by Mary Grow

The following article concludes (at least for now) the discussion of early agriculture in Vassalboro and moves eastward to Palermo. The focus in Vassalboro this week is on livestock.

Readers will note this week’s article is even more discursive than usual, as your writer came across a variety of slightly-related topics that intrigued her.

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In Samuel Boardman’s chapter on agriculture in Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history, two family names appear repeatedly in discussions of animal husbandry in Vassalboro, the Burleighs and the Langs.

Boardman organized his discussion by the type of livestock, starting with cattle, about which he wrote, “As cattle are the real basis of successful agriculture, the farmers of the province of Maine had their cows and oxen as soon as they had homes.”

Vassalboro’s John D. Lang and his son, Thomas S. Lang, were prominent Shorthorn breeders in the 1860s, Boardman wrote (see the Jan. 22 article in this series for more on Shorthorns).

John Lang imported Ayrshires, too, in 1855 and 1856 from Massachusetts. Thomas Lang was the first in Kennebec County to import Holstein-Friesians, in 1864, from another Massachusetts breeder.

Hall C. Burleigh was breeding Herefords by the 1870s. In 1879, he formed a cattle-importing partnership with former Maine governor Joseph R. Bodwell, of Hallowell, that lasted until Bodwell’s death in December 1887.

Boardman wrote that Burleigh and Bodwell imported more than 800 cows. Burleigh went to England five times to personally choose good breeding cattle, and the firm imported others, sight unseen, from England and from Canada. In 1883, Burleigh “chartered the steamship “Texas” and brought over for his firm the largest lot of Hereford stock ever brought to this country by one firm, numbering 200 head.”

Burleigh and Bodwell imported Polled Aberdeen-Angus through the 1880s, and in 1883 and 1886 they brought in Sussex cattle. In 1881 and 1883, Burleigh took some of his Vassalboro herd to exhibit at major agricultural fairs, including in Chicago, Kansas City and New Orleans, winning prizes everywhere.

Boardman wrote that a heifer named Burleigh’s Pride, a two-year-old, 1,820-pound Hereford/Polled Angus crossbreed, won a “champion gold shield for the best animal of any sex, breed or age, exhibited by the breeder.” He did not say what year or which fair brought this honor; nor did he discuss the complexities of moving a herd of valuable cattle around the country in the 1880s.

Burleigh’s national prominence brought Maine, and specifically Kennebec County, recognition for cattle-raising.

Writing in 1892, Boardman said Burleigh’s herd took 15 first prizes, 11 second prizes and one third prize at the 1891 Maine State Fair. His son, Thomas G. Burleigh, was also breeding cattle.

Another Hereford breeder Boardman named was J. S. Hawes, in South Vassalboro, who started breeding there in 1876 and in 1879 moved with “many of his best animals” to Kansas, where he continued breeding “on a very large scale.”

These types of cattle Boardman called “adapted to general purposes” – work animals that produced healthy calves and gave “sufficient milk for family use.” In 1855, he wrote, a Winthrop resident introduced the first Jerseys, a breed that produced ample milk and made butter and other milk products possible.

This novelty, in Boardman’s view, was “the beginning of specialties in farming, and specialties in farming mark the modern from the old style methods, introduce new ideas, create diversity and insure larger returns.”

The importer, Boardman said, was derided by other farmers for bringing “small, delicate Jerseys” into the homeland of “magnificent Durhams and Herefords.” It took a few years for the breed to be widely accepted, but by the 1870s they were popular throughout Maine.

In 1892, Boardman wrote, Chandler F. Cobb, owner of Mt. Pleasant Farm in South Vassalboro, was Kennebec County’s largest Jersey breeder, with a herd of “sixty choice, fashionably bred animals.” The “leading animals” were named Sir Florian (an import from Pennsylvania) and Fancy’s Harry 7th. The cows won multiple prizes, and “the product of his celebrated dairy has a high reputation.”

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Sheep, Boardman wrote, have been in Kennebec County since the late 1820s, but have never been as popular as cattle and horses. He assigned part of the blame to the “vast numbers of predatory dogs” which made keeping sheep risky, unless they were close to home.

“In hillside pastures remote from the dwelling, the losses to flocks from roving dogs have always been great and have actually driven many farmers out of the business of sheep husbandry,” he wrote.

The Langs, father and son, took the risk. Boardman called them “early and continuous importers and improvers of sheep,” specializing in Southdowns and Cotswalds (see the Jan. 22 article for brief descriptions of some sheep breeds).

Boardman named two other sheep breeders, Moses Taber, who imported Spanish Merinos from Vermont in 1853, and Hon. Warren Percival, another Cotswold breeder. He described N. R. Cates and H. G. Abbott as specializing in sheep husbandry.

Wikipedia says Merinos, noted for their fine, soft wool, originated on the Iberian Peninsula in the late 15th century. For years, the Spanish government prohibited exporting them; those who defied the ban could face capital punishment. Only in the 1700s did the breed spread to other European countries, and thence to the rest of the world.

In the April 18, 1874, issue of a South Carolina newspaper named the “Port Royal commercial and Beaufort County Republican,” there is a letter from an unnamed Maine farmer to the Department of Agricul­ture (of South Carolina, presumably) advocating keeping grassland in good condition by top-dressing without plowing. He cited Abbott as an example.

Abbott, he wrote, had a 40-acre meadow “covered with white daisy and yellow weed, the grass killed out.” He put 50 sheep to graze on 10 acres for two years, and in the spring of the third year mowed “the heaviest crop of hay he had ever grown.”

