Tucked away in the woods of Newburgh there is a sturdy home that was built by hand. Years of toil went into constructing the residence and other buildings on the shady property. The inside is much like a time capsule — filled with antiques handed down through the generations. There’s a 1910 Magic Chef stove and thick books carefully stored in bookcases. There are trinkets and furniture and artwork — all from years past.
The home was built by a back to the lander who moved to Maine from Detroit, Michigan, many years ago. He came to this state with little more than his own two hands, a van full of items he had started collecting when he was young and a desire to live off the land.
His name is Robert Croul, and some may be surprised he lives his life this way. After all, the 67-year-old is an appraiser by trade and works for some of Maine’s prominent summer residents — the ones on Mount Desert Island and Blue Hill Peninsula who require his services for their estates.
He also is the writer of a weekly column that has been in the Bangor Daily News since the early 1980s — 1983 is his best guess — called “What Is It?” It has been a popular piece that has drawn the eyes of Mainers since it began.
After over 30 years in the BDN weekend edition, “What Is It?” is coming to an end. The last installment of the feature will be published on July 30.
“It began as a weekly column on antiques,” Croul said from the sun porch of his Newburgh home. “It began in the early ‘80s, and Cheryl Olson was my editor at the time. We went along for a few years doing the column on antiques, and it seemed to be a little meaty for the readers, although it was very popular with a small group of people.”
A new editor, Joan Smith, then came up with the idea to replace the column with a feature called “What Is It?”
“For years there was a magazine called Yankee Magazine, and they had a column called ‘What’s It?’ It was very similar — people would send in photos of things they would want to have identified. And so we took the name and jigged it around a little bit and came up with ‘What Is It?’ so as not to step on their toes,” Croul said.
Croul, who has a master’s degree in art history from George Washington University, is a man with a storied history who has dedicated his life to the antiques he shared with BDN readers throughout the years.
“I’ve always been around these things. Some people are born to do certain things, and from the time I was a kid — you can probably see by looking around you — I was interested in history,” Croul said, gesturing to the contents of his home. “I was interested in antiques. When other kids were running off to buy Superman comics, I was running off after school to my great aunt and uncle’s house, and they would tell me stories about things they experienced in their life.”
He would spend time with his grandmother, who would take him through her house and tell him where she got things and what they were. Croul’s family also operated a moving and storage business where he worked during the summers, handling items that had been in storage in the 1800s.
“This was in Detroit, Michigan, and there were big estates that would be shipped to auction in New York or London, and my job was to inventory it and get it put together for shipment,” Croul said.
Though he worked in that business while he was young, he had a fervent desire to get out of the suburbs of Detroit.
“I didn’t want to do all the things my father did. I didn’t want to work from 9 to 5 at a job. I didn’t want to get a watch when I was 65 years old and walk out the door and feel like my life had no purpose. I wanted to actually learn to do things for myself. I didn’t want to hire someone every time I needed a lightbulb changed or something built,” Croul said.
So after he was married, he bought a moving van from his father and packed it full of the things he had collected over the years, then started driving.
“We were in Massachusetts heading toward Canada and we started driving through Maine. We assumed we couldn’t afford anything in Massachusetts — correctly. We assumed we couldn’t afford anything in Vermont, but we soon realized we could afford land in Maine. If you studied the history of back to the landers, 90 percent of them would tell you the reason they ended up in the place they did was because they could afford the land — there was cheap land,” Croul said.
The two bought a little homestead in Plymouth, but the harsh realities of Maine winter soon sunk in.
“It was one of those rare places that had been built in the 18th century and it had nothing — it had no central heat, it had very little electricity, barely had indoor plumbing, so we set about trying to make it into a workable house. And the first winter damn near killed us. We had no concept whatsoever. Growing up in Detroit … I thought Maine and Detroit would be similar climates. We ended up closing off everything but one room in the house and put an old wood stove in it,” Croul said.
After about a year and a half, they decided to pick up and move — this time to Newburgh, where they started from scratch.
“I literally taught myself to do everything that was involved in building. I built all these buildings, and I taught myself how to do it — the plumbing, the wiring, everything,” he said.
It was at this homestead that Croul constructed his life — one that was built slowly, and that is a testament to the history and antiques he had grown to love as a child. Though he is no longer with his first wife, whom he moved to Maine with all those years ago, his back to the land attitude never changed throughout the years.
