Maine History Online

"And surely by reason of those sandy cliffes and cliffes of rocks, both which we saw so planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people, besides the greatnesse of the Timber growing on them, the greatnesse of the fish and the moderate temper of the ayre…who can but approove this a most excellent place, both for health and fertility?" – Captain John Smith, 1616

Despite British historian Arnold Toynbee's provocative assessment of Maine's people as unsophisticated "children of a hard country" who reside well north of civilization's nurturing "optimum climatic area," Mainers have long known what to do with their bounty, extracting a living from the land and waters of Maine.

Maine's natural resources, geography, and location have allowed its inhabitants to turn the state itself into products for both local and distant use, converting its rocky coast into granite for building political, religious, and educational institutions across the country; harvesting lime for brick-making and fertilizer; river ice for refrigeration down the East Coast and in the West Indies; blueberries, potatoes, and fish for food; and timber for ships, housing, and myriad other uses.

Scaling the Forest

Different constituencies have regarded Maine's forests from different perspectives. A tourist walking through the Maine woods might be invigorated and delighted by an unfolding wilderness.

An early settler might see the woods as an impediment to homesteading and be compelled to chop, then burn swaths of it down. A forester might see board feet of lumber and calculate costs and profits accordingly. Each perspective – and others – has had an impact on the Maine woods.

Retreating glaciers some 12,000 years ago left Maine with navigable rivers, generous harbors, granite coasts, and the sandy soil preferred by white pine. All have played a role in Maine's future, fortunes, and history.

The rivers, harbors, and pine coalesced into premier logging and shipbuilding industries, affected the colonial fortunes of England and the national fortunes of the United States, and converted mass quantities of raw timber into private wealth and commercial transport.

Native Americans had made use of the forests for generations: they sweetened their food with maple sap, peeled bark for housing and canoes, made a variety of tools for daily use, cleared sections of forests for farming, and burned logs for warmth. Guiding the Native peoples in their use of the forest were the teachings of their hero-creator, Gluskabe.

The forests and all creatures that abounded on earth have spirits and, while humans can use the wood and bark of the trees, they use only what they need. Native Americans believe in a balance between humans and other living things, a view Europeans and their descendants did not always share.

The forests of Maine have been a resource since the area first was inhabited by humans – but the uses of the forest have changed and grown – from timber for masts and shipbuilding, to sawn lumber for myriad building projects, to raw material for papermaking, to a recreational resource that boosts the tourism economy.

Venturing from their own deforested realms, early Europeans often were staggered by the size, density, and sheer profusion of the North American forests. According to one member of a 1605 expedition to New England, Maine possessed "…goodly tall Firre, Spruce, Birch, Beech, Oke…good and great, fit timber for any use." Seemingly endless stands of birch, spruce, oak, and above all white pine drew first Europeans, later Americans, upriver and inland to measure and claim the wilderness. England's king and the masting trade got things started.

Seafaring and naval supremacy were so important to the island nation of Great Britain that its North American colonists were forbidden to cut down the largest trees, especially the white pine, perfect for masts, which were strictly reserved for the King's trade. Called the Broad Arrow policy for the particular mark blazed on reserved trees, the intent (one often thwarted by the colonists themselves, and frustratingly difficult to enforce) was to award England the lumber necessary for its naval and merchant fleets.

Commercializing the forest, therefore, awaited the arrival of Europeans, and even then required relevant market forces to emerge. Although significant in terms of what lumber provided in the 17th and 18th centuries –– housing, barrels, ships, pitch, fence posts, bark for tanning, fuel, and charcoal –– lumbering itself did not become a major Maine industry until after the American Revolution.

Logging mapped the same path as settlement at first, moving eastward along the southern coast and up the primary rivers, then far exceeded it, with the major river valleys –– the Saco, St. John, Androscoggin, Kennebec, and Penobscot --–– supplying most of the industry's timber as woodsmen ventured well inland.