The Lobster Coast by Colin Woodard

Author:Colin Woodard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

SIX

Down and East

During the twentieth century, the Maine coast, long regarded as a land apart, became more closely drawn into the mainstream of both American society and its national economy than ever before. An environmental crisis on the sea and a sociological challenge ashore would profoundly alter the character and potential of Maine’s coastal communities.

The Great Depression, the longest, deepest economic decline in the nation’s history, drove tens of millions of Americans into abject poverty. A quarter of the American workforce could find no work, and even those who held on to their jobs often lost everything when four in ten of the nation’s banks collapsed. Breadlines formed in the cities, and shantytowns sprang up at their outskirts. It was an event that shocked and scarred an entire generation of Americans.

Not so on the Maine coast. By the early decades of the twentieth century, Maine’s coastal economy had been in decline for so long that it had nowhere left to fall. By the start of the Great Depression in 1929, many Mainers, especially in rural areas, were already as depressed as they could get; they had little more to lose.

Virtually every industry on the coast had fallen apart during the late nineteenth century: farming, fishing, shipbuilding, lumbering, and the cutting of granite, limestone, and ice. The nation’s commerce abandoned the wooden hulls of Maine-built sailing vessels plying the Atlantic seaboard, shifting instead onto steel rails connecting the great eastern cities with the vast resources of the American West. The Maine coast, once at the heart of American commerce, had become an isolated backwater.

Maine’s population growth stagnated and its coast became depopulated. Between 1860 and 1910, the U.S. population grew by two-thirds; Maine’s grew by only 13 percent. During that same period, all of Maine’s coastal counties actually shrank, save for York and Cumberland in the far south. The Midcoast region was particularly hard-hit: Lincoln County (which includes the Boothbay and Pemaquid peninsulas) lost more than a third of its people in that fifty-year span, while Waldo County (center of the backcountry resistance a century earlier) lost 40 percent. Forests advanced over the fields of derelict farmhouses, and the mudflats became littered with the rotting hulks of abandoned sailing ships. The great-grandchildren of backcountry resisters were abandoning their meager homesteads and heading west in hopes of a better life along the expanding frontiers of the American West.

Those who remained behind typically worked hard just to get by. “I never knew anybody around that was considered wealthy, able to step right out and buy a house or buy a horse or something like that. They always had to scrimp and figure it out somehow,” fisherman Charles P. Dodge later recalled of his teenage years in turn-of-the-century Liberty and Isle au Haut, where his father farmed and kept horses. “Gorry, people were hard up in those days, you know, they’d hate to think of it now.”

Many landless, jobless families were reduced to squatting on scraps of land that were so poor and isolated that even the local towns refused to annex them.

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