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Our Rural Heritage: A Job Market Plus

Some job seekers from more rural areas may be inclined not to accentuate their roots from the “backwoods.” Such a background, however, can be a plus for employment opportunities and a key proponent to landing desirable jobs.

According to Matthew Hora, author of Beyond the Skills Gap: Preparing College Students for Life and Work, employers and educators surveyed said “work ethic” was the biggest missing skill in the workforce. A strong work ethic, Hora claimed, comes from one’s parents, jobs held in teenage years, and role models.

I have heard many times, over the years, that workers from rural areas are pursued in the marketplace because of their reputation for high productivity and focus, job loyalty, and low absenteeism.

My husband used to travel frequently and ended up once in a heavily populated section of Massachusetts. At a certain restaurant, he and his co-workers received the best meal service ever. When they asked where the waitress was from, they were all shocked to learn—except for my husband—that she came from northern Maine, one of the most sparsely populated spots in New England.

My parents, also from northern Maine, were potato growers and pursued their business in a professional manner with good success. They capitalized on a key ingredient: cultivating long-term relationships with local families in which everyone worked together and benefited from doing a good job.

Dad learned this early, the hard way. He began growing potatoes in the 1940s with a heavily mortgaged farm. He hired adult transient workers for the crucial labor-intensive fall harvest in an era when potatoes were hand picked instead of harvested by machines. As he was new to the game, Dad didn’t realize the importance of early bonding. In the middle of the harvest, half his crew left, never to return. They had been offered higher wages elsewhere.

The next harvest, things were different. Instead of transient employees, my parents hired local people from families they knew. More inexperienced teenagers joined the ranks, but they were all encouraged on several fronts.

During the fall school recess—when local schools closed so students and teachers could help with the harvest—my parents daily transported workers who did not have their own ride. They also made phone contacts with each worker to make sure everyone knew what was expected.

Field rules were strict. At least one worker was usually fired the first week if he or she was caught throwing rocks at other workers or engaging in other unsafe practices. For the remainder of the season, rock throwing was at a minimum.

Dad tried to be visible at all times to most of the crew in the field, encouraging them to continue at a steady pace and adjusting things when needed if workers were too slow or too fast for their appointed tasks. He stayed with the field employees as much as possible because some of them would stop working as soon as he left.

Every afternoon, my mother handed out either candy bars or soft drinks to the workers. On very cold days, she brought them hot chocolate. If a young employee was ill, Mom would care for them in the farmhouse until a ride was found for the worker to go home.

These little touches helped solidify a good working relationship. There were no more abrupt employee walkouts. Every late summer, more new families would contact my parents, asking to be hired.

Prior to our college years, my brother and I also helped on the farm. Watching 50 or more people doing various tasks proved interesting, and us young ones wanted to be a part of such excitement. You never knew what would happen next. 

Sometimes wooden barrels unloaded from the field held mounds of dirt and rocks instead of freshly picked potatoes. Eventually the truck driver would find out who filled these barrels, and Dad would have a talk with the culprit. At other times, the two-row potato digger would break down in the middle of a beautiful, sunny day. Pickers celebrated while an adult sped towards Presque Isle or Mars Hill in pursuit of new parts.

One night, a fire broke out in one of the outer storage buildings. A former employee was driving back to his parents’ house when he spied the flames. Mom called the fire department while the young man and Dad ran to the storage sheds nearby to move tractors filled with fuel that might ignite.

The entire fire department came and half the town watched. The last fire truck with the last load of water finally put out the blaze, with no spreading of flames to larger wooden storage buildings within yards of the torched shed.

All through the rest of that night, neighbors drove slowly past, looking for more outbreaks. But no more occurred and the next morning the harvest continued at full force.

It’s these kinds of experiences that affect rural children one way or another. We observe and sometimes participate in the work of our peers and adults. We watch how things are done, pick up the pace, gain experience and comradeship, and obtain the ultimate reward: a day’s wage for a day’s work.

So in interviews with potential employers, don’t be afraid to capitalize on your rural heritage. A conscientious, productive work ethic may be just what they’re looking for. (Employment Times, 2004)

Missing Boy

 

We were playing hide and seek in the barns—my brother, me, and the two neighbor boys. But the youngest boy went missing.

