Unearthing Maine's Past with Historian Dr. Gerard Gawalt

Today I'm speaking with Dr. Gerard or Gerry Gawalt, who is really an esteemed historian. He's an author. I've got some of his books here. He's written a lot about Maine. He's joining us from New Harbor, Maine. It's really great to talk to you today. Thank you for joining us. Well, thank you for inviting me. I've been waiting for a while. So I have to tell you, I read something that you had been quoted in an interview with one of the local papers regarding some of the history of Maine, and then I was talking to my mother about it and she got so excited. She went out and she ordered me a bunch of your books. So they showed up at my doorstep and I started reading about the history of Maine and I thought, wow, this is a person who has devoted a lot of his time to really understanding where we as a state came from. What is your original connection to Maine? Why did you get so interested in our state? Well, I became interested in it because my wife's family has roots back in Maine, at least 300 years there, Partridges and Dodges. And I've been coming here since I was 17, since I started dating my wife Jane Kavanaugh. So that's my connection to Maine. And I find it fascinating because the people in Maine have a very distinct outlook on life that I find challenging, and I think it has its roots in history. You can check back, trace back their awareness of their uniqueness and their, they're distance from outsiders. And it comes with good background, I think. Well, I would have to agree with you, even in the books that I've read that you've written, I've been really surprised by the level of violence and trauma and difficulty on all sides. I mean, certainly people who were indigenous to Maine, there was a lot of terror involved in that situation, but then that went on for generations. Is this something that you were surprised by when you first started looking into Maine's history? Well, I was surprised to find out that the history of violence for the Abenaki, people went back long before English settlers ever showed up. And there was intertribal warfare. There was warfare with the Mohawks, and so they were, had a history of violence, a tradition of violence, and then the English showed up and the French showed up and the Abenaki first saw the English as another tribe that they could use to their benefit. And what happened is that the English and the French brought European goods, guns, steel, hatchets, steel knives, steel pots, clothes, different food, alcohol. And the Abenaki quickly became adjusted to this new found wealth in a sense. And they became dependent on English traders and French traders, and it virtually destroyed their way of life. Their hunter gatherer style of life became commercialized, and it broke down the intertribal relationships and it also broke down intertribal governance. And so with the commercialization of hunting and producing furs, everything changed for the Abenaki. And they didn't realize at first they were really facing existential issues. They kept thinking they could just get trade goods and keep the Europeans at bay. Of course it didn't work. That's something that I learned a lot about in reading your books is the intertribal conflict that was taking place. I think many of us are familiar with the idea of people coming from away and taking what didn't belong to them, but also people who were here and already engaging with the land. The dissonance among the tribes was pretty significant. Yes. Well, they were all basically Abenaki's, but every river valley had a separate tribe and think of it as like a Scottish clan or to europeanized it, but every tribe had their river valley that they defended against other tribes. And they also were in conflict with tribes of indigenous people in Massachusetts. And they were also victims of the Mohawk and Iroquois tribes and the Pennacook's who would regularly come down the river valleys to raid the Abenaki. The whole thing of Indian warfare is raid and retreat, and when they were faced with the English version of occupy and don't retreat, they did not fare too well. That was a big problem. That idea of "occupy" is a strong theme in the book that you wrote about Henry and Lucy Knox, and it's titled Fire and Ice, Henry and Lucy Knox and the Settling of Maine. And I don't think I understood before I read this book that when Henry and Lucy came to Maine and they thought they were getting this land, they were already people who were on the land who had already taken it from the indigenous people, from the Abenaki, and they weren't all that interested in giving the land to Henry, selling it to him, giving it to him. And that generated just years and years of conflict and back and forth. This is one of the basic concepts where Mainers do not like outsiders. The great proprietors like Henry and Lucy Knox and the Bowdoin's and Hancocks had royal grants that people in Maine who had been living here by then for at least 150 years, some had purchased their land from Native Americans, some had royal grants of their own, some had just squatted on the land. They had just taken it. They said it's vacant and they occupied it. And here come these wealthy people from away and saying, now I own the land. You have to buy it from me or you have to lease it from me. They didn't like that. There was a lot of resulting violence and resentment even of those who paid or were employed by the Knoxes. And the resulting movement is called they were deemed white Indians because the resistors to the Knoxes dressed up as Indians because by then there were not very many Abenaki around. And so they burnt and attacked Knox's property. His workers, Knox brought in the militia, he hired and appointed sheriffs. He even appointed the ministers to preach that they should be good people and pay Henry. And this went on for in the Knox case for almost 40 years before Maine became a state. And one of the main reasons they wanted to become a state