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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com Cunliffe Company. It’s a good bet that no one in 1908 Fort Kent worried about corporate downsizing or about national deficits. Most people raised at least some of their own food so the weather rather than the strategies of presidents and speakers of the house and CEO’s was of real, ever-present concern. A 1907 photo of Fort Kent that Lisa Ornstein, director of the Acadian Archives, kindly let me study shows more open fields surrounding town, fewer trees than now. There is no levee to protect against St. John floods, and Pleasant Street is a country lane surrounded by fields of what is perhaps buckwheat. Potatoes, peas, and onions were other important non-monetary or “kitchen” crops. Chances are, my 1908 counterpart never imagined she could provide varied menus for the family supper. There was no Shop n’ Save, but, according to the stereotype advanced by Madawaska Training Center principal Mary Nowland, any local girl worth her salt could concoct a mean pot of pea soup. Was a woman in 1908 concerned about staying fit? No one bought treadmills or exercise tapes in those days, but women were beginning to assert themselves as athletes. This was, however, still new territory. A brochure written by Clarence Pullen to advertise the Bangor Aroostook’s new Fort Kent extension, acknowledges, if condescendingly, the woman outdoor enthusiast:
The question of suffrage may wait, but her enfranchisement into the pleasures of the canoe and fly-rod is a right that no woman will ever give up to the monopoly of man again once she has experienced the fun of going a-fishing. Well, even if Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Picabo Street weren’t available as role models, there was always the average woman farmer who put in a full day doing dishes, toting babies, carding wool, tending chickens, hoeing gardens, and handling the wash. In the Fort Kent of 1908, there were telephones, but there was no electric company. A woman might have wondered how it would be to drive an automobile. Joseph O. Michaud had, after all, just patented a new power transmission. But horse-drawn sled or carriage was still the standby transportation and would largely remain so until the 1920s. Without the ever-present electrified night, a Fort Kent woman wouldn’t have needed to go south of Eagle Lake to see Halley’s at its best. She could have crossed the St. John River to Clair, New Brunswick, on Joe Long’s new footbridge, and, halfway across, wrapped her seal coat tighter over a white shirt waist and long skirt, as she looked up at the comet and wondered if the rumors were true, if its vapors were deadly. Dangerous, at least. She’d have known that ginger in warm milk was a cure for colic, that bathing the feet in
cold water with mustard could put out a fever. There was no Tylenol or Bayer’s, and no AIDS, but she might have had first-hand knowledge of TB or cancer. She might have thought about the burning of St. Louis Church in 1907 and about how Father Decary now had to hold services on the second floor of the newly built school that rose from the original church’s foundation. She might have wondered what the new church — to be started next year — would look like and if she could afford to send her children to the Little Franciscan Sisters of Mary for the 50 cents a month tuition. Would she have wanted her sons and daughters to attend the Madawaska Training School? The girls might become teachers and be able to support themselves, even if they didn’t marry. But they might lose their facility with French. Would her sons work at Fort Kent Mills? Would one of them learn to run one of the seven shingle machines there? Would they work the 350-acre company farm? Would they take over their father’s farm when he was too old? I doubt this 1908 woman’s soul was so different from mine. Maybe she envied the wealthy — the Cunliffes and Mallettes. She might have liked to gaze in the window at Sawyer’s jewelry shop, a small square plank building at the far end of Military Square, and then decide that such luxuries weren’t real(continued on page 52)
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