Joe dashed into the hen pen in the back of the second barn and looked behind the thick, wooden box on legs. The box held seven straw nests for hens to lay eggs without anyone watching from the front, unless you pulled down the cover. The back side was all open for the hens to climb into.

Jerry searched the corners of the two connected barns—which were also called an Aroostook barn—where the walls seemed to twist and turn. You never knew what could be hiding on the other side. His canvas sneakers flopped over the long boards that were not nailed down, so Dad and his crew could flip them up to get at the potato bins below.

Joe ran under the southwest side of the haymow. Bicycles leaned against one wall. A milky-white kitchen table stood by another with spool-shaped legs and sides that folded down. In another corner sat a black and nickel-plated wood stove that Great-Aunt Fern Spear used in the kitchen years ago, before Dad bought the place, and Great-Uncle Forest’s black, metal safe with gold lettering on the front. A cracked door, green with yellow panels, stood behind the table.

The two boys went into the empty stable (all the cows were out in the pasture by the pond, and the rabbits in their summer hutch). Soon they came out through the milk room and shook their heads.

“We don’t know where he is,” Joe said.

“Come out, come out wherever you are!” they yelled with their hands cupped around their mouths.

The wind whistled through the funny metal vents that sat on top of the barn roofs, and the swallows chirped in their nests along the square beams over our heads.

Maybe he went outside. Or worse, maybe someone kidnapped him. “I never saw him leave,” Joe finally said. “He’s here somewhere.”

They went down the stairs into the house cellar connected to the shed that was in between the house and the first barn. They retraced all their previous steps, thinking he might have come out of one hiding place and run to another without us knowing.

I stood in the middle where the first barn was connected to the second—where Uncle Forest and his crew had moved one barn down from a field by way of horses, ropes, and logs and attached it to the first. I looked at the four-paned windows above the haymows, trying to see into the shadows.

From far away, I heard my brother. “I don’t believe it! That’s a great place!”

                                                                 Joe, a few years prior to this story

I ran to the shed where the three of them were chuckling. “Where was he?” I asked, suddenly feeling left out of the bigger kid games.

The boy with the curly, dark hair crawled back under the metal kerosene tank propped up by a wooden frame about three feet above the floor. Way under the tank, on the back wall, was a board nailed along the bottom. When he put his sneakers on top of that board, you couldn’t see his feet from the front of the tank. He had just enough space from behind to stand.

I was jealous that Gene had found such a great spot to hide, but happy that the barns hadn’t swallowed him up.

The Resourceful Russells

 

In the early 1790s, two Russells were born within two years of each other in Carrick-on-Suir, Ireland: Michael and Ellen. They may have been closely related—or not. As adults, Michael ended up settling in northern Maine. Ellen eventually settled in south Florida. Despite their differences, they shared one trait: the gift of resourcefulness.

Orphaned at 13, Ellen traveled from Ireland to the Island of Trinidad where she was brought up by her mothers’ two plantation-owning brothers. At age 16 she married Charles Mallory, an American construction engineer from Connecticut. They raised two sons, John and Stephen.

In 1816 Michael joined a British military regiment in Ireland destined for India. But later in Europe, in December or early 1817, he joined the Royal West India Rangers’ regiment stationed at St. Lucia—about 223 miles from Trinidad. His regiment remained in the Caribbean until 1819 when he and about 600 other men were disbanded in St. John, New Brunswick, and awarded land grants or funds for their service. 

Did Ellen and Michael know each other? Was that why Michael deserted the regiment bound for India? Did the Trinidad relations continue communications with those in Ireland? Did Michael visit Trinidad?

In 1820, Ellen’s husband grew ill and they left the island in search of a better climate. They enrolled Stephen in an Alabama school while Ellen, Charles, and John lived in Havana and then moved to Key West, Florida, inhabited at that time by pirates and fishermen.

In 1821, Michael married Phoebe Youmans in St. John. Born in New Brunswick, she was the daughter of English Loyalists from New York. Michael and Phoebe’s son John was baptized in Fredericton, N.B., and daughter Mary soon followed.

