EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an excerpt from the book “Ghost Buck” by Dean Bennett, published by Islandport Press. Ghost Buck is part memoir, part natural history and part politics, as the author explores his years spent at Camp Sheepskin, his family hunting camp in the woods of Western Maine. Be sure to also read John Holyoke’s review of this book, which he called “a treasure trove of information.”
Chapter Eleven: Camp Sheepskin
On September 8, 1936, my grandfather and father laid the sills for a camp. Three days later lumber was delivered, and the next day, September 12, thirty-seven relatives and friends arrived. Many of the men were carpenters by trade. Hammers rang, saws rasped, and beer flowed — the latter, in one case, perhaps a little too much. My grandmother’s brother Frank fell off the roof and landed straddling a sawhorse. This put him out of commission for a while (in one way, perhaps for life, as he never had any children). The sawing and pounding went on all day, with some respite provided by breaks for refreshment, lunch, and other necessities. At the day’s end, after the din had faded and the dust had settled, a one-room camp stood in the opening. In the next few days, my grandfather and father finished the woodwork; painted the outside dark brown and the window sashes red; located, dug, and rocked up a spring; and built an outhouse, giving it the euphemistic name “the Widow Jones,” one of several names for a toilet that had originated more than a century earlier. The cost for the camp: less than $100 in materials, and hours and hours of time given in the spirit of friendship and goodwill.
It was named Camp Sheepskin, after the bog one must pass by to reach it, and like birds building a nest in that wetland each spring — a piece of this, a bit of that, adjust here, move there — my family gradually shaped the camp’s living space. The inside was left unfinished, with open studs and matched pine boards, which served as both outside and inside walls. A large, black, cast-iron cookstove with an oven and built-in tank for warming water was set at the front of the camp, which faced the driveway and yard. At the back of the room in each corner, two beds were placed, separated by a partition. Burlap curtains were hung on wooden rods and could be drawn to close off these quasi-bedrooms from the front of the camp, for privacy.
Between these sleeping areas and the stove were a kitchen table, chairs, a bureau, kerosene lamps, a cast-iron sink, and shelves for dishes, cooking utensils, and pails of water. A woodbox sat against the wall between the stove and door. Later, a second floor was laid over the room, creating an attic and additional sleeping space. A ladder beside the front door went up through a trapdoor. The first floor also had a little table by the back wall, on which was placed a book containing three hundred numbered pages, bound between black covers, with the word records inscribed in gold on its maroon spine. This was the camp register, which has now grown to three volumes, where one can find a record of every visit made to the camp since the day the sills were laid.
I was one year old when the camp was built, having been born in May of 1935 in my Bennett grandparents’ home where my mother and father had been staying. My parents gave me the middle name of Birchard, after Rutherford Birchard Hayes, thus extending my family’s connection with Mrs. Hayes to me. From that day of the camp raising, I was present at nearly all of the hundreds of visits made by my family during the years I was growing up. Every Friday night, after my father and grandmother got home from work at the E. L. Tebbetts Spool Company mill, we would crank up my grandfather’s Model T Ford (later, the 1930 Chevrolet coupe), cram ourselves into it, along with clothes, food, and everything we would need for whatever we were going to do that weekend, and rattle our way to camp. My mother told me years later how much she looked forward to those weekends, and how she hated to see them end and have to come home on Sunday evening.
A major attraction of the camp to us was its remote woodland setting. When the camp was built, much of the surrounding land was also forested, or on the way to being so. Elton Dunham was still farming nearby, but other farms in the Rowe Hill-Shadagee area were disappearing. Stone walls were beginning to enclose patches of forest rather than fields and pastures for cattle and livestock, and their usefulness would eventually rely on the quiet pursuits of those interested in history and art.
This change in the land surrounding the camp — with its old apple orchards, old fields, and patches of grassy areas, interspersed by small cuttings, cedar swamps, and a diversity of other ecosystems — created a habitat favorable to deer. The land took on a patchwork character, which, in fact, extended far beyond the borders of camp and this hilly country of western Maine. Between 1920 and 1960, almost 18,000 farms were lost in Maine, leaving the remnants of decaying buildings, collapsing fences, and rusting machinery scattered over more than 3,000 square miles of deer habitat in the state, an area equal to the size of Maine’s easternmost region, Washington County. These qualities of the land and its quiet peacefulness drew my family back to the camp almost every weekend for years, and still does in November for deer hunting season.
“Ghost Buck” is available at local bookstores and online at www.islandportpress.com.