cribs. When he asked "what quantity of logs have been secured," the answer made him laugh. Instead of number of logs, he was told "about 90 acres."
Putnam observed ship building going on the Androscoggin. He never went over to Bath or up to Bowdoinham and Richmond and witnessed the building of ships for coastal and the West India trade, as well as boats for use in the Bay. The authors of the local histories indicate that elsewhere on the tributaries of the Bay industrial developrnent in such as forms as these had taken place by 1820, but none seem to have been on this scale.
"The gentleman from South Carolina" as he was anonymously referred to on the title page did travel about Topsham and Brunswick and up to Durham investigating the farming that was being carried out. He was much impressed. As with Rev. Bailey it was the cultural landscape that attracted him, not the wilderness. He was particularly impressed with the Quaker farmers. "Their farms are in excellent order and furnish the village with cider, applies, vegetables, provisions and grain." He went on to echo Bailey. "Wheat, rye, barley and oats are a sure crop here. Indian corn of excellent quality is raised on every species of land. . . Potatoes are a sure crop, of a quality altogether superior to those of the south. They are raised in great abundance, even on the lightest plains" [p. 22].
Unfortunately the local historians of the towns on the Bay have not been much interested in agriculture or forestry. It was the Revolution, the Civil War, the development of churches and schools that fascinated them over the years. In their books there are the dutiful chapters on "industry" but these either focus on the 18th century or the period just before that in which they were writing. No Federal agricultural or industrial census was taken until 1850, so it is not possible to create a comparative picture of what was going on in 1820 around the Bay, although the first decade of issues of the Maine Register --- a record of Maine busi nesses first published in the 1820s --- could help a bit. However, in comparison with later years, there is little indication of development in that publication.
The 1880s are another matter. By then the yearly issues of the Maine Register permit a comparative picture of what natural resource and farm produce processing industries were active in the towns of the Bay. In Brunswick by the falls there were two firms producing lumber, one of which also made doors and window sashes, C. H. Colby. Across the river in Topsham there were three firms producing lumber, and one doors and sashes only. Bowdoinham had three lumber mills, and Bowdoin one. Richmond had a saw mill, Dresden one also, and Woolwich three, probably located in the old mill areas on the Nequasset.
The town preeminent on the Bay in shipbuilding was, of course, Bath. Fourteen firms were listed in the 1880 Register as "Ship Builders." Two individuals and two firms were under "Riggers," and two in dividuals under "Ship Carvers." There were two "Ship Smiths" and four "Caulkers." Richmond was next in the number of builders with four, plus two listed as "Ship Carpenter" who a decade earlier had been together in a shipbuilding firm. D. W. Toothaker was listed as a "Ship Joiner" and Charles H. Hodges as a maker of sails. The only other town where shipbuilding was going on was Brunswick. Here three firms were listed, including the Schofield Brothers.
Probably about the same time that the collectors of information for the Register came around, John Furbish, a local hardware dealer, noted in his diary that the brothers "are at work in their yard upon a large vessel" [Facts About Brunswick, p. 61]. How much of the lead and copper in the sediments in the Bay and the lower Kennebec came from the scraping and bottom painting that went on in the boat and shipyards will probably never be known, but certainly some came from these sources by the 1880s and continues to do so.
Some other industrial operations had an effect on the ecology of the Bay and its watershed directly, and may still have some residual effects. In Richmond was a brass foundry, that had ten years earlier been operated by F. Hyde. In the meantime, the latter had gone to Bath were he had started the brass and iron foundry that became a major industry in the city. The production of brass requires the use of metals we now know are toxic, and residues both from casting and machining were disposed of on site and nearby water ways and probably moved through groundwater to pollute. So there may well be sediments with heavy metals derived from these sources.
Glimpses of what farm families were raising can be seen occasionally in the local histories and other records. John Furbish whose diary is in the Pejepscot Historical Society observed in May, 1879, that "quite a number of farmers about here have planted Sugar Beet Seed feeling encouraged from the experiment made last year that a new and profitable source of income has been opened to them" [Manuscript published in photocopied form as Facts About Brunswick. Maine in 1976]. Apparently a sugar beet factory had been opened, although no indication has been found in the Register. On July 4 he observed that the "hay crop must be very large and prices lower.... The 'Colorado beetle' is ravaging the potato fields, but early crops will very generally escape" [Facts, pp. 61-62]. A systematic and quantitatively-based picture of agriculture awaits a thorough analysis of the Federal agricultural census figures for the period.
