The title of this tidy digest of Maine history is a bit misleading. Yes, author Harry Gratwick does, as former Island Institute Publications Director David Tyler notes in his foreword, unearth some “captivating stories about Mainers you probably haven’t heard about before.” Yet they are all part of a well-documented history-and to the author’s credit, he is quick to acknowledge the many sources from whence his facts are drawn.
The state’s history is divided into four time periods: Colonial, American Revolution, Antebellum and “The Civil War and Beyond.” The presentation is simple and clear, with an occasional citation thrown in to underscore a point (Gratwick has read widely).
Here and there the author adds a flourish by way of a contemporary reference. “Father [Sebastian] Râle was what we would today call a ‘full-service’ missionary for the little community [of Norridgewock],” he writes about the Catholic priest who befriended the Abenakis. Recounting the Battle of Machias, the first naval conflict of the American Revolution, Gratwick likens the escape of the merchant Ichabod Jones and the seaman James Moore from the British to “a scene reminiscent of a Road Runner cartoon.”
Maine has spawned its share of international figures, a point underscored here. Consider William Phips, son of a Woolwich gunsmith and the youngest of 26 children. Frustrated with rural Maine life (a situation that continues to drive young men and women out into the wide world), he went on to become a ship’s captain, a successful treasure hunter, a figure in the Salem witch trials (he called them off when his wife was accused of being one), a friend of the King of England and an intemperate governor of Massachusetts (he was accused of “maladministration”).
The relevance of certain historical incidents to modern-day global affairs is often apparent, although Gratwick doesn’t necessarily make the connection. A good example: the conflict between the U.S. and the North African Barbary states in the late 1700s and early 1800s is surely a precursor to many of our foreign war follies.
Hidden History of Maine is illustrated with well-chosen photographs and graphics. Father Râle’s strongbox, which once held his Abenaki-French dictionary (which the British thankfully did not destroy, although they did scalp its owner), is shown with its secret compartment revealed. A broadside advertising Reuben Roy’s “Hack Stand—at Elm Street” features a fancy horse-drawn carriage owned by the African-American entrepreneur who founded the Abyssinian Religious Society in Portland. And a vintage photograph of George “Piano Legs” Gore, “the only Mainer to have ever won a Major League batting championship” (in 1880), shows the powerful mustachioed batter in mid-swing.
Gratwick is a retired secondary school history teacher from Philadelphia with life-long summer ties to Vinalhaven (he gives a nice shout-out to the island librarians in his acknowledgments, recognizing their role in finessing inter-library loans). He has contributed articles and essays to the Working Waterfront and the Island Journal and previously published Penobscot Bay: People, Ports & Pastimes. On the basis of Hidden History of Maine, one can only keenly anticipate further chronicles from this connoisseur of the little known and under sung.
Hidden History of Maine. By Harry Gratwick. Foreword by David Tyler. Charleston, South Carolina: The History Press, 2010. 128 pp. Softbound, $19.99.
Carl Little’s latest book is The Art of Dahlov Ipcar. His profile of artist and author Ashley Bryan appears in the 2010 edition of the Island Journal.