Then in 1825 tragedy struck the Mallory family. Both Charles and John died of tuberculosis and were buried in Key West. Ellen used what resources she had and converted her home into a boarding house for sailors. She also nursed Yellow Fever victims back to health and financed Stephen’s enrollment at a Pennsylvania academy.

For many years the Coconut Grove was the only place for visitors to stay in Key West. Ellen became renowned throughout the state for her hospitality, cheerfulness, Irish wit, and musical voice.

As an adult, Stephen married and had children, practiced law, and was elected US senator from Florida. Ellen lived to see her son prosper, and died in 1855. In her honor, Key West erected a stone image of Ellen that you can still see today.

One summer after his marriage, Michael guarded lumber equipment for a New Brunswick company. The equipment was located in northeastern Maine along the Aroostook River where part of the international boundary was disputed. The firm may have been the reputable Peters, Wilmot & Company from St. John. After his duties were done, Michael went back to Fredericton and moved his young family to a choice location he had found next to the river, near the falls. Most historians believed they were the first white settlers of what later became the town of Fort Fairfield. 

Eventually a road was built along the south side of the winding, sparkling river where Michael and his growing family lived—the Aroostook Falls Road—which ended at the Canadian border. When the border was finalized in the 1840s, part of Michael’s property was said to be on the Canadian side, with some on the American.

Besides raising livestock and growing crops, Michael supplied his family with several other means of revenue. Historian Wilmot T. Ashby wrote that Michael netted numerous Atlantic salmon traveling through a narrow portion of rock hollowed out by the river. Like most farmers, he probably continued harvesting trees to sell, and his family operated a sawmill. Michael also navigated travelers around the falls. 

On August 16, 1831, state agents John Deane and Edward Kavanagh hired Michael to haul their boat over the portage near the falls. They had been commissioned to document settlements in the northern part of the state and were traveling south.

In their report, Deane and Kavanagh recorded a number of settlers near Michael’s property. Next door, the James Fitzherbert farm, begun seven years earlier by Benjamin Weeks, included a house, farm, and 15 acres cleared (page 474). Next to Fitzherbert was land claimed by Peters, Wilmot & Co. Other settlers on the south river bank: Dean, Loveless, Rogers, Wright, Parker, McDougal, Dorsey, Campbell, Heywood, and McLaughlin. On the north bank: Fowler, McLaughlin, Davenport, Bobear (Bubar), McDougal, Powers, and Mowry.

Deane and Kavanagh also recorded crops: wheat, barley, rye, oats, Indian corn, peas, potatoes, and hay “in great qualities” (476). Pine trees were not that plentiful but were more so near the head of the river and sold for the highest price in St. John. Other trees in the Aroostook area: maple, birch, beech, ash, elm, fir, spruce, cedar, butternut, and hackmatack.

Many of Michael and Phoebe’s children married and settled on the opposite side of the river along what is now called the Russell Road. Their children included John, Mary, Thomas, Sarah, William, Nicholas, Martha, Nancy, and Margaret. For years, a good portion of the town’s residents could claim their ancestry back to the Russells.

Finally in 1866, at the age of 85, Michael died. A stone was erected in the Old Catholic Cemetery on the South Caribou Road, commemorating his life.

Michael and Ellen used what available resources they had to their advantage. Michael and his family had an abundance of lush, natural resources in the location he chose. Ellen, owner of her own home at the death of her husband, chose to convert that into a boarding house as she saw the need among seamen and other travelers.

Both possessed robust health and “street smarts.” Many men died from diseases on poorly equipped ships. That Michael survived is a testament to his strong health. Some men in northern Maine succumbed to serious accidents in the lumber and farming trades, and in the sometimes cold, rushing river. Michael survived those dangers. Ellen’s husband and son John died from TB, but she did not. She aptly cared for numerous men who had come down with Yellow Fever and, as a woman, maintained a business for many years in what would be considered a rough area.

Both Russells were hard workers, Catholic, dark-haired. The first white male settler of Fort Fairfield and the first white female settler of Key West. First settlers had to be resourceful. And Michael and Ellen of Carrick-on-Suir—related or not—definitely were.

