Robie Ames and Mary Drinkwater married in 1905, starting their lives together when they were barely 20. A year later their first child, Isabel, was born, and a year after that, Merton. The family lived in the Ames family homestead on the shore; the town line runs right through the property, with the barn in Lincolnville and the house in Northport. When Isabel was eight, her baby sister, Alwilda, was born, followed by Robie Jr., and finally, Edwin.

            The shore with its ledges and sandy beach was a perfect place to play. Isabel and Merton made little dishes out of the clay they found down there, leaving them in the sun to dry. Once they walked a long way down the shore, only to look up and find their mother standing over them sternly. She’d been keeping an eye on them all the time. Sometimes Isabel would play dolls with Elizabeth Griffin who stayed summers at her grandmother’s house on the corner of Howe Point Road and Atlantic Highway.

            Girls kept close to home, while boys might wander to the Trap or upstream to the shiner hole. When the Ames children were growing up, there were only remnants of the old enterprises at the Trap. The dam had broken down with gaps in it, and there were only remains of the grist mill and lime kiln of former days.

            Though Isabel had a bike and would deliver milk to a family friend at the Trap, she was more likely to be helping her mother at home. “Go wheel the babies” became a familiar order as the three younger siblings arrived, pushing them back and forth in the buggy in the dooryard to quiet them. But helping could also mean bringing something home for dinner. On occasion Mary Ames would say “Isabel, row out and catch us some haddock.” Using a line baited with clams or periwinkles, the little girl could catch a bushel of haddock in a short time. Cod, pollock, cunners and flounders were just as plentiful. Another regular chore, which Isabel did with Merton, was leading the Jersey cows to and from their pasture across the dirt road [Route 1!] for their morning and evening milking.

            Robie Ames kept a couple of cows, a horse, pigs, and chickens. Mary made butter, which they sold along with their milk and eggs. In a good year their big strawberry patch yielded enough to ship to Boston. In addition to farming, Robie fished for salmon, setting his weirs off the shore at Knight’s Point. The salmon were packed in ice and shipped to Boston on the steamboat, or sold locally if possible. The family tasted salmon only on the Fourth of July, or when a customer wanted just part of a fish.

            Mary canned all the garden produce and made hogshead cheese and sweet pickle meat [see below] when the pigs were slaughtered. Preserved meats and vegetables were stored in the root cellar. “Isabel, run down cellar and bring up a piece of pork”, Mary would say, then fry the sweet pickled meat in lard. Surplus eggs were put down in water glass, a preservative which kept them useable for several months, though they could only be used for baking. Butter too was “laid down” in crocks for winter use, packed in salt. Mary picked buckets of blueberries on Ducktrap Mountain to can and sell, and made sauce with the fruit from their two pear trees.

            Nothing was thrown out until every possible use had been made of it. Mary crushed the shells left from a clam dinner on the well curb, then fed them to her hens to strengthen the egg shells. Sawdust from the winter’s firewood cutting was saved for the icehouse, to pack the ice they cut on their farm pond in winter. The insulating sawdust kept the ice frozen to be used in summer when shipping their salmon. Codfish livers were put in a pan of water in the sun; a few days later a layer of codliver oil would have formed on the surface. No, they didn’t feed it to the children as a tonic, but sprinkled it on the shallows where flounder lay on the sea bottom, smoothing the water enough to make the fish visible and easy to spear. Fish oil was also used to grease the slips used to launch the wherry, the versatile small boat used by local salmon fishermen.

            In 1962 Robie Sr. sold his fishing gear, including his fish house and wherry, to Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. Isabel wrote down her father’s recollections of the salmon fishery for the Museum:

             Salmon fishing was being carried on in Penobscot Bay by 1837, perhaps [probably] before, as early in that year Isaac Ames came to Northport, bought the property still occupied by his descendents, and engaged in fishing for salmon.

            His son, George Ames, continued fishing at the same location, considered the major salmon fishing area along the coast. All the properties along the coast from Camden to Searsport had so-called salmon berths fished by the property owner or leased to other fishermen.

            In this area, the largest catch in any one day by an individual, is thought to be 52 salmon caught by George Ames one season between 1880 and 1885. The salmon catch varied greatly from year to year, there being cycles of good and bad years.

            After fishing with his father, Robie Ames, son of George Ames, fished alone from 1903-1947. In 1933 he bought out the fishing fear of the only other remaining fisherman in the area, a Mr. Griffin, and so became the last of the salmon fishermen on Penobscot Bay.

