Tommy Carbone



Fannie Hardy Eckstorm



"I was just mesmerized by the writings of Fannie Hardy Eckstorm.
She took me completely by surprise.
What an amazingly modest, but incredibly competent observer.
I felt there are passages which are just distillate, they are just perfect descriptions of something I may have seen but never could have articulated with the imagery as she has."



Review by: Peter Neill -

Host, Conversations from the Pointed Firs.

(Podcast linked below)



Who was

Fannie Hardy Eckstorm?


Fannie Hardy Eckstorm might be the most under appreciated Maine writer and historian of the period of the mid-1850s to the mid-1940s. Some even claim she wasn’t an historian at all, and rather she was only a folklorist. I will claim, she was both, and even beyond that when it came to her wide interests and faculties. For, in addition, she was a naturalist, an explorer, an ornithologist, and an ethnographer.



Photo from 1888, the year of Eckstorm’s college graduation. Image courtesy of Special Collections, Raymond H. Fogler Library, University of Maine




beginnings.





Fannie Pearson Hardy Eckstorm was born on June 18, 1865, in Brewer, Maine to Manly Hardy and Emmeline Wheeler Hardy.


She was the oldest of their six children and attended the public schools in Brewer, Maine and Abbot Academy (Andover, Massachusetts).


In 1888, she graduated from Smith College (Northampton, Massachusetts), was subsequently employed for two years as the superintendent of schools in Brewer, and for a time worked in the book department of the D.C. Heath Publishing Company in Boston. In 1893 she married Rev. Jacob A. Eckstorm of Chicago. The two resided in Chicago, in Oregon, and Rhode Island.


Seven years later, following the passing of her husband, Fannie Eckstorm and her two children relocated from Providence R.I., back to Brewer, Maine. There, they lived on the same street as her childhood home on Wilson Street, close to her mother and father.






Throughout her life, Eckstorm studied Maine people, folklore and natural history. It was an area she would come to know well, based on her experiences with her father in the woods and his personal acquaintance with the Maine woodsmen, hunters, trappers, and native Americans.


In 1886 she became an associate member of the American Ornithologists Union, the first woman admitted as such. Before graduating Smith College, she co-founded the college chapter of the Audubon Society, an endeavor in which the naturalist John Burroughs even visited Andover to even assist them.





Her interest in birds would be a lifelong pursuit, from which she published two books, The Woodpeckers (1901) and The Bird Book (1901).



Eckstorm had many other community interests, among them, she was a founder and vice-president of the Folk-Song Society of the Northeast, a founding member of the public library in Brewer, and was an honorary member of the Maine Historical Society.



Maine Explorer


Eckstorm wrote for magazines such as Forest and Stream, Sprague’s Journal of Maine History, The Northern, The New England Quarterly, The Atlantic Monthly and other publications and newspapers.


The Eckstorm essays describing the fall of 1890 canoe trip she took with her father are the subject of the book, Exploring the Maine Woods - The Hardy Family Expedition to the Machias Lakes.


Fannie and her father, Manly Hardy, had taken a long canoe trip together each year for four years. It was during such trips that Mr. Hardy was teaching his daughter about the woods, the animals, woodsmen, and passed to her around their campfires stories of people and places.


During their trip to the Nicatowis Lake region, they had additional research in mind, and that was to investigate poaching and game law violations. Fannie would make use of what they saw and were told in a series of articles, entitled, Six Years Under the Maine Game Laws.


An annotated version of those essays, along with other unpublished works from Eckstorm will be published in an upcoming book from Tommy Carbone in 2024.


Recommendation! get the dust-jacket hardcover of this book. It is a beautiful, commemorative edition. Yes, it is more expensive due to printing cost, but watch on Amazon, they sometimes discount it so that it is below the cost of the paperback!




In the Maine Woods


Her book, The Penobscot Man, originally published in 1904 was the culmination of two decades of research and journaling tidbits she heard about various Maine river-drivers, lumbermen, and woodsmen.


The newly released annotated edition,

The Penobscot Man - Life and Death on a Maine River, includes never before published content from Eckstorm’s journals and writings by Tommy Carbone.


A significant part of the research for that book, took Eckstorm into the lumbermen’s world along the Penobscot River in 1891. It was on that trip when her life was threatened by a notorious poacher for her stand against poaching, hide hunting, and violation of the game laws.


