The Enemy At the Gates: The British Invasion of Maine

In September 1814 the War of 1812, which had for the most part passed Maine by, came to its shores in earnest. A little known part of American history, it had the potential to radically change not only this state, but the entire nation as well.
The march towards open conflict with England had begun since the early days of the United States’ independence, finally coming to a head over England’s attempts at restricting American trade, particularly with Napoleon’s Europe and the Royal Navy’s practice of impressing American sailors into its service on the high seas.
With its long, well-harbored coastline and seafaring tradition, it was, perhaps, inevitable that Maine, then part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, would be drawn deeply into the war.
President Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807, which had prohibited the exportation of any merchandise from the U.S. had caused an economic depression in Maine. Up and down the coast, goods rotted in warehouses, ships lay idle at wharves and seamen were unemployed. Although the act was repealed in 1809, its memory created a strong anti-war sentiment along the Eastern Seaboard.
At a special Harpswell town meeting held on August 24, 1812, for example, Stephen Purinton and John Curtis were elected delegates to a county convention “to take measures to alleviate the miseries of war and bring about a speedy and lasting peace.”
With the declaration of war in 1812, the British, were aware the sentiment for war was centered mainly in the south and west, and realizing profit could be gained from continued trade, decided to leave New England be. It was said in Maine at the time, a young man wanting action should sign aboard a privateer and not join the militia.
Even when the president called for militia units to be placed under federal control, Governor Strong disregarded the order, stating it would leave the Commonwealth undefended in violation of the Massachusetts constitution. George Ulmer was given a presidential commission of colonel and placed in command of the regular troops at Ft. Sullivan in Eastport, ME. “It was Ulmer’s design and duty,” wrote one Maine historian, “To prevent, if possible, all smuggling and intercourse with the enemy, in the faithful discharge of which, he gave to the inhabitants some affront.” Ulmer’s reward for attempting to eliminate commerce in contraband was to be relieved of command.
The brief, sharp engagement between the USS Enterprise and HMS Boxer off Monhegan Island in September 1813 was a brief reminder to Maine that there was a war going on.
To reinforce the defense of Eastport, two additional forts were established at Robbinston, garrisoned with 30 men, and a 70 man force stationed on Moose Island.
In the summer of 1814, war finally arrived, when on July 11, an expedition launched secretly from Halifax, NS, led by the 74 gun HMS Ramilies anchored off Eastport. Commodore Sir Thomas Hardy demanded an immediate surrender. The new American commander, Maj. Putnam, demurred, but through pressure from the local inhabitants, struck his colors without resistance. Hardy ordered 1000 soldiers from the 102nd regiment put ashore along with a number of their wives and children. All public property was immediately confiscated, and the surrendering Americans were placed aboard a prison ship.
$9,000 in unsigned Treasury Notes was seized, which the customs collector refused to sign even under threat of death. Hardy did not carry out the threat and issued a proclamation declaring US laws would remain in effect but ordering all inhabitants to swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown. Eventually about 2/3 of the population did so. To secure his conquests, he left inn place a garrison of 800 men and a Royal Customs collector.
Almost instantly resourceful locals began a brisk smuggling operation of cattle and local goods into the British lines.
To further secure the area, a party was dispatched to drive out the garrison at Robbinston. The lieutenant in charge, realizing opposition to the highly trained, motivated British troops was futile, ordered the destruction of everything that could not be taken and withdrew to Machias. An additional British raiding party was put ashore to spike the guns at the fort below Thomaston, rendering them useless.
To be continued

Buy Now Now For Discount

10% off Where Is Crusader Rabbit Now That We Really Need Him?
Offer ends June 30, 2010

Get it
Where Is Crusader Rabbit Now That We Really Need Him?
Price: $19.99
Discount: $- 2.00
Discounted Price: $17.99

Disclaimer: Use coupon code SUMMERREAD305 at checkout and receive 10% off Where Is Crusader Rabbit Now That We Really Need Him?. Maximum savings with this promotion is $10. You can only use the code once per account, and you can't use this coupon in combination with other coupon codes. Sorry, self-purchases (buying books that you’ve published) aren’t eligible. This great offer ends on June 30, 2010 at 11:59 PM so try not to procrastinate! While very unlikely we do reserve the right to change or revoke this offer at anytime, and of course we cannot offer this coupon where it is against the law to do so.
Copyright © 2002-2010 Lulu, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Rusty Rails

