by Mary Grow

In Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 history of Kennebec County, Samuel L. Boardman (see box) wrote the chapter on agriculture and livestock, from the first European farmers to the 1890s. He began with one of the flourishes that help make Kingsbury’s work vivid and entertaining, calling the agricultural history “one of incident, importance and influence” and explaining:

“Of incident, because of that romance which attaches to the occupation of a new country by sturdy pioneers who hew out farms and build homes in the primitive wilderness; importance, when viewed in the light of modern achievements and the position of its agriculture today in one of the best agricultural states in the Union; and influence, when is taken into account the part which the historic agriculture of Kennebec has had in the larger history of the agricultural development and progress of the nation.”

Kennebec County is well situated for agriculture, in Boardman’s view: far enough from the ocean to escape its “saline winds and fogs” and from the mountains to avoid “suffering from their cold summits.” It is also “one of the best watered sections of Maine,” its rivers, streams, ponds and lakes important for soil health and air quality as well as natural beauty.

Soils are varied, Boardman wrote, with areas he described as “ledgy” and “very rocky.” Overall, the county is “a rich grazing section, excellent for the production of grass, the hill farms among the best orchard lands in the state, the lands in the river valleys and in the lower portions between the hills and ridges, splendid for cultivation.”

The earliest agricultural ventures Boardman described as a period of self-dependence, when settlers shared the area with wild animals, “[t]he land supplied everything, and the farm was a small empire.”

Farmers needed “a hardy race of cattle” to help clear the land and provide milk that housewives made into butter and cheese, he wrote. Wool from sheep and home-grown flax provided materials for clothing – “and the domestic manufacture of cloth was an art understood in every farm house.” Cows, sheep, pigs and hens provided meat.

Boardman mentioned oxen, but not horses. Other historians made it clear that settlers had horses. Milton Dowe, in his 1954 history of Palermo, repeated the story that the area’s first settler, Stephen Belden, “rode through the wilderness on horseback with his Bible under his arm.”

Early houses were log cabins, which Dowe said were windowless. Early beds, Dowe wrote, were bunks attached to the walls or mattresses, stuffed with corn-husks or hay, on the loft floor.

Housewives had brooms of “cedar, hemlock or birch twigs” to sweep their wide-board floors. They bathed and washed clothes in wooden tubs, and cooked in an open fireplace or a brick oven. Fires might provide light, too, if the family neither made nor could buy tallow candles.

(Wikipedia says tallow candles are made from beef or mutton fat and were invented before the Christian era.)

Some farmers planted orchards, Boardman wrote. He did not specify the kinds of fruit, except applies, writing that fruit “contributed to the luxury of living,” and every neighborhood had a cider mill. Dowe mentioned the vegetable gardens that gave the family “corn, wheat, potatoes, onions and beets.”

Both Boardman and Dowe thought life in these small farming settlements idyllic.

Of the period after fruit was available and log cabins were succeeded by big frame houses, Boardman wrote: “the domestic life of the early farmers, although books were few and there were no newspapers, was full of a quiet contentment, a high self-independence, little idleness and a large amount of domestic thrift.”

Dowe said that settlers in Palermo in the last quarter of the 18th century were “all very poor but happy and friendly, borrowing and exchanging among themselves and doing what they could to help each other.”

Boardman’s summary continued with occupations moving from homestead to mill and factory (many local histories of the area date the first mills, some for turning trees into boards, others for producing woolen and cloth goods, from the late 1700s). Farmers and their families could get better equipment; transportation and communications improved.

“The mowing machine upon the farm, the sewing machine and organ in the house, the diffusion of special intelligence for farmers through the agricultural press, wrought a complete revolution,” Boardman wrote.

In the 1890s, Kennebec County was still one of Maine’s leading agricultural areas. Boardman said it had “less waste, unproductive and unimproved land than any other section of equal extent in the state.”

He commended the rich soil in the Kennebec and Sebasticook valleys in Winslow; called Albion, Benton, Clinton and Windsor “excellent grazing towns”; and listed China, Sidney and Vassalboro among the “garden towns of the county.”

Agriculture was more specialized in the 1890s: county farmers might focus on their orchard, their dairy cattle, their hayfields or their special breed of horse, and buy other agricultural products they needed.

A newer specialty was truck farming: raising food for those who lived and worked in manufacturing towns and cities. Boardman said that a farmer in the 1890s could make more money from “a few acres of early potatoes put into our manufacturing towns on the first of July” than he could have earned from everything he grew and sold 20 years earlier.

Samuel Lane Boardman

Samuel Lane Boardman was born March 30, 1836, in Bloomfield (later incorporated into Skowhegan).

According to an undated (an on-line source gives an 1876 publication date) and uncompleted family memorial he wrote, the Boardmans (the name was also spelled Bordman and Boreman) came from England to New Hampshire, and in 1816 an earlier Samuel L. Boardman came from New Hampshire to Maine. He chose Bloomfield because his wife’s brother, Amos Hill, had settled in Skowhegan earlier.

This Samuel Boardman was a shoemaker when he came to Maine. The family memorial explains, “as was the custom in those days, he went from house to house doing the work in his like for all the members of the family.”

