Maine History Online

Nature's State

While most Mainers were engaged in agriculture, several industries grabbed the attention of the state and nation after 1820. In fact, America's public buildings were made of Maine granite and its houses of Penobscot pine and Brewer brick, cemented over and plastered with lime from Rockland and Rockport and roofed with slate from Monson and Brownville or cedar shingles from the wetlands north of Bangor.

Maine's combination of natural resources and geography put it in position to make a large contribution to feeding and housing the nation and carrying its goods in the early 19th century.

Maine used its abundant natural resources in a number of ways. Tanneries, which utilized the state's abundant hemlock stands for bark extract, dotted the central part of the state, and mixed forests of oak, pine, spruce, and tamarack made Maine the nation's premier ship builder. Ice production, which peaked in the second half of the century, illustrates the windfall nature of these staples industries, wherein a relatively small investment brought vast rewards from seemingly inexhaustible resources.

Granite was another semiprocessed raw material exported in great quantities from Maine. Quarries, particularly those on the islands and the peninsulas of Penobscot Bay, were well positioned for cheap shipment by sea, and good-quality stone lay near the surface, thanks to glacial scouring.

Once the base of a gigantic mountain range, Maine granite was so superior in durability, polish, and color that it was marketed as far west as Denver and San Francisco.

Maine became the nation's leading lumber producer based on an abundance of white pine and a complex of environmental conditions that offered cheap transportation to mills and markets. Rivers flowing out of Maine's relatively flat western tablelands presented few obstacles to impede log drives, and Maine's granite bedrock channeled rainwater and snow-melt directly into these streams, providing a forceful spring "freshet" to push the logs through to the mills.

Nature provided cheap transportation for the loggers, but it also introduced an element of risk known to few other industries. Snowfall provided a friction-free hauling surface to move logs to the rivers, but some seasons brought too little snow and some too much, causing horses to founder on the roads.

Snowfall provided water to drive logs to the mills, but if the snow lingered in the spring, the drive was delayed, and if it melted too fast, logs were stranded in the upper branches. Absent perfect weather, log jams were inevitable, sometimes bringing financial disaster and considerable threat to life.

Strong markets in the expanding seaboard cities pushed the frontier of lumbering activity from the Piscataqua to the Kennebec Valley by 1800, and north to the Penobscot headwaters in the 1840s. This moving frontier left behind scores of inland towns founded on the promise of lumbering profits; sawmills provided off-season jobs for farmers, and woods operations consumed the farmers' hay, oats, beans, and potatoes.

Lumber shipments provided capital for these isolated communities, allowing mill owners to diversify into grain-processing, wool-carding, tanning, and metal-forging, and edging these communities into the industrial age.

But, as the industry moved north of the Penobscot waters, tensions arose between Maine and New Brunswick over the contested boundary between the two. The dispute erupted into the "Aroostook War" and was finally settled in 1842 with negotiation of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. With the border established, the lumber industry moved further north and into the western highlands.

Where early operations involved hundreds of smaller companies, in the 1830s a few lumber barons like Abner Coburn, Samuel Veazie, Ira Wadleigh, and Rufus Dwinel bought up whole townships, constructed sawmills, and vied for control of the resource.

Companies often competed over construction of canals and dams, sometimes attempting to redirect water to serve their needs. Lumbering created booms towns, also, such as Bangor, for a time the world's greatest lumber shipping port.

In these flush decades, lumber production shaped Maine's politics in ways that sometimes hindered further economic growth. Low timberland taxes frustrated attempts to use state resources to encourage other industries. Jealous of their prerogatives, Bangor's merchants and lumbermen allied with rural Jacksonians to block state aid for railroad, canal, road, and waterpower projects aimed at benefitting inland farms and industry.

This conservative axis gave way only gradually in the second half of the century, and its continuing influence was responsible for Maine's contradictory and divided approach toward outside capital and industrial development.

While Portland financed new harbor facilities, the Cumberland and Oxford Canal, and the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad, Bangor invested narrowly in sawmills, timberland, and ships to carry their lumber. In 1856 the Board of Agriculture polled the state's farmers and found that four-fifths considered lumbering an impediment to agricultural modernization.

Timberland owners controlled land, shut out settlers, and discouraged market roads, fearing higher taxes. Their sawmills provided employment, but the work was seasonal and the companies' expectation that farm families would provide their own food depressed wages.

In the long run, seasonal work in the woods and mills anchored people to lands that should not have been cultivated, perpetuating a cycle of low wages, indifferent farming, and rural poverty. For many, the only alternative was out-migration.

Ice, granite, lime, slate, fish industries created huge fortunes for those who mastered the art of turning Maine's natural resources into liquid assets. But in the long run these assets became too liquid, passing easily out of the state when opportunities arose elsewhere.