was to free themselves get control over outsiders who had basically taken over their territory and they wanted it back. And so they did. But Maine still has one of the, I guess you'd say freest, squatter laws in the country that if you basically occupy a piece of land for 20 years, it's yours. So that has also caused other problems along the way. But the Henry and Lucy Knox tried their best really. I mean, they borrowed in the good American fashion, hundreds of thousands of dollars, which they spent trying to better what's now mid-coast They were centered in Thomaston. They built mills, they built roads, they surveyed, they built a canal, they built ships, they went in debt. They mortgaged in the case of Lucy Knox, who actually owned the Waldo Patton 589,000 acres, they mortgaged that. They mortgaged another 2 million acres that Henry acquired from the state of Massachusetts, and they were deeply in debt. And just before Henry died, they traded all their vacant land for their mortgages and were relatively free of debt. One can either say Henry and Lucy were profligate in borrowing all this money and we're thereby, I guess we would call them fools, or you can say they borrowed against all this vacant land which they couldn't sell or was occupied by somebody else who didn't want to pay them for it. And so they handed it over to somebody else and let them deal with it. So Henry and Lucy lived very well while they were in Maine, and then they just went on. Of course, Lucy was stuck after Henry died, but she did the best she could. She actually did a good job of managing what was left of her property because when Henry died, his estate was valued at $129,000, which is a lot of money in 1806, but he owed $131,000. So even after they traded all the mortgaged land, Lucy still had to try to work her way out of the debt that Henry left her. It was also interesting for me to read in particular about this family. They had 13 children, but only three of them lived. So that's a lot of children that they lost that Henry lived into his mid fifties, so not very old that they had at least one of their children, was a pretty grave disappointment. So in other words, in addition to all of the things that we know about them historically, personally, they suffered through quite a few tragedies. Well, they did have a hard time. I mean, they were married when they were married. Henry was a patriot in 1774. Lucy's parents were loyalists. They were the king's men. They actually held royal jobs. Her parents refused to attend their wedding, and her uncle Isaac Winslow walked her down the aisle. And so the family, there was family difficulties to begin with. Lucy traveled with Henry throughout the American Revolution. Attending was at all the winter campsites. She had several children during the revolution, basically one every two years, most of whom died. So there was all kinds of family trauma at the end of the war. Henry had government jobs that didn't pay enough to support Lucy in the style that she was used to and the style Henry wanted to be. And so they both turned to acquiring Lucy's inheritance from her mother. And Henry used his political military connections to reestablish the Waldo patent, which was still owned by Lucy, and she had to sign off on is one thing people don't really think of is that Lucy really owned the land and she had to sign all the deeds. And so she was very involved in the whole business, and Henry decided they had to go to Maine to make any profit on the land because it was clear in the 1790s people agreed to pay in Maine, but they wouldn't pay. And so Henry thought, well, if I go there, we can make a go of this. Lucy didn't want to go to Maine. She preferred big cities. Henry wanted to build a mansion, which he did, probably the biggest house at that time, north of Boston, 17 rooms, 6,000 square feet. There's a replica of it now in Thomaston, not on the same spot, but close to it. Lucy never really liked Thomaston. She liked the big city. She went to Boston. She used it as a summer house. Henry stayed there all year. Lucy went to Boston, rented another house, which Henry always complained about because she was spending a lot of money. Lucy liked to gamble. At one point she lost two townships in one card game. She was very competitive. She loved chess. And Dolly Madison's daughter or niece, actually Dolly's niece, complained that she played Lucy and chess every night in Boston, and she only won twice and she couldn't get Lucy just was a very competitive person and apparently very bright. Dr. Gawalt, you spent 40 years as a historian and working for a library of Congress. You're also a former college professor. You also have been a journalist. Obviously you are a writer. And I think the theme that weaves these things all together is an interest in understanding, as you said at the beginning of our conversation, how the past informs the present. Why is that particular notion important right now at this point in history? Well, I think it's particularly important because we're in danger of losing a lot of the past because society is so divided and they're not willing to compromise. Or cooperate, and in the past, if one looks at the US Constitution, it's a product of compromise and cooperation. And I was the curator of an exhibit called Creating the American Republic, and it lasted for four years at the Library of Congress. The theme was that America is based on compromise and cooperation, and when it breaks down, we're in big trouble. We just have to look at the Civil War to see what can happen if it breaks down. But I would take congressmen and their staffs through this exhibit and I would say, oh, it's compromise. It is based on, and they would say, we don't do compromise and cooperation anymore. And that's why I think it's important to look to the past. It's a general, I'd say, behavior, not just one person. I think that one doesn't have to look very far to see this issue. And it is also evident in Maine history. As I