It would be well to know how much of the wheat and other grains ground in the flour and grist mills of the Bay was from the region, and how much came from "the West." In Brunswick according to the Register, the Scribner brothers had a flour mill and A. G. Poland, a grist mill, while across the way in Topsham, one firm had a mill producing both. In the next town of Bowdoinham, one of the firms that produced lumber also had a grist mill. This was also true in Dresden. In the urban area of Bath there was a combined salt and grist mill, and out at the second dam up Whiskeag Creek was a flour mill.
One mill that had a major social and economic impact on Brunswick and Topsham processed the products of fields elsewhere in the country. This was the Cabot establishment with its several "works," its mill dam, and its mill worker housing. The conditions of housing were deplorable, as Edward Kirkland points out in his ironically titled Brunswick's Golden Age. The problems of what we now call environmental health were serious, and finally woke the leaders of the town to action in developing public services. The full story belongs in another Merrymeeeting Bay Note. Here suffice it to say that economics and ecology had become completely separated. The owners of the firm lived in Boston and the profits, as people complained, flowed to Boston [William N. Locke, "The French Colony at Brunswick, Maine," Archives de Folklore (Montreal), (1946), pp. 98,101]. Here was an early case of Maine's people and Maine's resources being under the control of interests elsewhere.
By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century it was apparent to at least one local historian that there had been a great ecological transformation. The early industrial balance of economics and ecology was long gone. Two things struck Silas Adams of Bowdoinham, writer of the most environmentally aware local history: farm fields had become exhausted, and streams were no longer the power sources that they had been.
One reason soil was in such poor condition was because too many "men who owned farms turned their attention more particularly to the shipyard as a means of getting money, a much quicker process than that of coining wealth from the somewhat tardy acres which had become long neglected and abused. . . They could buy more bushels of corn from the income of one day's work, than they could extort from the farm by three days' labor." It was immediate profit that they wanted, and "Yankee ingenuity studied that only and led
But the day was coming when enough people began to realize that ecology had to take precedence over economics, at least long enough to bring them into a new and healthy balance. This story belongs to another Merrymeeting Bay Note, the one by Richard W. Judd on the movement to clean up the Bay and its watershed and the environmental legislation that began the cleanup.
If the Bay and the waters flowing into it were still under pressure, so was the land around them. The crop of town plans of the sixties and early seventies reveal that fewer farms operated than earlier. The specialization that Adams had lamented continued. Economic factors within the control of humans forced farmers to expand in one line or go out of business. The requirement of bulk milk tanks for dairy forms forced many dairy farmers out of business in the Richmond area, and probably elsewhere. No researchers worked on means to make the farming technologically or economically efficient and at the same time environmentally benign, nor on ways to make rural communities economically viable.
This Note is intended to help with several specific parts of comprehensive planning. It provides an interpretation and a method for examining community and regional character, and assistance in thinking about where communities should go in the future. It establishes that economics and ecology were closely related for a long time, and in various balances. For about 100 years, they have been divorced. Now we have the task of bringing them together, providing jobs and development, and preserving the environment in a new, dynamic balance. Democratic planning through the growth management process, creative entrepreneurship and further development of regulated commons will do what is necessary to achieve this.
The method has two aspects. Use primary sources such as the Maine Register and reminiscences of people who lived in the town along with the local histories to establish the essentials about development. Look at a series of decades spaced apart to provide graspable perspectives on town history.
The interpretation that development is most positive where economics and ecology meet and are in balance and the methodology described above are useful for several parts of the comprehensive planning process, including establishing community and regional character. This approach also presents helpful perspectives when inventorying land use, agriculture, forestry and industry. It will be of particular importance in establishing the "historic contexts" that are used in inventorying cultural resources. Knowing about the historical patterns of farming, milling, and other raw material processing industries helps in deter mining the likely location of mill sites, significantly old farm landscapes and what old factory buildings were used for. Beyond predicting a variety of cultural resources, it helps in analyzing their significance and determining what ones could or should be protected. The Note on Community and Regional Character develops this methodology and its applications further.