The Maine legislative committee recommendation to approve a referendum to allow us to vote on whether to take our state off Eastern Time and throw our lot in for much of the year with Maritime Canada – placing us on a year-round daylight-saving time – has provoked fresh debate on one of our most basic customs.

Though the concept of time keeping is ancient, our current notion of fixed time zones is relatively new. Before 1883, all time in America was purely local. What time it was depended much more intimately than it does today on one’s relation to the sun. Because solar rays arrive in Bangor four minutes before they do in Portland, the time at Stephen King’s home would be that much ahead of the time in the city where Longfellow learned to walk.

The emergence of railroad travel during the 19th century was the impetus for a change, arising from the impossibility of publishing schedules among communities with so many disparate times. A railroad-sponsored commission in November 1883, as a result, created the four-zone U.S. system.

The transition was by not popular in all quarters. Some of the more religious refused to change what they regarded as God’s time, referring, according to historian Richard Mallett, to the new time as merely Payson Tucker Time, so named for the Portland-based manager of the Maine Central Railroad.

A second major change in the way we look at time was ushered in by the World War I. Driven by a need to save on fuel and other energy costs, America, following the lead of Great Britain, passed laws putting the clocks ahead by an hour during most of the year. Daylight-saving time – “DST” – was born. After the war ended, Congress left it up to local governments to decide whether to observe it.

Between the two world wars, the issue of whether to “go on fast time,” as DST was called, became one of the most heated questions at some town meetings in Maine.

Chief among those against the change were farmers. They complained that the added evening daylight was offset by an hour of prolonged darkness in the morning, a key time for milking cows and other agricultural chores. By the 1930s, most towns in Maine favored the summer time change to daylight-saving time, but the narrowness of some of the outcomes illustrate the contentiousness of the issue. In Farmington, for example, the 1933 town meeting favored the change by a mere four votes, 276 to 272.

Advent of another world war stimulated further change when Congress mandated daylight-saving time throughout the year until the war’s end in 1945. After that, the nation reverted to the pre-war local option system and it wasn’t until 1966 that national legislation was enacted that officially set forth a more uniform daylight time observance.

After the 1973 Arab oil embargo, Congress extended DST to 10 months in 1974 and to eight in 1975, but opposition from farming states and abatement of the energy crisis led to repeal of these changes. School bus stop fatalities of children unaccustomed to the hazards of early morning darkness were also a factor in restoring standard time in the winter months.

The most recent amendment was one pushed by our own U.S. Sen. George Mitchell in 1986, which moved up DST from the last Sunday to the first Sunday in April.

As with the change to standard time itself, there is opposition to daylight time founded on religious grounds. In Israel, some Orthodox Jews have urged its repeal because of the impact it has on certain early morning prayers they recite during Elul, their last month of the year.

To assess more seriously the present proposal to change our time, I turned to one of my lunchtime colleagues, Bruce Miles, a travel agent from Carrabassett Valley, who is one of the most traveled persons I know. Miles opposes the change since it would put Maine out of sync with the rest of the Northeast. Open minded as he is, however, he’s quick to point out two advantages. His travel clients would have an extra hour to catch their flights from Logan and there’d be fewer shadows in his last hour of skiing. A compromise he suggests is taking George Mitchell’s plan a step further, moving up the start of DST to early March.

The recent Maine legislative proposal to maintain daylight time throughout the year – placing us in the same time zone as Maritime Canada during the October to April period – may pick up new adherents in the aftermath of the BRAC proposed base closings. Proponents of the time change might even argue that a nation that so withdraws its military presence from our midst is not one to which we should be beholden for other purposes. Should we thus not only emancipate ourselves from Washington’s time zone but also from its dominion in other ways?

If an outcome of this was for us to join Eastern Canada, not only temporally but also spatially, to which of its provinces should we be affiliated? My own choice if this were to happen – and I hope it doesn’t – would be Prince Edward Island, the idyllic land of “Anne of Green Gables.”

We don’t immediately adjoin it, but if such a discontinuity didn’t keep us from being part of Massachusetts it shouldn’t be a barrier in the more fluent contemporary era. Ah, but Charlottetown is ever a great place to visit, but would we want our provincial capital so far removed from our state?

No, not for a minute or for that matter even if it meant winning an hour. I like this state and the country to which it belongs. I also like our present system of keeping time. I’d prefer to leave it alone. Let’s keep the hour ours.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail: [email protected].