“Timothy and red-top came in, and in some places the clover was so heavy that the mowing machine could not be used,” the writer said. He concluded, “He [Abbott] is of opinion that farmers who do not pasture sheep sustain a great loss.”

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Horse breeding in Kennebec County started in 1818 and 1819 in Winthrop, Boardman wrote, and the county’s trotting horses soon became world-famous. In 1859, Thomas Lang “began a breeding stud which soon took high rank among the most noted in the country.”

Boardman named some of Lang’s best-known horses, including the stallion General Knox. An 1895 New York Times headline called General Knox (who had died in 1873) the “most famous of Maine horses.” A five-page article written in 2004 by Clark P. Thompson and archived in the University of Maine’s Digital Commons called him “a foundation sire of Maine trotting horses.”

A black horse with brownish overtones and white markings on his face, General Knox was born in New York; he was three when Lang brought him to Vassalboro in 1859, Thompson said.

Thompson cited a Maine Farmer description of one of General Knox’s races, at the Waterville Driving Park in the fall of 1863, before an audience of 5,000 people. Knox’s competitors were two other prominent Maine stallions, Hiram Drew (who had never been defeated, and who had outpaced General Knox in an 1860 contest) and Gen. McLellan.

The race was supposed to be five heats, with the horse that won three the winner. It went three heats, because General Knox took the first three, “despite in the third a near spill for [driver Foster S.] Palmer when a stray dog crossed the track in front of Knox.”

In 1871, Lang sold General Knox for $10,000 and moved to Oregon.

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In his 2015 history of Palermo, Millard Howard began his chapter on 19th century agriculture by commenting that the period was the “golden age” of the family farm, and although people look back on it “with nostalgia,” few would enjoy reliving it.

Several readers of these articles have shared that sentiment, especially during January’s cold spell.

Howard continued: “Life was controlled by the seasons and the weather. Each season had its tasks and, if the weather failed to cooperate, disaster was close at hand.”

Men’s occupations overlapped. A farmer needed to practice a variety of crafts to keep his farm running, and skilled craftsmen raised crops and bred animals for food.

Milton Dowe had made a similar point in his 1954 Palermo history. All summer, he wrote, men cleared land, planted, tended and harvested crops and built and maintained fences and buildings; all winter, they worked in the woods.

They could lumber, hunt or trap, or all three. A trapper might sell to traders fifty or a hundred dollars worth of furs, Dowe wrote (without date). Hunting and fishing provided food, and in spring “there was much syrup and sugar making.”

Howard mentioned one home occupation: citing Palermo’s 1850 agricultural census, he wrote that William Jones ran three water-powered mills: a sawmill, a shingle mill and a stave mill. “Staves [planks] were in great demand for the home manufacture of barrels in the farm’s cooper shop.”

Forty years later, Dowe wrote, Palermo was producing apples for export, mostly to Massachusetts, and for home consumption. The latter, he said, were “peeled, cored and sliced, then strung on twine and hung to dry” before being used for cooking.

By 1890, making barrels, for apples and for lime, was done in cooper shops, of which Dowe said Palermo had many. His description focused on the process of building barrel hoops, the flexible bands (originally wood, now usually metal) that run around barrels at intervals to hold the staves together.

Wooden hoops were of “ash…for apple barrels and birch for lime casks,” Dowe wrote.

(An on-line source says the staves, too, differed. Ash is durable, yet flexible to withstand handling, and does not impart a flavor to the barrel’s contents; birch was readily available, thus cheaper, and similarly strong. Oak is waterproof, so it is suitable for liquids, including alcoholic liquids; and it does impart flavor to contents.)

For apple barrels, Dowe continued, the hoops were six and a half feet long (shorter for lime casks). They were “shaved by hand” down to three-eighths of an inch thick and sold in bundles of 100.

By working hard, a man could make 600 hoops a day, Dowe wrote – and earn, on average, one dollar.

William Jones appears repeatedly in both histories. An on-line source suggests references might be to father and son: William Jones who was born in in Bristol in 1774, married Abigail Bennett in 1798 and died in Palermo in February, 1834; and their son, William Jones, the mill-owner.

The Bristol-born William Jones “prepared a home” for his family “in the lower part of town,” Dowe wrote, and brought them from Bristol in 1815. “His children settled on farms around him.”

During the War of 1812, when Palermo (and other area towns) sent soldiers to Edgecomb, in September 1814, to repel a rumored British invasion that never materialized, Howard named William Jones (the elder, age 40) as one of the privates who participated.

Howard listed William Jones (the younger) as father of six children attending Palermo’s District 16 elementary school in 1847. (Nelson Jones, the younger William Jones’ older brother, sent another five Joneses to the same school the same year, out of 41 students.)

This district Howard located at the southern end of Turner Ridge Road, with its schoolhouse near the intersection with the road to Hibbert’s Gore. Turner Ridge Road runs south from Route 3 along the west side of Sheepscot Pond; Howard’s description locates the Jones family in extreme southern Palermo, close to the town line with Somerville (which is also the Waldo/Lincoln county line).

Dowe, again without providing a date, wrote that William Jones (readers are welcome to guess which one) “went on a voyage, as captain of a merchant ship, contracted a fever in New Orleans and died from its effects.”

Main sources

Dowe, Milton E. , History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1804 (1954)
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015)
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)

Websites, miscellaneous.