I like to watch railroad tracks, or, more specifically, abandoned or little used rails. They are a link to what was, the way we traveled, the way we got things, the way we even celebrated holidays.
Train time was an event. When my brother was born, my grandmother came over from New Hampshire on the train to take care of my sister and me while my mother was in the hospital. We drove downtown to the stately granite, oak and polished brass station to await her arrival. A few people waited in the darkening evening. There were folks waiting for arrivals such as we were, others leaving for parts unknown, one or two sailors departing for leave from the naval air station. Now and again we would go out onto the cold platform, even though we knew what time the train would arrive. And arrive it did. The rails had been converted to diesel by then, but we could hear the lonesome horn to the west, echoing as the engine passed through Deep Cut on the old Maine Central Line. The train stopped with a squeal of steel on steel, and my grandmother stepped down from the shiny car. It was all so thrilling.
Children’s books told us of how the good things we ate and everything else arrived in box cars behind the hard working engines. New cars were unloaded for the local dealerships, coal and oil were brought onto the siding at Brunswick Coal and Lumber to heat up our homes. Long trains filled with cement, potatoes, and wood products rumbled through town on their way to bigger places like Boston, New York and beyond.
The box cars were lessons in geography to us: The Louisville & Nashville, New York, Hartford & New Haven; Delaware & Hudson; and the Canadian National and Grand Trunk railroads.
But best of all was after Thanksgiving in early December, when the railway express cars would be shunted to the Railway Express depot, disgorging brown paper wrapped packages from distant relatives or large boxes from catalog stores. Christmas fever was boosted to a higher pitch, when the olive drab delivery trucks started up and down the street, stopping next door or even at your own place because every kid knew what that meant: presents were starting to arrive.
But all that is gone now. The few trains that come through are sorry affairs; one or two unmarked, unremarkable, rusting storage sheds on wheels pulled by equally drab mono-colored engines. No more do kids count them and try to find out where they have come from.
Most of the track is abandoned. Leaning telegraph poles and old ties still lie scattered along them, as if someone walked away and forgot what to do with them. Those are the tracks I like to stand beside. I like the grass covered rails leading off around the next corner into the fields or woods to disappear with their stories.

Give Me A Break, PETA

At one time the humble sardine provided Mainers with thousands of jobs along the coast, particularly Downeast, where paid work today is a vanishing commodity. Seiners went out with their nets and returned with holds loaded with little, silver fish, which were headed, gutted and packed away in often times colorful, flat cans to be shipped all over the world.
During the Vietnam War they could be purchased in the PX tent along with crackers and consumed as a snack along with a favorite beverage when off duty.
But like the shoe and textile industries, the forest product industry and farming, the sardine industry is about to become a thing of the past, with the last cannery in the entire US in Prospect Harbor, ME closing.
For those of you who don’t know it, Prospect Harbor is not one of the economic boom areas of the country. Maine has turned its back on its old industries. Despite all the promises of a legion of political candidates, Maine has turned its back on any industry to become a haven for wealthy retirees and yuppies with enough in the trust fund to open trendy shops for tourists. Bring forward a proposal for a business, even an environmentally friendly one like wind or tidal power generation, and a “Friends of” group will spring up, in their LL Beans finery, decrying how the proposal will destroy “their corner of heaven,” or even life as we know it. Forget the facts, just don’t mess with my view.
But, I digress. A possible buyer has been found to purchase the Prospect Harbor factory and process lobster, allowing more of our largest marine catch to be turned into a value added product right here instead of being shipped to Canada. The state government hasn’t, in the recent past been overly friendly towards the lobster industry in spite of its impact on the economy, but nonetheless, here is an opportunity to help it.
In one of the stupidest moves (I’m not going to euphemize it, it is bone headed stupid) I have ever seen any group do, PETA has written a letter to the governor protesting the sale. According to the Portland Press Herald: “PETA official Tracy Reiman says ‘lobsters and fish are smart, sensitive and unique individuals who should be respected, not killed and canned.”
Got news for you, Tracy. Lobsters are bugs, genetically related to grasshoppers. They are neither smart nor are they nice. They are cannibals. In fact, if left alone in a trap, they will attack and eat each other. I’ve also never really noticed anything particularly intelligent about fish either, although our 14 year old gold fish could recognize me through the glass and beg for food. Oh yeah, lobster is low fat, fish high in omega 3, so where are we going to get that? Birch bark? Nature made the food chain, and we, fortunately, sit fairly near the top. It’s all part of the circle of life.
I’m sure Ms. Reiman is adequately paid as an official of PETA, but the former sardine workers are now just receiving unemployment compensation. Isn’t it time we think of them?
By the way, I have no problem boiling a lobster.

