Read about Cutler – and watch a video of the Cutler Coast Preserve -  in the September issue of Down East magazine.

Maldovan is one of several people that pottery owners Christine and Richard Hilton have hired on the strength of their intuition rather than the conventional wisdom that said their potters should have formal training in the ceramic arts. In fact, Christine suggests, her employees’ lack of formal training has proven something of an advantage to what the Rand McNally Road Atlas called “one the most highly acclaimed art potteries in America.” Unencumbered by the rules, they are open to experimentation. “We push it,” Christine says. “Rachel is always pushing the glazes. We give her permission to create, and we give her permission to fail. Every time we open a kiln it’s like Christmas because you never know what is going to come out.”

Read the Edgecomb Potters story in the July 2011 issue of Down East magazine.

When he stumbled upon the hamlet again six months later, he not only made a point of knowing where he was, he began looking for property, settling on a 1915 automotive garage whose ruptured walls and sagging roof were challenges he was eager to tackle given the building’s glorious perch on Minnehonk Lake. With its large industrial-style windows, open floor plan, and drywall whose jaggedy edges expose rock walls, the home and guest lodge he has created is a bit unconventional, but that makes it perfectly suited to the little town of Mount Vernon.

“Eclectic,” says Davis, summing up his adopted hometown’s nature. “We have artists, writers, educators, farmers, and retirees who have created what the world is looking for: a real community. It’s a hidden valley, a little oasis.”

Read about Mount Vernon in the June issue of Down East.

He wakes up in Robbinston, the last town on the Down East shoreline — the last town, for that matter, on the Atlantic coast in the United States. If it were possible to make a running leap off Robbinston’s wild red sandstone cliffs and soar over Passamaquoddy Bay, you’d land in the resort town of St. Andrews, New Brunswick, whose fine mansions, two hundred dollars-a-night historic hotel, and botanical garden inhabited by peacocks represent not just another country, but another world.

Lean and ropy from working the land, Mingo is in his early seventies and has lived in Robbinston, a lake-dotted hamlet of five hundred people, all his life. “I’ve traveled quite a bit,” he says, “so I know what a beautiful community it is. The people here are real people. When there’s a disaster, like someone loses a home to fire, the whole community is right there. The grade school is the best — the teachers, the principal, everything. The kids who go to that school go very far in life — you’d be surprised to hear what some of them have done. And the basketball games, well, you can’t get in because the seats are full for every game.” He grins and folds his arms across his chest. “I’m not moving.”

Heaven could be more heavenly, Mingo admits. His daughters — one in upstate New York, the other in Delaware — would love to move back home, but there are no jobs for them in the Passamaquoddy Bay area, whose roughly 17 percent poverty rate mirrors that of Washington County as a whole. “We’re losing all our younger people,” Mingo laments. “They’re all gone.”

Continue reading Robbinston: A Town in Repose in the May 2011 issue of Down East.

Continue reading about Maine’s prescription drug abuse epidemic in the April issue of Down East magazine.

Read about Jackson and Mealey’s restoration of a kitchen in an early 19th century Cape – and the intriguing piece of local history they uncovered in the process – in the April issue of Down East magazine.

Now picture that elegant white tower rising from a choppy sea. Imagine it tethered to a string of turbines just like it — ten of them, maybe, or even fifteen. Now connect a second row of turbines behind it. Add another row, and another, and another, and another, until your mind’s eye sees an entire field of swooping blades floating in a vast and otherwise empty ocean.

“This is a one thousand-megawatt farm covering an eight-square-mile area,” says Habib Dagher, the man who created this vision and is now leading a team of engineers, environmental scientists, government policymakers, and offshore construction and energy industry leaders called the DeepCwind Consortium who hope to make it, the world’s first floating wind farm, a reality. “In the Gulf of Maine, that’s like an outhouse in the corner of a football field.”

Make that three outhouses. DeepCwind’s goal is to have three such wind farms bobbing twenty to fifty miles off the Maine coast and generating enough energy to power three million homes by 2030. It’s a breathtaking idea, and still it doesn’t fill the frame that has been drawn by Habib Dagher.

Continue reading about Habib Dagher and his vision for Maine in the March 2011 issue of Down East.