            The daily accounts of Robie Ames show his largest catch to have been 49 salmon on July 13, 1936. From 1939 on there was a steady decline in the number of fish taken. In that year Mr. Ames took 36 salmon, in 1940 on 17, and in 1947 only 4. That was the last year of salmon fishing on Penobscot Bay as Mr. Ames retired with the end of the salmon season.

             Most of the Ames family’s saltwater farm has passed out of the family today. The house, barn and shoreland are owned by Point Lookout; they seem to use it mainly as a place for their guests to get to the shore, the house and barn sit unused, though children of Robie Jr. and of Edwin live on other parts of the Ames land. Isabel, who lived to be 100, never married, living alone after her parents died in the house she was born in, until she was 95.

            She and her younger brother Robie told me about their parents and the work that they did to bring up their family in 1993. Re-reading this story now (it was printed in Ducktrap: Chronicles of a Maine Village in 1994) I’m struck by how much knowledge of the sea is lost by present generations. People still farm, some even using the old ways of keeping a family cow, tending the land with horses, and preserving food for winter. But who remembers calming the waters with codliver oil, much less their own harvested codliver oil? Or for that matter finding flounder, cod, haddock, etc. so plentiful a 10-year old girl could catch enough to feed a family of seven?

            See a Ducktrap-built Lincolnville wherry out at the Jackie Young Watts Open Air Museum in the Center, right next to the Library. It’s the one Stimpson Rhodes built for ten-year old Osborne Wade in 1898, another child fisherman!

            As for that headcheese, it’s not what it sounds like it might be. I used to make it when Wally and I raised two pigs each year. Fed ‘em hot lunch garbage from the Lincolnville and later, Castine school lunchrooms, a five-gallon bucket every school day full of wasted milk, baked beans, chocolate pudding, bread – whatever the kids weren’t finishing that day. The pigs loved it; they lived under our barn during the winter, actually directly under my rug loom. Phew! We kept them through the winter to coincide with the school calendar — no school, no lunchroom garbage. Usually on a day in March when it still promised to be cold, Harvey Curtis and his son-in-law, Ivan, came up from Rockland (always Sunday when they both had the day off) and killed our pigs.

            It involved some drama: A 55-gallon drum of nearly boiling water (thus a raging fire under it), and a quick dispatching of the pigs. Everyone got into the act, including our three little ones at whatever stage they were — infant/toddler/child/teen. Neighbors and friends came to help; one year my parents were there, and my brother loved telling how our mother wore her mink stole – it was chilly after all. Harvey and Ivan were quick, neat, and professional, leaving us four perfect halves of pork, split snout to tail, hanging from hooks in our barn. We were always their first of the day since they could count on us to have the water hot enough by 8 a.m. They went on to a full day of slaughtering animals for farmers — calves, steers, lambs, pigs.

            I just looked up a recipe for headcheese, and it calls for pork loin! That’s not the headcheese I made, nor what Mary Ames made. My recipe calls for one pig head, boiled, with onion, black pepper, allspice, bay leaf, salt and vinegar, most of the day in a big canner kettle, until the meat (there’s actually quite a bit of it) falls off the bones. Pack the cooled meat in a loaf pan and cover with the broth. Chill until it sets, gelatin-like. Unmold it, slice it and use it like cold cuts.

Vacation Bible School

Starting Monday evening July 27 at 5:30 p.m. at Breezemere Park, Crossroads Community  Baptist Church will sponsor Vacation Bible School for ages 3 years old all the way through the 12th grade. All are welcome to come. There will be Bible stories, recreation, snacks, music, crafts and mission stories. A family team from Florida will be leading the teenagers, separate from the smaller children. This nightly event, Monday through Friday ends at 8:00 p.m. each evening. Friday night's short, closing service will be followed by a free barbecue of hot dogs and chips. There is no cost for the week, and no donations are expected.

A Special Town Meeting has been called for Wednesday, July 29  at 7:30 p.m. at the Town Office. This is to correct an amendment to the Floodplain Management Ordinance which was passed at June’s Town Meeting; a reference to one flood insurance map, Map 636E, was inadvertently left off the amendment.

Condolences

Margaret Page, a dear friend to many, passed away at her home last Sunday evening, just where she wished to be, with her family around her. Margaret, who was a teacher and guidance counselor in the Camden schools for many, many years, had just retired this spring. We shared many adventures in the lives we both made here on the coast of Maine, the quiet kind of adventure that happened in our gardens, our kitchens, and over cups of coffee. We planned on growing old together....