Staying Put in Lincolnville Maine: 1900-1950, the book I wrote and the Historical Society published in 2004, was based largely on the stories some sixty-five people who grew up here told me. Their photos appear on the last few pages of the book; today I took stock. Counting the latest loss – Ruth Nickerson Felton passed away on Saturday – just 24 are still living.

Ruth, who had moved to Connecticut as a young mother, came home after her husband died to live at the farm on Beach Road where she was born. There she lived much as her mother, Elsie Thomas Nickerson, had before her, gardening, canning, pickling, cooking for public suppers, tending to the old farm house.

One day as I neared the end of Staying Put, Ruth took photographer Peggy Bochkay (my partner on Ducktrap: Chronicles of a Maine Village) and I on a tour of her barn. It was attached to the house by a series of sheds and passageways, and crammed with the stuff of a couple of generations of gardeners/farmers/homemakers. Here is the story Ruth told us that day as she opened doors to coops and stalls and workshops, all much as her father had left them.

JOE NICKERSON’S BARN

Joe Nickerson planted his last garden the spring before he died at the age of 86. Early each morning, before the blackflies came out, he’d hoe the rows of carrots, beets, onions, corn and cucumbers. Colorful dahlias still grew tall against the white wall of the garage near the road. For all the 61 years of their marriage, Joe and his wife, Elsie Thomas Nickerson, worked according to the seasons, each dictating its own tasks.

  Then, one by one, as the years crept up on them, they’d let go – first the cows went and then haymaking, then the chickens went, and then the trapping. The last to go was the garden – they did that nearly to the end, he the gardening and she the preserving.

Elsie put up all the food he grew, first canning and later freezing the carrots, beans, corn, peas and more. Dandelion greens and pickles went into crocks; when mackerel was running she canned that. A pig provided salt pork, and venison took them into early winter with some of it canned as mincemeat for pies. When Elsie was an old woman, her hands crippled with arthritis, she could still pick blueberries faster than her daughter. In dandelion time she couldn’t be kept inside, but insisted on digging them herself.

Joe and Elsie didn’t build the farm, but they made it theirs. A native of Troy, Maine, he bought the 77 acre farm at 628 Beach Road from Lavicie Young in 1920 after returning from the World War I battlefields of France. Not long after, he married Elsie, who lived nearby. Though Joe dammed the brook to make the pond out back, he didn’t cut the forest that had covered the land. He built the long stone retaining wall behind the barn, but the rocks had already been carried out of the fields. Yet he made his mark on the land just as his predecessors made theirs.

Joe’s barn, the center of his working life, remains much as he left it when he died in 1982. It can speak for itself, revealing its story to a watchful visitor, but walking through it with his daughter, Ruth Nickerson Felton, is much better. For Ruth was there watching her father work, first as a little child playing, and later as a growing girl who, along with her sister, Doris, did the varied chores that came with a farm.

You see his hand in many ways, both dramatic and simple. Walk into the main front doors of the barn and take in the big, empty lofts (empty of hay now, but stacked with boxes of the family’s belongings). A large, ungainly piece of equipment seems to be suspended in the air, and in fact, it is. The horse-drawn hay rake has been raised up to the second level and hung there, long logs stuck through the spokes of its enormous wheels, their ends resting on barn beams. Ruth has no idea how her father got it up there, but it was obviously the logical place to keep such an awkward item both safe and out of the way. Perhaps he thought someone might need it again someday.

[The hayrake was lowered down out of the barn a couple of years ago by a crew of eleven, carefully loaded onto a trailer and transported to the Open Air Museum at the Library where it can be seen today.]

Hanging above the rake is the hayfork. Only those who have seen hay put up the old way, that is, loose, even know what a hayfork is. Simply put, its large jaws clamped on a huge mouthful of hay from the loaded wagon, then was lifted by ropes and pulleys to the barn’s peak, swung into place over the mow and opened, dropping its load of hay onto the growing pile. Elsie led the horse out from the door, attached to the ropes and pulleys, and hauled the fork up while Joe stood in the loft and maneuvered it into place. Putting up loose hay gave young children an important job to do; Ruth and Doris trod the hay atop the wagon to compact the load, as Joe threw up forkfuls from the field, and Elsie raked the stragglers into piles.

Even the smallest details of the barn bear his mark – a handcarved door handle, hooks whittled from the crotch of a branch, neatly coiled rope. If he needed something he made it, fashioning it out of the bits and pieces of metal and wood and rope and wire that fill every corner of an old barn.