The Strength of Buckwheat

 

Over in Williamstown, New Brunswick, in the 1870s, a blue-eyed woman with her hair pulled back walked back and forth so many times from the wood stove to her family’s table that over time she wore a path in the soft, wooden floor. She was cooking pancakes for up to seven sons, one daughter, and her husband—if no guests were served. Buckwheat pancakes with molasses.

Hannah’s sixth son, Joseph Allison Emery, said he grew up on those pancakes as part of a poor farming family who could not afford to eat much meat. 

They did, however, have plenty of the three-sided grain call buckwheat. And so did their neighbors in New Brunswick, and so did other pioneering families across the border in Maine.

In the border town of Fort Fairfield, for example, Sam Everett, an English farmer known for his large build and great strength, reportedly ate buckwheat pancakes with eggs or pork every morning for breakfast. He lived into his mid-80s as did his wife, Eunice. Was a moderate diet of buckwheat part of their longevity?

As an adult, Joseph Emery worked for a time on logging drives on the St. John River, a precarious task of hopping from one floating log to another. He then went out to Colorado to visit his brother and help in the mines. He eventually settled in northern Maine, married, raised nine children, and lived into his 90s. He would tell his grandchildren about his childhood days of eating buckwheat pancakes.

                                                                              George and Joseph A. Emery

From the same plant family as rhubarb, buckwheat can be planted in late spring and harvested before the first frost as the plants mature in 8 to 10 weeks. In poor soil conditions, the grain produces a higher yield than any other grain crop in a cool, moist climate. It can even thrive amongst tree stumps from newly cleared land.

As little as two acres would feed a farming family of four for a year and not even mice could chew through the dark brown shells. Local grist mills ground the seeds into a flour that had more protein and higher amounts of nutrients than the slower growing wheat.

The buckwheat seed hulls were saved from the mills and used for insulating walls in settler homes. The hulls may also have been used to stuff pillows…a practice in some parts of the world to this day.

Many northern farms, settled in the mid to late 1800s, grew more buckwheat on newly turned soil than wheat, oats, or rye. Buckwheat was more dependable for food in uncertain times when store goods were expensive or sparse and growing seasons unpredictable.

In the more northern St. John Valley where Acadians settled decades earlier, Tartary Buckwheat was grown and ground into a light colored flour (with a bitter taste) to make the famous Acadian ployes, eaten as a thin crepe or bread.

The species grown south of the St. John Valley was generally the Common Buckwheat which made a heavier, blue-gray flour with a sweeter taste.

After the local grist mills ceased operation in the 20th Century, the common buckwheat was seldom ground for flour but was still used as a green rotation crop for potatoes. But the memories of its taste and filling features remained in the minds of my parents, Fred and Iris Russell. 

One day in 1969 Fred met a salesman who sold him a counter top grist mill from Salt Lake City. Dad grew both wheat and buckwheat that year, harvested the grains, and then had enough of both to grind for wheat breads and buckwheat pancakes all the next year.

About once a month my task was to sort through a bucketful of buckwheat seeds to pick out any stray, small stones. Then Dad set up the mill in the kitchen and ground up coarse wheat for cooked cereal, fine wheat flour for Mom’s baking, and the buckwheat for pancakes. I’d sift the broken hulls out of the flour and then we’d have a meal that next morning of blueberry buckwheat pancakes with New England’s dark, maple syrup.

Whenever I later drove several hundred miles to attend college, I always requested a meal of pancakes before I left. The buckwheat would keep me full and alert for the entire eight-hour trip.

Years later, I inherited the old mill from my father and found local sources of buckwheat grain to grind. My family did not eat the pancakes nearly as often as Joseph Emery did, but we ate them fairly often, with both our children sifting the flour and mixing the batter.

Recently my now grown daughter requested such a meal. She ate more pancakes than anyone else at the table. She had a long drive ahead of her and craved the nourishment and strength  the old-fashioned meal could give. It did not disappoint.

Wallpapering Memories

 

I was tearing off pieces of wallpaper while Mom sanded. We were making a mess.

“Old houses don’t have a straight wall,” Mom said.

She pointed to the top right corner, and I saw what she meant. The corner curved to the left, not straight up to the ceiling. She took the scraper from me and started tearing off more paper. I grabbed one piece and looked at the different layers.

