Primary and Secondary Sources for
Researching Agriculture in Maine
Those interested in the history of Maine agriculture
will find an extensive literature available for further reading.
Secondary sources include:
- Clarence A. Day's A History of Maine Agriculture, 1604-1860 (Orono, 1954) and Farming in Maine, 1860-1940 (Orono, 1963) survey not only Maine agriculture but also Maine rural life generally.
- Harold F. Wilson's The Hill Country of Northern New England (New York, 1936);
- Howard S. Russell's A long, Deep Furrow (Hanover, N.H.,
1982); and the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife's annual
Proceedings for 1986, titled The Farm (Boston, 1988), provide
information on Maine agriculture in the context of New England
history. The bibliography contained in the latter volume is extremely
valuable.
- Hal S. Barron's Those Who Stayed Behind (Cambridge, 1984), a study of the upland Vermont town of Chelsea, suggests themes applicable to village society in western Maine.
- Alan Taylor's scholarly Liberty Men and Great Proprietors (Chapel Hill, 1990) offers insight into political and social life in rural central Maine, while Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale (New York, 1991), Nancy F. Cott's The Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven, 1977), and Carolyn Merchant's Ecological Revolutions (Chapel Hill, 1989) provide feminist perspectives on early nineteenth-century rural society and agriculture in Maine and northern New England.
- Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present (University of Maine Press, 1995) provides a contemporaty, comprehensive look at the history of Maine.
- Early local histories, used critically and interpretively,
can also yield a wealth of detail about rural life.
- farm diaries,
- account books, and
- journals, which may be found in such repositories as the University
of Maine's Special Collections Department of the Fogler Library,
the Maine Historical Society, and the Bethel Historical Society.
- The Dublin Seminar's The Farm offers a sampling of northeastern diaries and journals arranged geographically.
- The Maine Farmer (1833-1924), one of New England's most important agricultural newspapers, contains information on farm methods, technologies, rural attitudes and opinions, crops, and politics.
- The annual reports of the Secretary of the Maine Board of Agriculture, particularly the Fifth (1860), Twelfth (1867), and Eighteenth (1873), contain information on a variety of topics related to farming and rural life.
- Travel literature, autobiographies and youth literature, particularly
the stories of Elijah Kellogg and C.A. Stephens, also provide
insight into everyday life on the Maine farm in the nineteenth
century, as do the oral histories collected at the Northeast Archives
of Folklore at the University of Maine.
This list adapted from Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present.