said, Mainers do not trust outsiders, and they're very, I would say clannish and they're very bright, but they like to protect what's there. Now, my wife, who is family, goes back many generations in Maine. She's a Mainer, even though she hasn't lived here for all her life, but I am definitely an outsider. It was years before I even had a name. I was known as Gerry Dodge's daughter's husband. So they're very, very concerned with themselves and they take care of themselves, I think very well. So I've enjoyed living in Maine and I have learned a lot and I tried to learn a lot more. And I think my books reflect a lot of research, which I really like to do. And I enjoy writing because it's like building something, start with a sentence, a paragraph, a page, and you build yourself a book. Well, I've enjoyed reading them and I can tell they're very thorough and well researched. Particularly I enjoy the snippets of quotes that you pull in from outside sources to really cause the people you're talking about to come through in their own words. And I imagine that took a lot of time to do that original research. A lot of time spent going through archives and understanding genealogy. And so I suspect that you're a fairly patient individual for doing that work. Well, I would say I determined to find things and I'm persistent. I think I learned a lot of that from being a newspaper reporter because I basically worked my way through college as a newspaper reporter. And I think I learned that you have to be persistent to get a story. I enjoy doing it. I enjoy writing it, and it is a challenge I think. Most of the details come from original sources, and I think people can understand the past better if they read the originals rather than having an interpreted for them. For example, one of my daughters, Ann and I did a book called First Daughters, which is letters between presidents and their daughters. And it's basically just the letters. And I think I know from what people have said that they learn a lot from just reading what fathers and daughters said to each other more than somebody trying to say, well, president Harding didn't like his son or daughter. George Bush didn't get along with all his children all the time, et cetera. If one reads the letters, you can understand a really deep understanding between parent and child. And sometimes there are good points and there are bad points. But that book and the book that I did called My Dear President, which is led between presidents and their wives, also gives people, I think, windows into the past that you don't get if somebody's just some historians giving you his point of view of what they thought. So I try to put a lot of original quotations in there, and I think people like it. I think that what I'm doing now is working on a book on women on the Maine frontier, which is a series of biographical sketches and anecdotes about women up to 1800 in Maine, in which I try to use mostly when I can find them their own diaries, their own words, which I think really lend a lot to understanding what was going on. And I think unfortunately, women are rather anonymous in history because people didn't think their letters or diaries were important. There are no diaries of women in Maine before 1750 that exist. There's only three or four before 1800, and women become anonymous, partly because they lose their name when they become married, they become Mrs. So-and-So, and people in the past, women didn't keep their maiden name, so they kind of disappear. It's hard to do. It's a challenge to write about women in the past and to paraphrase, I guess a well-known book title, I would say that well-behaved women disappear in history, badly behaved women are featured. They go to court, and that's one thing. Unfortunately I found out in the 17th and 18th century, most of what we know about women are from unfortunate circumstances. They're either abused, they abuse somebody else, they're captured by the Abenaki or the Abenaki are captured and enslaved by the English. So it is a challenge. I mean, I have a lot of good, happy stories, but it is, I think, a fact of history that it is hard to find out things about the normal common woman and what she did, and in her own words, it's almost impossible. But I have found some, so I like it. Well, I look forward to reading that book. When do you think it'll be finished? Oh, I think it'll be out this fall. I'm wrapping it up. One thing I have found in life, early in life is that if you don't finish a project, it never gets done. I mean, so that is an obvious fact, but I know people who've spent a lifetime writing a book that's never finished. I don't have that problem. I finish it and move on and that. So whatever the project is, my strong point is finishing and I've enjoyed it. I think Maine has got a lot more good history than I thought it did. So I've written three books featuring Maine. I'm writing another one, and I'm sure there's another one out there somewhere. Well, I appreciate your taking the time to learn about Maine and to educate people like me about Maine, and I do encourage anyone who's listening and has been kind of interest has been piqued as a result of our conversation. I encourage people to read your works. You are Dr. Gerard, Gawalt Gerry, the books that I've read, Terror on the Maine Frontier, Fire and Ice, Henry and Lucy Knox. But these are available on Amazon, I'm assuming also local booksellers. But Dr. Gawalt, it's really been a pleasure to have you on Radio Maine today. Thank you for joining me. Well, thank you. I enjoyed it and enjoy the rest of the day. Thank you very much. It is my great pleasure to have conversations like this with the wonderful and very intellectually accomplished Dr. Gerry Gawalt, who writes about Maine history among other things, and continue to join us here on Radio Maine, and perhaps come join us at the Portland Art Gallery at one of our upcoming openings, which occur the first Thursday of every month in Portland, Maine.