He also lived on farms (as a tenant?) before buying one, with a log cabin, in 1823. In 1835, he became the tollkeeper at the Skowhegan bridge and moved into the keeper’s house, where he and his family lived until he retired Oct. 1, 1848.

Our Samuel Boardman wrote that his grandfather Samuel Boardman was “genial and social” and made many friends. Most of the time he lived in Skowhegan he was secretary of the Bloomfield Academy board of trustees, and was able to educate his younger children there.

A few years before he retired from the tollkeeping job, Boardman bought a farm in Norridgewock, where he lived from 1848 until shortly before his death in 1857.

This Samuel Boardman’s oldest son was Charles Franklin Boardman, born in 1806. He married a Bloomfield woman named Philenia Sawyer Russell on Oct. 31, 1833; their second child and first son was Samuel Lane Boardman, born March 30, 1836.

The couple lived on the Bloomfield farm until 1846 and then moved to Norridgewock. Charles Boardman died there on Jan. 14, 1870; his widow died in Augusta on Nov. 8, 1870.

Your writer found no reliable information on Samuel Lane Boardman’s childhood education. He received an honorary Master of Science from the University of Maine in 1899. One on-line site calls him a journalist; others list his multiple roles as a leader and chronicler of local agricultural activities.

In 1859, he became assistant editor of Country Gentleman, published in Albany, New York. He was also a contributor to other agricultural journals, unnamed, in the 1850s (when he would have been in his late teens and early 20s).

In 1861, Boardman became assistant editor of The Maine Farmer. Established in 1833 in Augusta by Ezekiel Holmes, often called the father of Maine agriculture, its full title was The Maine Farmer and Journal of the Useful Arts.

When Holmes died in 1865, Boardman, age 29, became editor, a post he held until 1878. In 1878 and 1879, he edited American Cultivator, published in Boston, and from 1880 to 1888, The Home Farm, published in Augusta.

(Henry C. Prince, in his chapter on newspapers in Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore’s Waterville history, says that in 1887 “the Home Farm establishment” moved from Augusta to Waterville and the paper became The Eastern Farmer. It was an eight-page, six-column agricultural monthly that “lost money steadily” and sold its subscription list in April 1888, after 30 issues.

(Whittemore quoted from S. L. Boardman’s History of Kennebec County. An on-line catalog gives its full title as The agriculture and industry of the County of Kennebec, Maine: with notes upon its history and natural history. This source says it was printed in 1867 at the Kennebec Journal office.)

Boardman was agricultural editor for Augusta’s daily newspaper, the Kennebec Journal, from 1889 to 1892, and in 1895 became editor of the Bangor Daily Commercial (published from 1872 to 1949).

Here is Boardman’s description of his editing and writing career up to 1876, from the family memorial:

“Besides editing the Maine Farmer for a period of sixteen years, he has published five volumes on the Agriculture of Maine; a volume of 200 pages on the History and Industry of Kennebec County, 1867; a History of the Newspapers of Somerset County, 1872, and various essays, lectures and papers on agricultural, scientific and industrial subjects.”

A later project was writing the chapter on Kennebec County agriculture for Kingsbury’s 1892 history.

In addition to his writing, Boardman was active in agriculture-related organizations. In 1865, he was elected Holmes’ successor as secretary of the State Agricultural Society. He resigned that position after being elected secretary of the State Board of Agriculture in 1873.

Another on-line source says he remained in the latter post until 1879, simultaneously being a “trustee of State college.” He was a member of the Maine Experiment Station’s board of managers from 1885 to 1887.

(The Maine legislature established the Maine State Fertilizer Control and Agricultural Experiment Station in the spring of 1885, “to inspect and analize [sic] fertilizers and to progresss [sic] agricultural investigation.” In 1887, it became the Maine State College Agricultural Experiment Station.)

In his family memorial, Boardman listed affiliations as of 1876:

“He is a Trustee of the State College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts; a member of the Maine Historical, New England Historic-Genealogical and Maine Genealogical and Biographical Societies; corresponding member of the Vermont and Wisconsin Historical Societies, and of the American Entomological Society, and also a member of various local agricultural and other societies.”

Another source says he was secretary of the Maine State Pomological Society in 1885-86.

In 1875, 1876 and 1877 Boardman served in Augusta city government, becoming president of the city council in 1877 (his mentioning this position in the family memoir makes your writer wonder about the 1876 publication date).

As he wrote, he said, he was living “in a quiet corner of the city of Augusta, at a little place called “Oak Terrace,” surrounded by foliage and good air, where he has a few books, some friends, and less money; and has spent his leisure moments in compiling this “Family Memorial.”

On June 12, 1860, Boardman married Temperance Ann Bates (also called Ann Bates), of Norridgewock, born Jan. 11, 1838. They had a daughter, Annie Isabell, born Dec. 18, 1861, and two sons, John Russell, born Sept. 15, 1866, and Henry Lane, born Feb. 5, 1870, and died July 22, 1870.

Ann died in 1894. Boardman’s second wife was Alma Staples, whom he married in Bangor on April 19, 1900. She was 68 when she died Jan. 5, 1920, in Boston.

Samuel Lane Boardman died in Augusta on Oct. 15, 1914, aged 78.

Main sources

Dowe, Milton E., History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1804 (1954)
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Care, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902)

Websites, miscellaneous.