You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Thank goodness, Biden’s not in our face every day.
Especially with another outrage, another assault on decency, like his predecessor.
Instead, he’s too busy doing the job.
And there are those who fault him for that.
As for his family loyalties, look in the mirror before speaking. Please.
As a parent, you really try to keep your kids from a lot of painful encounters but they never listen to your advice, as far as you can tell, which seems to be futile no matter how hard you try, and then the next thing you hear is crying.
Maybe that’s a good thing, if from their experience they learn more than you knew.
There are several books that fall into that model. Had I read them before completing Quaker Dover, I might have overlooked some fresh insights. But now that my book’s out, I really appreciate what else I’m finding.
Donald R. Bryant’s History of the First Parish Church is one of them. The 160-page volume, first published in 1970 and enlarged in 2002, offers another side of my argument of the Quaker invasion in town, for one thing, while relating other parts of the early years with, well, perhaps more discretion. And, my, I do admire his resources and tenacity.
One of my favorite sections is the profile of John Williams that Bryant works into the narrative. Williams, a member of the parish, was, as he says “a visionary, a leader in bringing textile manufacturing to America,” and a cofounder of what became the big millworks in today’s downtown.
But he also became part of the faction of 26 male members who announced in 1828 they were leaving the church to join the Unitarian Society in establishing a new congregation. The split among the heirs of the Puritans into Unitarian or Trinitarian Congregational at the time paralleled a similar one among American Quakers into Orthodox and Hicksite. New England somehow remained Orthodox, as far as Friends went.
The plot within First Parish further thickens over the kind of minister it needed along with the construction of a new, and present, house of worship. What follows in the parish history is a turmoil that includes the changing economics of the town I haven’t yet found in the Quaker Meeting.
Bryant’s history then turns largely to the successive ministers rather than the congregation’s members and their influence in the community.
Still, I appreciate the comments by David Slater at the end of the book. He was First Parish pastor when I first came to Dover and quite engaging. He offered a checklist on how church life was changing that remains relevant, though nothing hit me more than this:
“Christianity is becoming more and more counter-cultural.”
That takes me back to the Quaker invasion into Dover, back in the mid-1600s.
As for the city’s other congregations? I’m anxious to hear more.
More accurately, John Chapman, who distributed Swedenborgian church tracts with those packets of seeds all along the American frontier of his time.
As was William Penn, on the Quaker side, largely still confined in old England.
It’s curious how individuals’ religious motivations get excised from the sanitized histories.
The Book, or Bible, if you prefer, is filled with a lot of revolutionary vision for those who want to reclaim and then pursue its fulfillment.
So starting with apples, which do get a bad but undeserved rap at the beginning of the epic, seems a fitting place to begin.
End of sermon. For now.
They’re Calais, Eastport, Lubec, and Machias. Or the other way around, depending on how you’re driving or sailing.
Like pearls on a string, one that hugs the coastline of vast Washington County.
The image of four anchors arrayed along a map makes sense, each one with its own distinctive attraction.
Their combined population comes to barely eight thousand.
The terrain around here is much more real than Acadia, for sure, if you’re the least bit interested in the Real Maine.
Dover’s public library has been quite proactive in developing an online presentation of the city’s historical profiles and images. I’ve found those resources to be very useful for fast checks when drafting these posts and related material, for certain.
Its dark-hued historical room upstairs is a treasure chest of local lore, as I discovered decades ago chancing upon Dover’s Quaker family records serialized in the fat volumes of the New Hampshire Genealogical Record, 1903-1909. They’ve since been keyboarded and made available online, if you Google, though I’m still relying on my photocopies.
In time, as a library cardholder, I even had online access to U.S. Census records from home in the wee hours. What a privilege!
If it weren’t for the Covid restrictions and my relocation to far eastern Maine, I’d like still be digging around on the top floor there. I certainly encourage others to do so.
In relocating from Dover, I do miss its annual Labor Day weekend Greek festival – the food, conversations, dancing with live music, and overall happy vibe. What they call kefi.
For Greek Orthodox congregations across North America, these events have become a traditional way of celebrating their culture, welcoming the surrounding community to sample it, reenforcing the bonds of their membership, and conducting some needed fundraising, sometimes for local charities as well as the church itself. The deep commitment of the volunteers and the overall organizational skill always amaze me, and it has been fun to be part of the food-serving line some years.
Earlier in the summer, neighboring Portsmouth usually has its own, similar but also with differences, and both weekends draw big crowds, jammed parking, and partisan comparisons. Dover’s has free admission, unlike Portsmouth, which has more dance addicts.
The festivals closet to Sunrise County are in Portland and Lewiston, downstate five or so hours away. Or, for variety, Halifax, Nova Scotia, which has a four-day schedule but is a six-hour drive away – or seven if you take the shortcut ferry ride across Fundy Bay.
