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Northern Maine Farm Families Preserve Relics of Disappearing Way of Life

Jennifer Mitchell

We make another stop on our holiday road tour, where we take a look at some of the museums, attractions, and hidden gems around the state. Next, we travel north of Houlton to Littleton, Maine, and a museum that captures the region's rich farming history. 

"My name is Karen Donato, and we are here in Littleton, Maine at the Southern Aroostook Agricultural Museum." Donato is a school teacher and museum volunteer who, as a child in the 1950s, spent a lot of time in this very building, when it served as Littleton's elementary school. "So this is the original gymnasium," she says.
 

Credit Jennifer Mitchell
Karen Donato, with some of the items preserved at the Southern Aroostook Agricultural Museum.

The school is very much a part of the very collection it houses, with its small, warmly-wooded gym, echoey hallways, and scoreboard frozen in time.

Jennifer Mitchell: "I see on the scoreboard it says 'Home 49, Visitor 41.' Was that the actual score? Or was that just, like, fudged?"

Karen Donato: "We don't know." (Laughs). "It was there when the school closed in 1999."
 

Credit Jennifer Mitchell
Farming-related Items on display at the Southern Aroostook Agricultural Museum.

Just down the hall from the pint-sized china drinking fountains, the classrooms have been converted into exhibit halls, full of hammers, plow blades, ice skates, wheel chairs, stilts, aprons, dolls, and electric hair curlers. It wasn't brought together by a major collector of rural antiquities, but by local farming families who wanted their parents' and grandparents' farm tools and household items preserved.

Each treasure in the museum is tagged with a homemade sign bearing the name of the family or the farm where the item was collected. "And so we'll never take those off, because that we feel is very unique to our museum," Donato says.

The museum is a reminder of how people in this area lived and worked. You'll see vintage snowmobiles, tractors, sleighs, pea shellers, and potato barrels. It's a monument to a time when families made a lot of what they needed.

This cobbler's bench tells the story of a local family called the Tingleys: "The Tingleys had five little boys and the father learned how to make their shoes, because he couldn't afford to go out and buy them new shoes all the time," Donato says.

You can also see some of the more cutting edge conveniences of early 20th century life in Littleton. "This is where you'd wash your clothes," Donato says, then you would run them through the ringer. The center tub can be put back in, and it is a butter churn!"
 

Credit Jennifer Mitchell
Museum volunteer Francis Fitzpatrick, who has been farming in Aroostook County for more than 50 years.

"If you look at a lot of these things, it was done because of need. Someone wanted an easier way to do something," says Francis Fitzpatrick, who has been farming in Aroostook County for more than 50 years. He's also a museum volunteer who helps interpret some of the more puzzling farm items for visitors, such as clockwork egg turners, as well as the many devices important to the potato industry.

Fitzpatrick says the museum is home to a lot of homemade and rebuilt items. And some of the more common items, he says, aren't really that common after all. "You will probably not find a potato barrel anywhere else in the world," he says. Potato pickers elsewhere, he explains, seemed to prefer burlap sacks over Maine's iconic baskets and barrels.

But these details of history could be lost, as Aroostook County is losing population, and as younger people move down state, and get out of farming altogether. And Fitzpatrick says as the County struggles to find its future, it's up to the older generation to preserve its past.

The Southern Aroostook Agricultural Museum in Littleton is open Thursday through Saturday, 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm through September.