I set out to find out what it means in the December 2010 issue of Down East.

Woodland caribou. U.S. Fish & Wildlife photo

Reindeer once roamed the woods of Maine. Hunters from out of state shipped them home by the scores on trains every year. Then they disappeared, quite suddenly according to some accounts. I delved into the mystery of Maine’s lost caribou for the December issue of Down East magazine.

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I shot the last caribou,” Cornelia “Fly Rod” Crosby told a reporter in 1930. “It was at Square Lake, up in Aroostook County, not far from the Canadian line.” Maine’s legendary sportswoman, then seventy-six, reminisced from her cottage in Phillips, under the sightless gaze of her prey’s antlered head. “We had been roaming around for two or three days before we found the caribou. It was a small herd of nine animals. ‘Shoot, Fly Rod, shoot!’ whispered Dan [Cummings, her guide]. ‘Not until I see horns!’ I answered. The animals shifted uneasily, and this fellow’s head was outlined clearly. I fired. One shot was enough.”

The year was 1898. Soon after, Maine outlawed caribou hunting, but it was too late. “They vanished,” Crosby said. “There were never any more to shoot.”

Richard Mills, 8, a cutter in an Eastport cannery, shows a severely cut finger in this 1911 photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine. Hine, one of the first to use photography for social change, documented child labor conditions around the country.

“I am sometimes inclined to think that we must mutilate these infants in industry before the shame of it can be driven home.” Thus did Lewis Wickes Hine express his frustrations with a public disinterested in the abuses of child labor in the early twentieth century. But reformers hardly had to resort to maiming children to make their case, as Hine’s photographs of Maine mill and cannery workers attest. Sliced fingers and broken limbs were part of the workday routine.

A pioneer of “concerned photography,” Hine forayed into Maine twice during the eleven years he worked for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), the first organization to effectively lobby for reforms. In Lewiston and Sanford in 1909 and in Eastport and Lubec in 1911, Hine recorded poverty, hazardous working conditions, and exploitation of the worst kind. His unflinching portraits of pale adolescent mill sweepers posing insouciantly and five-year-old sardine cutters wielding butcher knives are disturbing yet strangely beautiful, for Hine married social documentary with artistry.

Sweepers outside the Hill Manufacturing Company in Lewiston, 1909

The Wisconsin native’s desire to change brutal factory conditions was genuine and born from experience. To help support his family after his father’s death in 1892, Hine, then 18, worked in an upholstery factory thirteen hours a day, six days a week for a weekly salary of $4. After graduating from University of Chicago, he taught school in New York, then turned to photography. As he made his moving portraits of Ellis Island immigrants in 1905, Hine knew their American dreams were about to evaporate. They would become cheap labor and begin a bleak cycle that would draw their children into the sweatshops beside them. “This degradation was to become his obsession; it would give him no rest,” wrote Hine’s friend, the photographer Walter Rosenblum. “No matter the weather or his state of health, Hine was in the field documenting the misery of exploited children.”

Hine’s first assignment for the NCLC was to photograph New York tenement dwellers, after which he was sent to the notorious textile mills of Georgia and the Carolinas. In April 1909, three months after witnessing “gross violations of the existing child labor law” in the South, Hine was at Goodall Worsted Co. in Sanford and Bates and Hill manufacturing companies in Lewiston, all of which employed large numbers of French-Canadian immigrants. No doubt Hine assumed one of his usual guises, perhaps that of an industrial photographer interested in making a record of machinery or, with camera hidden inside his coat, a Bible salesman. In his pocket, he would have had a notebook for surreptitiously scribbling whatever details he witnessed or could coax from workers.

Having caught wind of the NCLC’s activities, however, mill bosses were suspicious. They allowed Hine to tour their factories, but not take pictures. Ever resourceful, Hine photographed children outside, at the beginning and end of their twelve-hour workdays. The images are less compelling than the ones of barefoot Southern boys climbing dangerous spinning machines, but Hine’s captions made it plain that children under fourteen were working in violation of Maine law: Going to work at 5:30 A.M. April 24, 09. Small boy named Jo is a sweeper in Mill Mfg. Co., Lewiston, Me. Been there 2 years. I saw him working inside. Said he didn’t know how old he was and he couldn’t spell his name. Lives 2 miles out in the country and his father drives him out and back every day. Jo, pictured with a man wearing a top hat, looks about eight years old. (The factory’s correct name was Hill, not Mill, Manufacturing.)

