FORT KENT, Maine — Over the years, I’ve covered my fair share of potato harvests in Aroostook County.
I’ve talked taters, photographed taters and certainly cooked and eaten those taters, but I have never, ever worked a Maine potato harvest.
To be clear, I have the utmost respect and admiration for the men and women who bring our food from farm to table, but if anyone told me I’d have to get up before dawn and be out the door to pick potatoes in near freezing conditions for up to three weeks, I’d simply sit down and cry.
Long before there were mechanical harvesters and bulk body potato trucks in the fields, there were “hand crews,” armies of local seasonal workers — many of them family groups with children — who picked by hand every single potato harvested in Aroostook County.
A mechanical digger, pulled first by horses and later by tractors, would clank along the rows, uncovering the tubers and depositing them on the surface.
These rows were divided into sections that each picker was assigned to pick. Throughout the day they used ash baskets to gather the spuds that were then dumped into the wooden barrels scattered around the fields.
Pickers — regardless of age — were and still are paid according to how many barrels they filled in a day.
“That’s where the money for our winter and school clothes came from,” my friend Bob Boucher told me. “After harvest, we’d go shopping [for clothes], and if we had any money left over, we could buy something for ourselves we really wanted.”
But for the legions of potato pickers, young and old, harvest produced more than spuds and income. It grew memories, and anyone who ever pulled a mud-caked potato from a freezing cold field, has a story.
“I have a lot of harvest memories, I loved potato harvest,” Dawn Bragdon of Madawaska said. “I remember my mother preparing our lunches in the evenings. She’d take a whole loaf of white bread and line up slices on the kitchen table and spread mustard on one side, then bologna, then cheese and top off with another slice. Two sandwiches per child, five children, so 10 in all.”
Dawn also remembers the apples and Little Debbie snack cakes that went into each lunch along with the breakfasts of Quaker oatmeal that her mom made.
A potato harvest definitely travels on its stomach, and I remember making countless sandwiches for my late husband, Patrick, when he drove a truck for three weeks for our neighbors’ harvest every autumn.
One year, after two solid weeks of living on those tuna, egg, bologna, ham or roast beef sandwiches, bad weather forced a temporary halt to the harvest, and Patrick was able to be home for a real sit-down supper for the first time in days.
“What are we having,” he asked.
“Sandwiches,” I said as a joke.
Honest to God, it was one of the few times I thought he was actually going to cry.
My friend Lise Roy told me she was not a speedy picker as a child.
“When we picked by hand, I was so little. I must have been 8 or 9,” she said. “I used to get in an empty barrel to escape the work and escape the cold. Picking was not my favorite thing I’ve ever done.”
Bob Boucher also did the barrel trick with his brother Jim. Not so much to escape the work, he said, but to take a break.
“We’d take turns crawling into a barrel and take a nap,” Bob said. “My mom would often send along a blanket for us.”
Bob said he always made sure the barrel was on it’s side so as not to be hoisted onto the passing farm truck and taken to the barn.
It was hard work but also some good times, such as the epic battles with rotten potatoes.Then there was the time Pam Bard of Fort Kent recalls being sent to the barn for “the big wrenches” when the digger broke down. As she was returning with them, she said she remembers, singing and dancing her version of “La Cucaracha” using the wrenches as castanets.
“Not a good thing to do in front of a farmer,” Pam said.
Sometimes, the fields of northern Maine would yield more than potatoes.
“One harvest day in early October 1984, it was unseasonably hot, and the crew manager gave us only half barrel sections so we wouldn’t get heatstroke from working too hard,” Denise Theriault of Presque Isle said. “I was perched miserably on the back edge of my basket as I tossed potatoes into it one at a time, [and] as I picked, I found something shiny popping up through the freshly dug dirt.”
Curious, Denise cleaned the object off, and it turned out to be a solid gold watch in near-perfect condition other than a cracked lense.
Later that day, when she showed her treasure to her family, Denise said she remembers her father’s odd expression and her grandmother’s tears.
“One day in 1970, as my father was working on the farm with my grandfather, he witnessed my grandfather’s horrible death,” Denise said. “While tilling, my grandfather fell off the tractor seat directly into the path of the moving rototiller.”
Fourteen years later, Denise found the gold watch her grandfather had worn all the time, including that fatal day.
Perhaps the best harvest “find” goes to Wendy Guy Lynds of Houlton who, as a high school sophomore in 1970, was working on a harvester when she was introduced to a young farm truck driver named Jerre Lynds.
“I was introduced to him by my friends,” Wendy said. “He was driving a truck, but he’d come up on the harvester to pretend he was ‘helping,’ and he would end up touching my hand when he was supposed to be picking out the rocks.”
The couple celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary this past August.
Memories of potato fights, freezing temperatures, helping a sibling finish a section, competing over who could fill the most barrels, praying for bad weather or a breakdown of machinery so there could be a rest, and lunch time treats are all woven into the fabric that is the history of harvest in northern Maine.
It kind of makes me wish I’d been a part of it.
Julia Bayly of Fort Kent is an award winning writer and photographer, who writes part time for Bangor Daily News. Her column appears here every other Friday. She can be reached by email at jbayly@bangordailynews.com.
