Frontiers are not lines on a map. They are zones where people encounter and adapt to new things: other people, different environments, new activities … Maine could be the frontier and also encompass trading, logging, farming, and maritime frontiers, even an urban frontier.
Maine was New England’s Northeast frontier. As more southerly settlements filled up, children grew up to want farms, the wealthy sought new enterprises, adventurous or poor souls sought new open spaces (and would work to intimidate or remove the native
inhabitants).
The first coastal settlements were trading posts: Euro-American goods for American furs. Trying to farm in a new, harsh climate, they might starve if supply ships were delayed. The logging and agricultural frontiers sometimes advanced together. Settlers cut trees to clear pasture and croplands, build their houses and barns, and found crops suited to a short season. But timber was everywhere, marketable and moveable by river, far beyond the range of agriculture. All of Maine became a logging frontier.
Harvested at or floated to the coast, lumber could become ships; foodstuffs could feed shipwrights and mariners. Both products were saleable in nearby colonies, and abroad. The sea became a frontier where young Mainers tested themselves in foreign climates, among foreign people.
As population grew, towns expanded and developed the marks of European “civilization”: elegant shops and houses, classy and déclassé taverns, books and papers, advancing education and ostentatious churches… These various zones are described and analyzed in Clarke’s The Eastern Frontier. He and other important New England historians contributed to Maine in the Early Republic (there were still frontiers).
The Maine frontier saw socioeconomic and political conflict. Taylor’s Liberty Men and Great Proprietors looks at the very different goals of egalitarian, democratic small farmers, hoping to own their farms and defer to no one, versus those who hoped to remain on top of a society of hierarchy, wealth, and deference. The historical core of Rolde’s The Interrupted Forest emphasizes this conflict in a very lively account of frontier(s) Maine.
Best of all, there’s Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. It won the Bancroft and Pulitzer history prizes: scholarship and literature. We get a vivid picture of health practice, the practitioner’s life, and the nature of community in frontier Maine.
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