His cow tie-ups show the wear of animals confined countless days and nights, waiting to be fed, to be milked, to be turned out to pasture. They gnawed, they chewed, they rubbed itchy heads and backs against their wooden home, rounding the edges of stalls, wearing away the thick floorboards with their horny hooves. Twice a day, morning and night, Joe carried pails of water to the them, forked hay through the hinged doors at their heads and sat down next to their warm, moist sides to milk them.

He did it when he was eager to get at some other task – plowing on a spring morning, or setting out the first traps of the season on a chilly fall day. He did it evenings, exhausted from a day of cutting wood or haying, when all he wanted was to sit in his chair in the kitchen while Elsie fixed his supper. He did it when the family was dressed and anxious to leave for a night out at a Grange function. He did it on Fair days, compelled to come home at milking time, even on a rare day away. He did it until finally it stopped making sense. The girls were grown and moved away. People were becoming accustomed to store-bought butter and pasteurized milk. One by one he sold his cows until they were gone.

The chicken room is piled with the odds and ends of Joe and Elsie’s farming life, much of it his making -- barrels, berry boxes and the crates that held the boxes for shipping the fragile fruit, fish traps for the shiners he kept in the pond, even a jar of eels, bait for his trapline. The half dozen nest boxes were enough for the flock that supplied the family with eggs and meat, but for many years Joe and Elsie kept hundreds of hens in a house he built behind the barn. Now that hen house is a hazard, and Ruth talks of having it burned.

The fur room is Ruth’s storage room now, but she shares it with her father’s fur-trapping apparatus, the enterprise that more than any other provided Joe’s family with the extras. Christmas would be pretty slim, he used to tell his daughters, without it. Thin, flat boards are stacked around the room, a different size for each critter – fox, beaver, mink, skunk. Bunches of traps still dangle from nails; penciled sums in Joe’s hand hang on the window frame, along with the names of long-dead fur dealers. Ruth accompanied him on his trapline as a girl; she watched him scrape the pelts and stretch them inside out over the proper board; dozens of drying pelts hung from nails tacked every few inches along the beams overhead. Joe was trapping into his eighties, when his knees hurt and fingers were stiff, when nothing came as easily as it had.

Ruth was a tomboy, and she followed her father everywhere, helping him haul meadow hay from the marsh across the road to the blueberry fields behind the house. In the spring the marsh hay was spread thinly over the blueberry plants and set alight to burn off the fields. Years later, a young mother herself, she still came home to help her father with the hay. She loved to go barefoot, even on the prickly stubble of the cut grass.

Underneath the barn where Joe stored his horse-drawn plow, potato digger and cultivator, and later his tractor and truck, an old wheel-rim hangs near the door. Until Ruth explains it this is just another piece of rusty metal. Joe kept it hanging by the back door where Elsie had her clotheslines along with a hammer to strike it. He meant it for Elsie to call him in from the blueberry field or pond if she needed him, if in her increasing fraility she’d suddenly taken sick. In the end it was Joe who went first.

What did Joe Nickerson think about as he neared the end of his life? His daughters were long since established in productive lives with children, and grandchildren of their own. Their husbands worked in jobs that provided a paycheck every week. None of them would be using the bait traps, the cow tie-ups, the plows or tractors, the hayrake or fur boards he had so carefully stored away. It’s tempting to think he regretted the passing of what he knew best -- literally making his family’s living from the simple stuff of field and woods.

But that’s unlikely. He and Elsie worked hard every day of their lives, practically to the very end. There were few days off, and their financial security depended completely on their own efforts, along with the vagaries of market and climate, the availability of transportation, even the abundance of fur-bearing mammals in a given year. Jobs that provided a known, regular paycheck and time off, jobs that could be done indoors, out of harsh weather, well, those must have seemed desirable.

It is we of the generations that came after Joe and Elsie Nickerson, after Claude and Ethel Heald and Virgil Hall, after Russ and Jennie Carver, after Martin and Mabel Athearn and all the others who stayed to live and work in Lincolnville, who may regret what has passed. Joe and Elsie Nickerson lived unremarkable lives -- unremarkable because dozens of other couples were doing exactly the same things all over Lincolnville day in and day out. Yet which one of us could begin to duplicate their feat – feed and raise a family, have some fun, and stay independent into old age, all without leaving our own land?

With Ruth’s passing this week there is one less witness to that way of life that now seems so remote, so simple perhaps. But if we think it was an easier time, we’ve got it wrong. Joe and Elsie Nickerson, repeatedly doing the work each season brought, even as age made the familiar tasks harder, must have had such strength of character. Where do we see that today?