Under the Davy Crockett print in my brother’s room was a torn print of blue and white flowers, and under that was a beige paper with delicate lines. I wondered how many people had slept in that room before Joe and how many years that house had been there.

“See this,” Mom said as she pulled off more layers. “This is the wall crumbling.”

Pieces of the wall, like white bread crumbs, flew through the air.

“And see this over here,” she said. “There’s a big bump in the plaster that I can’t do a thing about. It’ll show through the new paper.”

She got down off the stepladder and unrolled a dark green window shade. It had a few pinholes and wasn’t used on a window anymore.

“I’m gonna glue a piece of this curtain on top of the plaster and hope that keeps the wall from falling apart. It’ll make the new wallpaper smoother,” she said.

Leaning next to the opposite wall was the wallpapering board—a long, thin, rectangular box held together by two metal hooks each wrapped around two screws. The hooks were the same shape and size as the hook on the old cupboard in the house cellar, and the hook that latched the top of the grain bin out in the barn. They looked way too small to be holding anything the size of the wallpapering board, cupboard, or bin.

Unlatched, the board unfolded on two narrow hinges. Mom pulled out the metal legs hidden inside, and all of a sudden the board became a table.

Mom cut off a large piece of the curtain.

“Hand me my pot,” she said.

I handed her a dented, aluminum pot filled with wallpaper glue. I also handed her a paintbrush. Mom dipped the brush into the pot and spread the glue over one side of the green fabric.

She took the fabric by the edges and spread it over the crumbling plaster. I handed her a brush with a wide, thin handle that she used to pound the glued edges.

“There, that’ll do it for now.”

I was worried that it would never do, and Joe’s bedroom walls would never look good, even with new wallpaper.

The next morning Grammy Amy drove into the yard and filled the house with her laughter. She and Mom each took one side of the wallpapering table and placed it in the middle of the upstairs hall. Rolls of new wallpaper were unwrapped.

“I love that shade of blue,” Grammy said.

“And there’s not much of a pattern so we won’t waste a lot,” Mom said. The blue paper had flecks of white, not a complicated design.

I wasn’t experienced enough to help with the papering, so I watched the two women and tried to stay out of their way.

On the ladder in one corner, Grammy unrolled the paper and let it fall. Mom caught the other end and creased it by the mop-board so they’d know how much to cut. Grammy took the whole roll out to the table, and Mom cut along the crease. Grammy flipped the wallpaper, grabbed the glue brush, and spread the gooey paste all over that side.

She and Mom carried that piece back to the bedroom. Mom climbed the ladder and lined up the top edge of the paper next to the top edge of the wall as best she could, with the walls so uneven. She took the wide brush and smoothed the paper while holding the top with her other hand.

She handed the brush to Grammy, who finished brushing the panel to the floor. I could see bits of the glue oozing out from the edges. Now that panel was glued to the wall.

They talked about papering the upstairs hall at our house and the hall at Grammy’s place which had an elaborate staircase and landing in the middle. Then it was time to get dinner ready for Dad to eat at 11:30—on the dot.

After the meal was over, the ladies did the easier part: cutting and pasting the border that went around the top of the walls to make a finished edge.

“There! That looks a lot better!” Grammy said as she turned around with her hands on her hips, studying the walls one last time. She was wearing one of her full aprons, a calico with bias tape trim and two big pockets in the front. Her graying hair was rolled up from the bottom into a coil around the sides and back of her head.

She didn’t seem to notice that one wallpapered corner was crooked. Somehow, the new paper seemed to hide almost all of the old houses’s imperfections.

“I can hardly wait for you to come do my hall,” Gram laughed, as she and Mom left Joe’s room and went downstairs.

Alone, I realized that there was no more hint of Davy Crockett’s coon cap or the covered wagons dancing along the walls where Joe and I had played games and giggled when we were little. There was no more hints of the mysterious prints in styles that had long gone out of fashion. The new paper had covered up all those memories and clues to the past. And I had forgotten to save any.