“It always had a powerful appeal to me — the idea of living off the land and growing your own food. I had a huge vegetable garden for many, many years and made maple syrup — all those things you do when you’re a back to the lander,” Croul said.
“At that point when I started I had no, what you would call, real job … I cleaned out milk tankers for the national farmer’s organization for $1.35 an hour, and I was a desk clerk at the Newport Inn on the nightshift selling bus tickets to Florida and stuff like that. And the total take for a week of that kind of work was usually under $200. It’s not a straight line from where you start to where you are. There’s a lot of work in between. But, you know, I wouldn’t have done it any other way,” Croul said.
During this time, he was building the home he still lives in today with his second wife, and also building his business, Robert E. Croul Estate Services, from the ground up. He also was making connections with others in the area.
“When I first came here, the people that I found most interesting were the people who were twice or three times my age. Those were the people I became friends with — people in their 70s and 80s — because what the back to the landers were doing was what they had done in their youth. You came here and you worked really hard and you made something. You built your own buildings and made due with not a lot. And you always saved everything. The old saying in Maine is ‘for just in case.’ My barn was full of stuff ‘for just in case’ because I had saved everything that anybody had thrown away in my entire life. What I realized is that if these things weren’t photographed and recorded and exposed to another generation, they would be lost — they would be forgotten,” Croul said.
His BDN column has survived throughout the years, asking readers to identify antique items and send in their guesses to him, first by snail mail, and as technology evolved, through email.
“At the outset what I had to do — this was all, of course, before computers — I would have to go around to people, or my own barn and gather up things, bring them into the paper, leave them in the photo lab [and] they’d shoot them … I typed my column, brought it in, everybody sent letters. I would get probably 50 to 60 letters per week. I still get probably 10 or 12 letters because there are still a lot of people from Aroostook County who don’t have computers. It was a much more tedious process back then,” Croul said.
In all the years he did that, nothing was ever lost or broken — which was important, because sometimes he would use items from other people.
The column led Croul to many correspondences over the years — mostly from residents of Aroostook County, which he believes houses the majority of his readership.
“I’ve had people drive up here with pickup trucks full of things and say, ‘Here are some things, can you use them?’ Usually they were things so big that I couldn’t bring them into the paper, and it was before digital photography, so I had no way to shoot them,” Croul said.
They would ask if they could leave them with him, to which he would laugh and give them a firm “no.” After all, he has quite a collection himself.
Through the years he has noticed a shift in the interest people hold in antiques.
“A lot of people under the age of 50 just have no interest in all of the things I was interested in and my parents were interested in. They shop at IKEA, and when they move, they throw everything in the dumpster and start over again. They seem to specialize in iPods and bipods and tripods rather than Chippendale and Queen Anne. It’s a demographic shift in what people were interested in,” Croul said.
Croul said he has between 10 and 20 fervent readers he can list off the top of his head, and many of them have become his friends, such as St. David resident Ernie Levesque. Sometimes he stumps his regulars, but not often. His dedicated readers respond to every single one of his columns, and entries always flow in from others as well, who try their luck at guessing what the antiques he puts in his column are.
“You can look at something like this,” Croul said, pointing to a page in a hardware manual from the 1800s he received from one of his friends, Amos Kimball, who has contributed items for Croul to use in his column. “Everybody thinks a pitchfork is just a pitchfork, but you’ve got five or six different kinds of forks — hay forks and spading forks and dung forks and another 10 different kinds of shovels for various purposes. These became resources for me. Amos, of course, is a resource along with other friends who had collections.”
Sometimes Croul would turn to others such as Kimball for items to use when his own stock was getting low — other times he would use an item he ran many years ago, but he could never get away with that without one of his regular readers noticing.
He thinks that will be what he misses most.
“I said to my wife last week that I’ll miss the interaction with people,” Croul said. “The last thing you want to do is end up sitting alone in an empty room with your memories. You don’t want to stop. You want to continue doing the things you enjoy — so that’s the thing I will miss — the engagement with it.”
Despite the impending end of his column, he knows he will stay in touch with his regular readers, who he has come to know as friends. And he will fondly look back on the letters he has kept through the years.
Every so often he’ll get a longer letter — one that’s embedded with memories, instead of just a simple answer to the “What Is It?” question.
“They talk about the farm they grew up on and the context of the item and how it was used by their grandmother or grandfather. And those things really touch me. I’ve saved a lot of those letters throughout the years,” Croul said. “That’s why I started doing it in the first place — to jog those memories and make a connection.”