~*~
For the Labor Day weekend, Eastport has a much more low-key observance, the Salmon and Seafood Festival.
Things get wilder the following weekend, then the pirates invade for what’s our blowout to the summer tourist season.
What are you doing special for the holiday weekend?
The American Can Company factory, now a hulk out over the water, had a daily output of more than a half-million cans for sardines. It employed 300 people. It was at the end of the line for the railroad, too.
In the adjacent canneries, sardine-packing women had hands moving so fast in cold water you saw only a blur, according to a friend who was a teen at the time and couldn’t begin to keep pace when he worked there.
I still have no desire to eat a sardine, though. Consider that the statement is coming from someone who’s learned to appreciate anchovies in his old age.
The Salmon Festival always takes place over the Labor Day weekend.
In all of today’s media upheaval, many younger users are puzzled by the term AM radio, while automakers are even considering eliminating the bandwidth from new vehicles altogether.
When I was a teen, this would have been entirely inconceivable. AM was king, period.
Dominated by clear-channel 50,000-watt stations that covered half of the country at night – and many having staffs of several hundred – they ranged down to much smaller voices that aired only during daytime hours, and even those frequencies were highly coveted by investors or niche nerds.
In contrast, FM was more limited in range and quite fringe. Many of the stations simulcast the AM sister’s programming. Others specialized in classical or jazz or “elevator music” for medical offices and retail store backgrounds.
Flash forward to today, when FM is where the audiences are. Not just for music, either, though much of the classic rock was crafted around the sound of AM top-40 formats. The shift of talk radio to FM sealed the deal.
I’m still surprised when traveling to find how little is available on AM, at least in English. More surprised, actually, to hear of station licenses being laid down and going idle, even in rural areas like the one where I’m living.
Gee, we might even begin wondering about the era of radio drama and comedy. Those really were something.
What are you listening to today?
While Quakers were active in the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves, the practice wasn’t universally embraced within the Society of Friends. In fact, much of the illegal action across the North was undertaken by evangelical Protestants who even created the altar call at revivals to enlist fellow workers.
Yes, it’s one more story in the American experience that needs to be better known, in all of its gritty reality.
As I describe in Quaking Dover, the Cartland family farm in Lee is believed to have been a stop on one of those lines to freedom. While documentation of such participation is rare, escaped slaved turned abolitionist Frederick Douglass was a frequent visitor to the farm, and like also its small Quaker meetinghouse and school.
The bigger question would be how did the fugitives get that far and where did the route head from there? Not everyone along the way was sympathetic, after all. Newburyport, Massachusetts, for one, was downright hostile and thus an unlikely place to jump ship. As for Portsmouth or Dover?
Establishing reliable yet invisible connections every ten or 20 miles would have been quite an accomplishment. What prompted households to risk everything to the moral cause? They were, after all, a threat to a vast economic system and its wealth.
It’s one more another interesting twist to develop in future research through New Hampshire.
Sunrise County – more formally, Washington County, Maine – and neighboring Charlotte County, on the facing waters in New Brunswick, are the center of some serious salmon farming. Cooke Aquaculture, a pioneer in the field, is a major employer in both places.
Without getting into the surrounding controversies, millions of salmon are shipped to market from these farms and are one reason the protein-rich anti-oxidant species is no longer a luxury item for most people. It’s a surprisingly healthy option, if you’re so inclined to investigate.
The local enterprise has even spawned Eastport’s annual Salmon Festival over the Labor Day weekend, which includes narrated boat trips to farms in our coves, typically clusters of 16 pens, and explanations of their care. Some locals describe the event as drawing an NPR kind of crowd, in contrast to our Pirate Festival the following weekend, which may be seen as more of a NASCAR following or its biker equivalent. (Please stay tuned.)
What I’ve found fascinating this summer is the flock of working boats busy around two of the farms in our fair city. The pens have been vanishing!
The reason, I’ve been told, is that every few years, the pens and their nets need to cleaned and repaired. And then they also lay fallow for a season or two.
Don’t know about you, but I’m impressed. Each pen starts out with a million and a half baby salmon. Maybe more.
And the filets we get do make for some impressive sashimi – raw fish that are a favorite in Japan, expensive in restaurants, and surprisingly easy to make at home. If you’re interested, check out some recipes online. My between-the-lines improvised sauces remain delightful, at least as far as me and my sons-in-law are concerned. (Pardon the English there, I’m yielding to their generation. Those boys really can skin a fish, by the way.)
From here, we’re most curious to see about how Cooke’s efforts at oyster and mussel harvests from our waters are also progressing.
The advice to eat local remains a spiritual discipline, as far as I’m concerned, not that it’s always practical where I’ve lived.
Now, what’s on your plate tonight?
