Ike Hubbard, a longtime designer and maker of harvesting rakes for Maine wild blueberries and many other crops, died this month. He was 84.
An industrial engineer, he returned from southern Maine to a family homestead Down East in 1990, where he created a durable new rake for harvesting Washington County’s iconic crop and expanded into designs for other small farmers across the country.
“I’m the rake manufacturer of the United States, to be honest with you,” Hubbard said in July, shortly after his Jonesport shop burned to the ground. “Everything that’s got a berry on it, I build a rake for.”
His was the last business in Maine, and possibly the country, to make such rakes by hand. Efforts to rebuild and reopen the shop will continue, his employee Debbie Salisbury wrote on a GoFundMe page that has raised $26,000 toward recovery efforts.
Salisbury and her husband, Ken, had been training to take over the company and Hubbard wanted them to continue it, she said Monday, but she’s not sure yet what will happen as the business goes through probate.
Hubbard died in his sleep on Oct. 3 after his health declined following several falls, according to Salisbury.
During Hubbard’s lifetime, advances in technology and field management nearly quadrupled Washington County’s wild blueberry yields, and mechanical harvesters that came on the scene in the 1980s changed the harvest from an event that drew many migrant rakers into a more mechanized affair with fewer workers.
But hand rakes still have a place in smaller fields, areas with difficult terrain and operations selling berries for the fresh market instead of frozen. Hubbard still built and repaired them, and kept inventing. He was most recently working on designs for a walk-behind flame weeder and a rake on wheels that could be used from a standing position; one of his latest creations was a specialty rake researchers used to scoop up lizards.
Hubbard spent his early childhood in Jonesport, when blueberries were still raked entirely by hand into wooden containers. His family moved to southern Maine when he was a teenager.
He served in the Army and worked as a manufacturing engineer, returning to Jonesport in 1990 and opening a rake shop next to the old family home.
The lighter, wider-panned, two-handled design he came up with was like the “Cadillac of rakes,” early users told the Bangor Daily News at the time.
He continued inventing with input from rakers, eventually offering rakes from 12-tooth miniatures to 35-foot spans.
Skilled workers using his rakes can harvest berries as intact as those picked by hand so they stay covered in whitish “bloom,” a natural coating believed to preserve the fruit’s quality.
“When you get these berries with the bloom on them … it’s like they glow,” Hubbard previously told the BDN.
The company also branched out into rakes for harvesting herbs, highbush blueberries, huckleberries and elderberries, along with tooth-based garden tools like broadforks and weeding claws for Maine-based Johnny’s Selected Seeds.
That seed company calls the tools that Hubbard helped develop part of a “small scale farming revolution.”
He chose not to work on mechanical harvesters, because he promised himself when he started not to build anything that would put a person out of work, Hubbard said last summer.
His uninsured shop burned from an unknown cause in late June, taking tens of thousands of dollars in tools, supplies and finished orders with it. A phased fundraiser to clear the site, pay employees, rebuild and replace equipment has so far raised about $26,000.
Rebuilding is still underway, with a foundation poured and a local builder taking the lead on constructing a shop, according to the fundraiser. But how the building would be used and by whom is also up in the air, Salisbury said Monday.
After the fire, Hubbard only became more determined to keep working, according to the page.
“He was an original: a veteran, a brilliant craftsman, an inventor, and a welder, with a true Maine work ethic and a wicked sharp sense of humor,” the fundraiser update announcing his death reads. “For 40 years, the rakes and farm tools he created have served Maine farmers. We hope that tradition continues.”
His funeral will be held at the Bayview Cemetery on Mason Bay Road at 9 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 7, followed by a celebration of life at the American Legion’s Machias post.