Meanwhile, their daughter Ruth was soft-spoken, hard working like her parents; I never heard her say a mean thing about anyone. Ruth was a model for how to grow old gracefully, true to herself.

If the weatherman is right, today, Monday should begin to warm up to the 20s (imagine!), and by the end of the week even the 40s (dare we hope?). Warm enough that we can voluntarily leave the house and see other people. Leaving the house for such necessities as job, grocery shopping, sending the kids to school, etc. doesn’t count. Here are a few fun things you can do right here in town:

Jan. 8: Watch LCS basketball teams play Appleton in the Lynx Gym. Games start at 3:45 p.m. with the boys playing first, girls second.

Jan. 9: Bring some handwork with you and join the needlework group at the Library, Tuesday, 4 – 6 p.m.

Jan. 10: Come to the Library at 7 p.m. to hear Tom Jamrog tell about his latest hike on Newfoundland’s East Coast Trail.

Jan. 11: Have lunch at the Soup Café, noon to 1 p.m. at the Community Building.

Any day:

Stop by our local shops, say hello, have a cup of coffee or just browse. Dot’s, the Lincolnville General Store, the Beach Store, Drake’s are all open every day. Check out Green Tree Coffee Roasters just across from Dot’s.

I love browsing the aisles of a hardware store, and we’ve got Western Auto and Vikings right here in town when the urge hits to look at some tools and stuff.

The Whales Tooth Pub is open Wednesday through Sunday including lunch on the week-end. Lincolnville Fine Art & Antiques, next to the Beach Store, is often open with an interesting mix of paintings, sculpture, pottery and antiques.

The LCS basketball teams will play Appleton Village School at home Monday, Jan. 8, 3:45 p.m. Boys play first.

Congratulations to the following December Students of the Month: Kindergarten, Maggie Feeney and Alexis Blake; First Grade, Anaelle Dodge and Isabel Pickford; Second Grade, Cora Leavitt and Grant Morrison; Third Grade, Silas Moody and Emma Mathews; Fourth Grade, Liam Day-Lynch and Maddy St.Charles; Fifth Grade, Skyla Dyer and Iain Larsen-Leavins; Sixth Grade, Avery Marino; Seventh Grade, Kara Andrews; Eighth Grade, Britney Jackson.

The PTO (Parent-Teacher Organization) finds various ways to fund their projects that help support school programs. Collecting box tops, which can be dropped in the mailbox in the school lobby, is one source of funds. Another is by donating clothing to Bubbles and Beans, the children’s consignment shop in Reny’s Plaza; your can designate that proceeds from your donations go into the PTO account. The next PTO meeting is January 10, 6-7 p.m. Childcare will be provided.

Library

The needlework group meets Tuesday, Jan. 9, 4-6 p.m. Bring something to work on. All welcome!

Lincolnville’s Tom Jamrog, winner of the 2014 Triple Crown of Hiking Award, will give an illustrated talk on his recent hike of Newfoundland’s East Coast Trail on Wednesday, Jan. 10 at 7 p.m. at the Lincolnville Community Library. 

Tom spent two weeks this past August hiking the trail, which covers more than 180 miles along the Newfoundland coast. He will tell about the adventure and share his photos of the spectacular scenery. That Triple Crown award was for completing continuous through hikes of the Appalachian, Pacific Crest, and Continental Divide trails. Tom gave a great talk at the library two years ago about his hiking adventures and this promises to be another interesting one.

Leaving out names, here’s how one problem was solved by neighbors helping each other out:

Original post: “…. Some people know that my daughter had a stroke and is in hospital in Portland.  She has improved greatly…..[and] may be transferred to Augusta to a trauma rehabilitation facility. Her husband has been taking care of [their 2 miniature Nigerian black goats] along with 2 children, house work and going back and forth to Portland. …He is returning to work Monday …

“My request is that he needs … someone to come to the house in the a.m. to tend them and the kids’ 2 chickens or take them in for awhile.  He can manage the evening chores. The …. immediate need, he ran out of hay.  Is there any one out there who would sell 4 bales of hay?  

“Again, Thank you for all the assistance my daughter and family have received. You folks will never know how much my family and I appreciate everything.”

First response: “… I have the hay. Come over anytime. I would bring it but I have a tiny car. [Can] anyone … can deliver it?

Next response: “I can borrow a truck to bring a few bales over if you still have the need - (am trying to figure a way to help with the animals too) “