It was also on that trip where she began to compile significant Maine woods history, although at the time, the history was still being made. However, she knew the men who lumbered in the woods and drove logs down icy rivers would soon come to pass. She went to the woods just on the expiration of the long-log drive, before Great Northern and large corporations, she went in order to get the story herself.




In the Maine Woods


In addition to the stories about the men, she heard and documented the ballads they sang. She had a deep interest in documenting Maine folksongs and ballads. The work of capturing the songs of the woods and sea would not be completed until published in collaboration with others.


Two decades later, two books resulted from their efforts, Minstrelsy of Maine (1927) and British Ballads from Maine (1929).


One of her friends and correspondents on matters in the Maine woods and on the Maine rivers, was David Stone Libbey, himself a lover and singer of lumbermen ballads.


Following Libbey’s death in 1904, and with encouragement from his family, Eckstorm published a small book, David Libbey: Penobscot Woodsman and River-Driver, (1907). David was a remarkable Maine pioneer and himself a respected outdoors writer. That book has formed the basis for an updated edition with annotations and many of Libbey’s own writing and is titled, David Stone Libbey - He Was Penobscot.




Fannie Hardy Eckstorm's writing covered a good number of topics along her interests.


In her "Out-of-doors" essay series she wrote wonderful observations of watching the birds by a brook, winter fishing, being wind-bound on Chamberlain Lake, and the tree preferences of the sapsucker. Some of those essays, along with her writings on legends and Maine place names were published in the book, "Katahdin, Pamola, & Whiskey Jack."

This volume also includes Maine north woods related essays from Manly Hardy, Thomas W. Higginson, and select poems of Anna Boynton Averill.

Most of the writings are timeless pieces from the 1800s and early 1900s, which will transport you to the ‘way the woods were’ and, in many cases, still are.

This edition was compiled and edited with new information and photographs by Maine author, Tommy Carbone.
.



Readers and researchers are warned about finding mistruths about Eckstorm online, in presentations, and in books.


Even some historical society websites claim Eckstorm came out against the Maine game laws in the 1890s, and she herself was against game protection. Those are completely inaccurate statements and her own words should be read for research and publication purposes.


In her 1891 essays on the Maine game laws, Eckstorm's main thesis was about the unfair enforcement that was perceived, maybe rightly so, by many Mainers. She wrote these words in the articles:



ECKSTORM:

"Lest there should be a misunderstanding on another point, I wish to state again that in what I have said so far, I have tried to represent other people's views rather than my own, and to give their reasons for these opinions instead of those which I might hold personally. For my own opinions on most of these matters I conceive to be of little value."


She goes on:


"I do not believe that our Legislature is wholly corrupt, nor that the game laws have been unfair, nor that all visitors are lawless and all residents are saints."


- - -


In the first essays, Eckstorm even writes:

"Understand now for all that the present company is always excepted, and that you and I are the people who never broke a game law—at least I am sure I never did."

- - -



I can only imagine that the writers who interpreted Eckstorm's words, did so through their own lens, or did not read her actual words. I admit, the series is a long one, the issues of her day surrounding the game laws were complicated, although not much more so than now (maybe even less so than now).

- - -

What Eckstorm wrote in those essays took courage. Her life, and that of her father's, was threatened because she named names of poachers and their crimes. That saga can be read in, "The Penobscot Man - Life and Death on a Maine River." Eckstorm dedicated her original book to the men of the West Branch Drive who took an oath to protect her from the renegade that threatened to kill her.

The new annotated edition book contains never before published journal notes from Eckstorm.


You only have to ask one question to those authors and presenters who claim falsely that Eckstorm came out against the Game Laws and in support of the poachers and those who violated the laws.

Why, I ask you, would Eckstorm write those essays and name names of people who were breaking the game laws, if she herself supported what those people were doing?

- - -
To those who will write about Eckstorm and her positions, I encourage you to read Eckstorm's own words and not copy what some websites have posted or books have published as your source.

Eckstorm's full position on the game laws, in her own words, will be published in a soon to be released book from Tommy Carbone.


Sign up for Tommy's newsletter to be the first to know when it is published.


While waiting, be sure to read the other writings from this wonderful woman of Maine history in these books:



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