Jeannette Lasansky tells the story of farming on Maine’s largest island in the Penobscot Bay since early settlements. Included are tales from family farms like the Ames, Browns, Calderwoods, Coombs, Crocketts, Hopkins, Lanes, Leadbetters, Mills, Smiths, Vinals, and Youngs – families which, for three to five generations, built their houses and barns, cleared and cultivated the land, planted crops and raised animals. Farming, since first recorded in Maine, was life sustaining and, for these island families and their community, did not resemble the single commodity farm to which we have become accustomed.
Over two dozen old maps, period engravings, and inventories; also, 54 photographs most from the early 1900s and never published before, and 16 contemporary architectural photographs by island summer residents Joel Greenberg and Wendy Stewart.
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