The Combination Stove

The first thing anyone would see coming in through the main kitchen door or through the back door (from the unheated back room and barns beyond) was the kitchen stove. A gift from my dad’s parents, it replaced the wood-burning stove used prior to my father buying the farm and my mother moving in after their wedding on Aug. 28, 1948. 

The Florence stove was a combination of propane and kerosene. On the right side, if you were facing the stove, were four propane burners and a pilot light. In the center, below the range top, was the oven with blue, dancing propane flames that appeared after you’d taken a wooden match and lit each side of the oven. A door to the right of the oven opened to a storage compartment for broiler pans.

The left side of the stove contained two kerosine burners underneath the metal top that had several round plates you could open to see the burners and the space to the right of the burners. A little door on the left side of the stove also opened to the round burners and had two small windows covered with mica.

Decorated with white enamel, the stove stood on four black metal feet, several inches high, and a shiny pipe ran from the stove to the chimney behind it. 

The space in back was wide enough for barn cats to walk through and then crawl underneath. They curled up for a nap, soaking up the heat, until a cruel human pulled them out at night and sent them out the back room door into the barns.

From late August until sometime in May, one of the kerosine burners stayed lit (except for the rare occasion when a gust down the chimney blew it out). Heat generated from that burner baked large, round white potatoes that were first washed and pricked several times with a knife and carefully placed inside the stove next to the burner. Within an hour the hard, raw spuds were transformed into crispy skins and flaky, white interiors. 

The burner constantly heated water in Mom’s stainless steel kettle, moisturizing the dry, winter air. Cast iron fry pans on top of the stove where the burner was lit sizzled eggs, Canadian bacon, eggs-in-a-blanket, hot dogs and onions, leftover baked beans…the ideas were endless.

Coming into the house on a cold, dim afternoon, after fighting below zero F. temperatures outside or in the barns, you’d hear the kettle’s simmering water and feel the radiant heat from the stove pushing against your face. Hands, sometimes red, automatically reached out.

The kitchen with its table, chairs, and rocker, and the adjoining farm office with its roll top desk, remained very warm throughout the winter. The dining room—used for watching TV, napping on the couch, and sewing in the corner—was filled with the stove’s friendly heat. The door joining that room to the kitchen and office was always left open.

All other interior doors were shut most of winter and fall: the door to the downstairs spare bedroom, the door to the living room (also known as the front room), and the two doors connecting the downstairs hall. There were gray radiators in all of those rooms—including the kitchen and the bedrooms upstairs—that were attached to an ancient hot water boiler in the basement. But except on the coldest of days, the boiler didn’t have to boil. The stove warmed what was necessary.

Decades later after our family had grown and Mom and Dad had died, the farm was sold to a younger family who moved into the farmhouse and all its rooms. For awhile, even the combination stove was kept, though silent.

After one kind invitation, I walked through the first floor, amazed. All the interior doors were open. Even both doors to the hallway stairs. The place did look much bigger, but after that next winter, I heard that the ancient boiler in the cellar had to be replaced.

Dad had kept that boiler going for years, replacing parts when needed. It never had to heat the entire house 100 percent of the time. Even nights when the last person to go upstairs to the bedrooms left one hallway door open for the stove heat to drift upward, even when the radiator pipes clanged and thumped, bringing more warmth to the rooms—the stove did its part.

       Dad relaxing near the stove, chatting with family and farm workers, waiting for supper, 1957.

When the stove was running and the extra doors were closed, you couldn’t be mad at anyone in the house for long. The heat caressed and coddled you until you felt warm and cozy and happy to be inside and not out. Cats purred while baking under the stove and the hot kettle sputtered on top. Fruit pies bubbled in the oven and spuds softened next to the kerosine burner. Wet mittens and gloves and socks hung nearby while a sleeping dog danced her paws in a dream.

No, you couldn’t stay unhappy for long. The stove kept us congenial and content until the storms cleared and the outside temperatures slowly rose, when life on the rest of the farm commenced with planting and cattle out to pasture, cats roaming down to the woods and kids running off on their bikes.

The kerosine burner would be blown out and the stove kept cold as the humidity and heat from the sun grew strong.

Such were the rhythms on the farm, the combination stove included.

We always would return, however, when fall came and the burners were lit. And the happy, winter days drew near, again.