Like an investigative reporter, Hine collected details on his subjects, matching them with his images. Of a group of boys outside Bates Mill, he wrote: Larger boys get $4 to $5 a week. Nearly any one could not speak English. Of a trio of girls: A few of the young workers in Bates Mfg. Co., Lewiston, Me. Many more and younger. This mill is as bad as the average South Carolina mill in regard to child labor. Which is to say, it was very bad indeed.

Children cut sardines in Eastport, 1911.

The New England Lewis Hine encountered in 1909 had made substantial advances in reducing the number of child factory workers, at least according to the official record. About 7.7 percent of the region’s mill laborers were children, half the number recorded 25 years earlier. In Maine, Eva Shorey, special agent for the Bureau of Industry and Labor, reported about 3.8 percent of textile mill laborers, or 740 workers, were under age 16. One reason for the improvement was that the textile industry had shifted to the South where, by contrast, children made up 25 percent of workers. Maine also had an active reform movement in the Maine State Federation of Labor, the Socialist Party and several other organizations.

But numbers don’t tell everything. Criticism of Maine’s cotton and woolen mills had preceded Hine’s visit. “We had a federal government report in 1908 that said Maine was the poorest state when it came to enforcing child labor laws,” says Charles Scontras, research associate at University of Maine’s Bureau of Labor Education and author of In the Name of Humanity: Maine’s Crusade Against Child Labor. “There was just one state factory inspector. It wasn’t a pretty picture at all.”

Five year old Preston, a young cartoner in Seacoast Canning Co., Factory #2. "I saw him at work different times during the day--at 7 a.m., in the afternoon, and at 6 p.m.," Hines wrote, "and he kept at it very faithfully for so young a worker."

Hine’s photographs should have made news in Maine, but it seems they were ignored. “The local press did not cover Hine’s visits for reasons not difficult to fathom,” Scontras says. “The mills and factories were viewed as cathedrals of progress, and the newspapers gave scant attention to the people who worked there.” Scontras also is skeptical of official statistics. Mill bosses were known to hide children when the inspector visited, and many workers carried certificates falsifying their ages.

Why Maine’s forces for reform also failed to use Hine’s photographs is a mystery. Scontras speculates that the Maine State Federation of Labor was on the verge of dissolving if it hadn’t already done so. The virulently anti-religion Socialists, on the other hand, may have been unwilling to take up the cause of French Catholic mill workers or may have been discouraged from doing so.

What did Hine see that he could not photograph? Agent Shorey’s 1908 report on Lewiston’s mills tells of people working long hours with “the constant crash of machinery in their ears and the moist, lint-laden air in their lungs.” Shorey saw boys and girls sweeping constantly falling cotton fluff and pushing heavy boxes of bobbins. She observed women and children taking “awful risks” to clean and oil running machines because they would lose pay if the machines were stopped. “Last spring, in one of the mills, a woman who was cleaning a fly frame became tangled and before her shrieks of agony brought the overseer to her aid, her scalp was completely torn from her head,” Shorey wrote. “The children sometimes get their hands or fingers caught in the machinery when cleaning it, as doing it so frequently causes them to become careless. Some of the small boys employed in different parts of the mills have maimed hands or bodies on this account.”

Going to work at 5:30 a.m. at the Hill Manufacturing Company mill in Lewiston. Joe, the small boy, had been a sweeper for two years, Hine reported. "I saw him working inside. Said he didn't know how old he was and he couldn't spell his name. Lives 2 miles out in the country and his father drives him out and back every day."

Lewis Hine returned to Maine in August 1911 to investigate the Eastport and Lubec sardine canneries, which had been singled out for condemnation by John Spargo in his 1906 book, The Bitter Cry of the Children. Spargo had not personally visited the canneries, but he quoted an unnamed source: “In the rush season, fathers, mothers, older children and babies work from early morn till night – from dawn to dark, in fact. You will scarcely believe me when I say ‘and babies,’ but it is literally true. I’ve seen them in the present season no more than four or five years old, working hard and beaten when they lagged….” Scontras believes Spargo’s informant was Everett W. Lord, secretary of the New England branch of the NCLC, Hine’s employer.

