Dozens of people turned out in Newcastle on Thursday to urge U.S. Department of the Interior officials to create a national monument honoring Frances Perkins, the nation's first female Cabinet secretary.
Perkins served as secretary of labor under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt from 1933 to 1945 as the nation emerged from the Great Depression and fought during World War II. She is credited with designing and carrying out many of Roosevelt's "New Deal" reforms, including implementing a federal minimum wage, passing workplace safety and child labor laws, standardizing the 40-hour work week and establishing Social Security.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and others representing the National Park Service participated in a "community meeting" in response to a request to designate the Perkins family homestead as a national monument. Although she grew up in Massachusetts and lived in New York and the Washington, D.C., area, Perkins always considered the family's property along the Damariscotta River as her home. She is buried nearby.
Haaland is the first indigenous person to serve as Cabinet secretary. And as she sat in a nearly 200-year-old barn on the Frances Perkins homestead, Haaland said Perkins should be remembered for not only breaking the Cabinet gender barrier but also carrying out Roosevelt's New Deal initiatives.
"I'm so honored. I feel her legacy in this position that I have right now and feel grateful for standing on her shoulders," she told the group.
Haaland said the country needs more national monuments and other memorials honoring the historic contributions of women like Perkins.
"Women are still woefully under-represented in many places in America, including in our history books and our national parks," she said. "We are now undertaking a deliberative process to explore how the National Park Service can better tell the story of women and girls who have made significant contributions to our nation."
The Perkins family homestead is already on the national register of historic places. But the nonprofit Frances Perkins Center, which acquired the property from the family several years ago, is petitioning the Biden administration to make the homestead a national monument.
The petition has the support of Gov. Janet Mills, members of Maine's congressional delegation, Perkins descendants and many people in the community. Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross, Senate President Troy Jackson, Penobscot Nation Ambassador Maulian Bryant and Secretary of State Shenna Bellows all attended and spoke during Thursday's event.
No promises were made Thursday about the national monument petition. But Assistant Secretary Shannon Estenoz, who oversees the National Park Service, said her staff were amazed at how much of Perkins' life was preserved by her family.
"I will tell you when our team first came here they came back giddy," Estenoz said. "Because nothing gets a historian giddy like walking through a place and seeing the typewriter this person typed on and holding a book that this person held and looking into a bible that this person read."
State Sen. Peggy Rotundo, a Lewiston Democrat who serves on the Frances Perkins Center's board of directors, said before the roundtable discussion that although it's not a done deal, she is hopeful the homestead will receive national monument status. National monument designations protect sites of historic, scientific or natural significance.
"There are very few national monuments that exist in this country in honor of women and I can't think of anybody more worthy of a national monument in her name than Frances Perkins," Rotundo said. "Frances Perkins' policies affect people's lives every single day. She was the architect and driver behind the New Deal and she just believed very strongly in the power of government to lift up people's lives."
There are only two other national monuments in New England — Katahdin Woods and Waters in Maine and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument off the southern New England coast — although Acadia National Park began as a monument. This weekend, Haaland also plans to visit Katahdin Woods and Waters to formally open a visitor's center roughly eight years after the land was granted monument status by former President Obama.