Free Shipping

Buy your copy soon!

The Hit Man

There once was a hit man named Artie, who specialized in strangling his victims. One day he performed a hit on a friend's ex-wife as a favor, but being a professional, he said he had to charge, but only asked for one dollar, to protect his image. The hit was to take place in the parking lot of the local Shop 'n Save. As the woman drove into the parking lot, Artie noticed that she had a boyfriend with her, which meant he had to be dealt with. Artie jumped him first, strangled him and then turned on the ex wife, strangling her. The manager of the store, alerted to the scuffle going on outside, ran to the scene and was strangled himself before the police arrived and secured Artie.
The headline in the paper the next day read, "Artie Chokes Three For A Dollar At Shop 'n Save."

The School Hot Lunch Program

Once I became a first grader, one of the big kids, who had to be at school during the morning and the afternoon, I became aware of the hot lunch program at school. Many of us lived within walking distance of the school and were excused at noon to walk home to a bowl of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup or a peanut butter sandwich. That’s right, I did not say peanut butter and jelly as my mother had not mastered that concept yet, and I was forced to choke down, on sandwich day, two slices of Holsum bread with an arid layer of Peter Pan peanut butter between them.
The bus kids, and those whose mothers worked during the day marched down to the room which, at Longfellow School, served as the gymnasium, assembly room and cafeteria. At one end was the stage for presentations and plays, the other end held the kitchen, serving window and highly varnished picnic tables. For $.25 a kid could buy a ticket for a hot meal and a ½ pint bottle of milk or for $.03, a ticket which scored him just a milk, if mom sent him to school with his Roy Rogers lunch box with a sandwich. My Hopalong Cassidy lunch box, contained a thermos bottle, and so I would be relieved of the necessity of even that expense.
The hot lunch program was funded, not by the Department of Education, as one might think, but by the Department of Defense. Its purpose was not to keep us healthy learners as the concept of “a hungry child can’t learn,” wasn’t in vogue. It was borne out of the need to insure that our generation could provide enough healthy cannon fodder when the time came, and that the girls would become brood stock for another generation of soldiers. The Great Depression had created so many malnourished youngsters, you see, that the government was alarmed at the number of young men rejected medically for military service during World War II.
Lunches at home were pretty mundane. In addition to what I’ve described above, there was Franco American spaghetti, a plate of elbow macaroni with orange shake cheese or good old, healthy baloney. We didn’t expect any more than that, and we knew what it was, even though no one had ever seen a healthy balone, from which the baloney came, grazing in a pasture.
One nearly forgotten rainy day in the first grade, I did not want to walk home in my heavy, oil skin raincoat with hat that didn’t turn when my head did, giving me a limited field of vision, so I conned a quarter out of my mother to eat a hot lunch. At noon, I watched the walkers leave, lined up and filed to the cafeteria with those, who were already veterans of the lunch room. As we neared the first floor, my nose was assaulted by a warm, damp smell. I stood in line, received from one of the hair-netted lunch ladies a thick, white plate with a green band, which I could barely hold, and shuffled down the line as the food was ladled onto the plate. At the end of the line I was given a ½ pint glass bottle of milk. I found a seat with some of my friends, some of whom started to eat, and looked at the plate. There was a distinguishable glop of what looked like mashed potatoes, unlumpy like my mothers. Over this was spread a mass of brown. Yup, brown it was. I suppose it was meat and gravy, but to a finicky first grader, any thing unrecognizable was nauseating. I picked at it, drank the milk, developed a roaring headache and was scolded by some female authority figure as I emptied an almost full plate into the trash when the bell rang.
At home that night, I still felt sick, and my father, like most of his generation to whom the three squares a day of army food were a welcome relief from the poverty of their childhoods, was not sympathetic. “When you get into the army,” he warned, “You’ll eat it or starve.” I heaved at that.
From then on, I avoided staying in for lunch until junior high, when a 20 minute lunch period and a two mile round trip walk forced me to bring a lunch and watch others try to put the meals down. We were now eating out of bilious green sectional trays and the milk bottles had become cartons. The meal I remember the most, not only because of its frequency, but because to this day I’ve never seen anything as revolting served to free citizens. It was called, “Canadian bacon.” It was, in reality, fried baloney, and so help me the edges of it were gray-green.
The food in the Army, by the way, with the exception of the C-ration of ham and lima beans, was pretty good. One of my first extra duties as a lieutenant was mess officer, and later in the reserves, I served as director of instruction at the Army’s food service school at Ft. Lee, VA. But… Anything after those school hot lunches would have been good.