A PAGE-TURNER AS WELL AS A HISTORY
LESSON
WILDFIRE LOOSE
THE WEEK MAINE BURNED
50th Anniversary Edition
By Joyce Butler
304 pp. Paperback
Down East Books. $15.95
Reviewed by Randy
Randall
When I turned one,
the state of Maine was on fire. Really. My first birthday was Oct. 22, 1947,
and we celebrated down on the seashore, where it was safe, with our
relatives. My uncle had come to rescue Mom and me when it looked like the
old place was going to burn along with all the other hardscrabble farms in
North Saco. Uncle Eb had to drive round about through the back roads of
Scarborough and Pine Point to escape the oncoming flames. He had come for us
because my dad, along with hundreds of other Maine men, was out on the front
lines fighting the fires.
For that one week
in October it seemed like the entire state of Maine was one massive raging
forest fire. In about five days over 200,000 acres of woods, farmland, and
homes were burned flat. Nine towns were almost completely destroyed, and
many others were ravaged by the out-of-control fires. During the week about
150 separate wildfires were reported, all burning from Fort Kent to York.
This week has come
down through our local history as “the fire of ’47,” and it changed the
state and its people forever. I grew up hearing stories about the fire, and
when I was older, I could see the evidence in places such as Waterboro and
Lyman, where the hillsides were covered with charred stumps and a lone brick
chimney might be seen standing out in a field marking where the farmhouse
had been. In the early 1950s, when Mom and Dad bushwhacked a path down to
the shore of Swan Pond in Lyman, they scuffed up black ashes from the
old-growth pine forest that had burned there. Their first task in clearing a
place for a cabin was to saw down the black charred stumps of dead pines and
firs.
Prior to the ice
storm of 1998, the fire of ’47 was the worst natural disaster to ever hit
Maine, and even then I don’t believe the ice rivaled the fires for the scope
of devastation. The fiftieth-anniversary edition of Wildfire Loose is
a record of the fires and the events as researched and recorded by Joyce
Butler, who is a historian and currently holds the position of curator of
museum collections at Maine Historical Society’s Center for Maine History.
She subtitled her book The Week Maine Burned. The first edition came
out in 1979. Since then Butler has met many other folks who had either lived
through the fires or whose memories were rekindled when they read her book,
and they have told her their stories. These stories and other new
information that has come to light over the years have been incorporated
into this latest edition, which I would call the definitive description of
the ’47 fire.
By the time the fall of 1947 arrived, the Maine woods and
underbrush were like a tinderbox ready to burst into flames. The snow had
melted early that year, and there had been no significant rainfall since
June 25. This was the worst drought in thirty years. The forest fire danger
level was the highest possible. Governor Hildreth authorized additional
funding to keep the fire wardens on watch in their lookout towers. At first
he was reluctant to ban the woods, since hunting season was just beginning
and so many Mainers derived income from that sport. When the woods did begin
to burn, fires erupted all over the state, and all the fire-fighting
resources of the state agencies, the towns, and the military were helpless
to bring under control so many wildfires raging in so many places.
Some of the fires and the damage they caused became
nationally renowned because of the press coverage and the notoriety of the
people affected. However, other fires just burned on without being well
known except to the men and women who risked their lives to save their rural
homes and their communities.
The most notable fire was probably the one that burned
Mount Desert Island and nearly wiped out the resort town of Bar Harbor. The
papers of the day were filled with stories and pictures of the wealthy
summer cottages on “Millionaire’s Row” that all went up in flames. The
Jackson Laboratory burned as did most of Acadia National Park.
Almost equally as well known was the Kennebunk Fire or,
more accurately, the multiple fires that burned their way from New Hampshire
to the Atlantic Ocean. Kenneth Roberts was in residence then at his farm,
Rocky Pastures, in Kennebunkport. He proposed to the firefighters that they
could make a successful stand against the flames at his farm because the
wide-open fields would provide a natural firebreak.
Joyce
Butler recounts all these episodes and carefully sorts out the facts from
the myths. She has faithfully documented the largest fires and has taken
great care to describe the effect on the people whose lives and livelihoods
were destroyed.
It might be
strange to say this about what is essentially a history book, but
Wildfire Loose is a page-turner. Sprinkled throughout the descriptions
of the fires are accounts of families fleeing just in the nick of time as
their homes burst into flames behind them. Crowded beneath an old tarp in
the back of a truck, they barely escape with their lives as they race
through the fire. There are unbelievable stories of the heroism of men ill
equipped and ill prepared to wage war against the flames driven by the
incessant autumn winds.
In York County a small airplane scouted the progress of
the fires. The pilot warned the men on the ground of danger by dropping
handwritten messages wrapped around a rock.
Then, too, there are the wonderful stories of the
take-charge women who set up canteens right in their own homes and fed
hundreds of firefighters from their little kitchens. There were women who
made thousands of sandwiches and fried thousands of donuts and others who
stuck by their country telephone switchboards, even as the flames glared in
their windows. It’s hard to imagine that an entire town could be burned—the
municipal buildings, the school, the homes, the farms—but that’s what
happened.
The Fire of ’47 is an amazing part of Maine’s past. Those
who lived through it, like my dad, are now in their eighties and nineties.
For many of these older folks, the memories of seeing the entire horizon
aglow with flames or the sun blocked out by the clouds of black smoke are as
vivid today as when they witnessed them in 1947. They still remember when
they abandoned their homes or when they stolidly worked alongside a
bulldozer, beating back the oncoming fire. When these survivors and
firefighters are all gone, we will still remember because we will have
Butler’s book to tell us about these brave, ingenious, and unselfish Mainers
and the week they all watched Maine burn.
