ALLAGASH, Maine — The best part about being a folklorist and not a strict historian, according to Faye Hafford, is the freedom from keeping track of specific dates.
“I always said that’s why I don’t do genealogy,” Hafford said last week, sitting at a table in the community library that bears her name. “If I did, I’d have my grandmother born after me.”
Over the years, Hafford has been a stitcher, a teacher, a gatekeeper for North Maine Woods, a receptionist for Allagash Wilderness Waterway, a historian, an author and a librarian.
In fact, at 89 years old, genealogist may be the only project Hafford — known around town simply as “Miss Faye” — has not taken on.
Few things slow Hafford down, and those who know her count themselves lucky if they can keep up with her.
“I know I can’t keep up with her,” her best friend, retired educator Clara McBreairty, said. “She’s always two steps ahead of me, and I slide back one step every time.”
Over the years, because of her jobs and projects, Hafford has become somewhat of an ambassador for the community of 200. But she said many of her fellow residents often are surprised not only to learn Hafford is not a native of Allagash but that her early years were tinged with great sadness.
Born Faye O’Leary in the Wheelock area of St. John Plantation, Hafford was the youngest of five children. By the time she was 4 years old, both her parents died and her siblings went to live with relatives, first in St. Francis and then in Allagash.
Eventually, Hafford was sent to live with other relatives in Fort Fairfield so she could attend high school — the school in Allagash only went to the eighth grade.
“They wanted to send me on to the college in Presque Isle to become a teacher,” Hafford said. “But I didn’t want to be a teacher, so they sent me to Colby, instead.”
After two years at the college in Waterville, Hafford decided she had enough and went to work as a stitcher at the Hathaway shirt factory where, it turned out, she was a teacher after all.
“They took me and taught me how to train the other workers on how to be a stitcher,” she said. “So, for four or five years, I was a teacher.”
After helping workers unionize and negotiate better wages and conditions at Hathaway, Hafford eventually moved back to Allagash, a place she said might have been at the end of the road but one that never lacked for something to do.
“We didn’t have things like cellphones or computers back then,” Hafford said. “We’d communicate with each other by walking a lot, [and] we’d always end up at someone’s house and have a party.”
Among the more popular party spots was the home of her friend Dean Pelletier.
“He was always having parties every week,” Hafford said. “If he was not planning one, we’d get after him to have one.”
It was at one of those gatherings where she met Lee Hafford. The two were married in 1949.
When Lee Hafford got a job working in mechanics, Faye Hafford turned to teaching. For a woman who said teaching was something she never wanted to do, she ended up spending 25 years in classrooms, from Brunswick to Allagash.
When Lee Hafford got a job as a ranger on the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in 1976, which kept him away from home for extended periods of time, Faye Hafford decided she did not like being alone. She retired from teaching and got a job as a waterway receptionist, working with her husband at the Michaud Farm ranger station.
For the next 16 years, Hafford greeted every canoeist paddling on the Allagash River.
“That was just wonderful, and I talked to people from all over the world,” she said. “They all came because they loved the outdoors.”
Despite moving to Michaud Farms to be closer to Lee, Hafford did spend some time on her own and remembers one occasion vividly.
“These two boys showed up with Elvis [Presley] haircuts and city clothes,” she said. “They wanted information about going to the [Allagash Falls]. And I don’t know why, but they made me pretty nervous.”
Hoping to buy some time, Hafford told the young men her husband would be back “any moment” and could help them out.
“Right then, we heard Lee calling me on the radio saying he’d be back in two hours,” Hafford said with a laugh, adding the two young men wandered off and never caused any trouble.
As a waterway receptionist, it was Hafford’s job to keep track of people who passed by her station and alert them to the natural obstacle of Allagash Falls not far down the river.
Lee Hafford passed away in 1993. The loss of her husband and best friend devastated Faye Hafford, who said she spent the following two years “feeling lonely and sorry for myself.”
But after a while, Hafford decided to get up and out of her house and got a job as a gate attendant for the North Maine Woods.
For seven years, she again was keeping track of visitors to northern Maine — this time on dry land — and on any given day could pinpoint the approximate locations of all those visitors who passed through her gate.
“It was really a good time at the gates,” she said. “The work was easy, and I talked to so many people who came through.”
Be it on the waterway or in the North Woods, the best part of the job, Hafford said, was passing along her love of Allagash.
If she’s not talking about the community, she’s writing about it.
“When we had the centennial here in Allagash, some people asked me to write a book about our history,” she said. “I started looking around and discovered there was not a thing written down anywhere about our history [and] that all of our history was in oral stories or songs, and I decided it needed to be written down.”
That was 28 years and 20 books ago. Somehow along the way she created what is the Faye O’Leary Hafford Library at the former Allagash Consolidated School, which is where she can be found three afternoons a week.
There, she works on a community newsletter mailed four times a year to people around the country, helps residents find books or use the library’s computers, councils residents on Medicare and runs the local book club.
“That book club can be tricky,” she said. “I tell everyone you don’t have to like every book, but you do have to read every book.”
For those who can’t get to the books, Hafford organized a book delivery program, which sends reading materials directly to elderly and homebound Allagash residents.
When stopping to drop off the mail, Allagash Town Manager Patty Pelletier exchanges some light banter with Hafford.
“She’s the matriarch of Allagash,” Pelletier said.
Up the road at Two Rivers Cafe, Hafford and her “partner in crime,” Clara McBreairty, are a common site. Residents will say you rarely see one without the other.
“One time someone called my house looking for me, and my husband said, ‘Only Clara knows where Clara is,’” McBreairty said. “One of the children piped up, ‘And Faye and God know where, too.’”
She uses a cane to walk and has moved from her family home into a smaller apartment, but Hafford shows no signs of slowing down — despite her vow to “retire” in April.
“I’m going to be 90,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s time?”