This time Hine managed a few indoor shots. His photographs of cannery workers on the job offer a fascinating peek inside a thriving industry that has long since disappeared from Washington County. Children and adults armed with large knives work side by side severing the heads of herring and scraping out their entrails. Outside the factory, children agreeably demonstrated their skills, raising knives with frighteningly large blades above slippery fish that they steadied with one hand.

Hine found many very young workers, including Preston, a barefoot five-year-old “cartoner” at Seacoast Canning Co., who proudly displayed a can and the carton he would slip it into: I saw him at work different times during the day – at 7 a.m., in the afternoon and at 6 p.m., and he kept at it very faithfully for so young a worker. It is, in fact, an almost wholesome image. A picture of Bryon, 7, is another matter. Blond with a cowlick at his crown, Byron extends a wounded index finger. The caption is in the boy’s own painful, though exaggerated, words:  “I cut my finger off, cutting sardines the other day.”

"I cut my finger off cutting sardines the other day," Byron Hamilton told Hine.

In photo after photo, Hine showed children with cut and bandaged hands. In captions, he quoted them: “The salt makes ‘em pickle-sores” and “The salt gits in the cuts an’ they ache.” One disturbing series concerns eight-year-old Phoebe Thomas, first seen carrying a huge butcher knife on her way to a Seacoast Canning factory. Later that day, Hine photographed Phoebe running home “her hand and arm bathed with blood, crying at the top of her voice. She had cut the end of her thumb nearly off, cutting sardines in the factory, and was sent home alone, her mother being busy.”

Though Hine’s images are graphic, the canneries were less oppressive than the textile mills, believes Maine State Museum historian Jane Radcliffe, who has written about the industry and was a consultant on a 2000 exhibit of Hine’s Maine photographs. Cannery work was strictly seasonal and a family affair in the agriculture tradition. Moreover, it was legal. State laws permitted children of any age to be employed in factories dealing with perishable goods. “Look at the pictures of the children in Eastport,” Radcliffe says. “They look really proud. We didn’t have things like day care then. A child was probably better off being there where he was under the eye of his mother than left at home alone.” Radcliffe does not dispute the hazards, but says Hine’s perspective, while important and revealing, is not the only one. Then again, Hine never pretended objectivity. His photos were meant to shock and anger. “There were two things I wanted to do,” he said. “I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected; I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated.”

Once again, Lewis Hine’s photographs received no attention in Maine, but they surely had an indirect influence on improving factory conditions. The images, along with thousands of others taken elsewhere, were an essential part of the NCLC campaign, published in books and national magazines and displayed in lively traveling exhibits. They helped mobilize public opinion and advanced the cause of labor reform across the country.

Four years after Hine visited Eastport, Maine legislators closed the loopholes that had allowed factories to break child labor laws without fear of penalties. As a result, there were no longer any children under 14 working anywhere in the state, according to a Department of Labor and Industry report. Hine quit the NCLC in 1918 when the committee but his pay because his work was “not worth the present salary.” Ironically, this very same work would be an important tool in securing the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, the country’s first truly meaningful labor reform. Hine went on to photograph post-World War I Europe for the Red Cross and to create his famous studies of the working man and the construction of the Empire State building. Sadly, in his later years Hine had trouble finding work because an employer warned of an “artistic temperament” that “required handling,” an assessment that baffled Walter Rosenblum who knew Hine as “the most gentle of men.” Hine died in poverty in 1940.

“I have followed the procession of child workers winding through a thousand industrial communities from the canneries of Maine to the fields of Texas,” Hine once wrote. “I have heard their tragic stories, watched their cramped lives and seen their fruitless struggles in the industrial game where the odds are all against them. I wish I could give you a birds-eye view of my varied experience.” Indeed, he did give us that, and in doing so moved an entire country to action.

Eastport sardine cannery worker Minnie Thomas, age 9, shows the tool of her trade.

Originally published in Down East, January 2006.

View more photographs by Lewis Wickes Hine at the Library of Congress Website .