Nature Next Door: Cities and Trees in the American Northeast

4. Who Owns Maine’s Trees?

113 I n May 1895, Cornelia “Fly Rod” Crosby sat tying flies in a Maine cabin, admiring the mounted deer and moose heads that adorned the cabin walls and handing out pamphlets to passersby. The cabin was a modest one, a mere ten-by-thirteen-foot structure of peeled logs, but it caught everyone’s eye. In the woods of Maine, it would have been no strange sight; in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden, it was decidedly odd.1 The cabin and a nearby lean-to, both decorated with antlers, stuffed rabbits, birds, fish, snowshoes, and guns, were part of the Maine exhibit at the first annual New York City Sportsmen’s Exhibition. Crosby, an expert hunter and fisher and a tireless promoter of tourism in her home state, was part of the official Maine delegation to the show, and she reveled in showing New Yorkers what life in Maine could be like. For four days, she and her friends Ed Grant and James Mathieson, both Maine hunting guides, handed out leaflets and magazines touting Maine as the “playground of a nation” and demonstrating their backwoods skills. They were a hit and returned to Maine in high spirits with even grander plans for 1896. That next year, they borrowed a specially made railroad car to bring live fish for the display.2 In Vermont, forests were entangled with an image of romantic farm chapter four Who Owns Maine’s Trees? 114 m chapter four retreats; in Maine, they were tied to the romance of the wild. The Maine woods were harsh, as Henry David Thoreau had discovered on his own travels there in 1846: “Nature here was something savage and awful, though beautiful . . . . This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night.”3 The chaotic harshness had an appeal. When “Fly Rod,” Grant, and Mathieson packaged the Maine landscape for New York tourists, they offered a challenge. The Maine woods promised rough living, large game, elusive trout, largemouth bass, and wild excitement. Maine was a place to get lost in the woods, to live off the land, to hone skills with rod and gun and knife. Or so it seemed. This image of rugged individualism belied a different reality: Crosby was marketing her Manhattan Maine cabin as part of her state’s effort to restrict and control the public use of land. The Chamber of Commerce wanted New Yorkers and other urban swells to come to Maine not to set out on their own in the woods but to hire guides who would manage their experiences in hunting camps. They would bring money into the state, but without threatening the valuable forests owned by the giant timber companies. Fannie Hardy, a naturalist and also an avid hiker and hunter, thought Crosby had it all wrong. More tourists in Maine would mean more rules and more regulations—rules like hunting seasons—that would make it harder for the people of Maine to make use of resources that were rightly theirs. Traditionally, Maine residents had access to timber company land for hiking and hunting; urban tourists who didn’t know what they were doing—urban tourists who shot more deer than they could carry, who set fires that burned out of control—they were a problem, not an opportunity.4 Olive Cousins couldn’t have cared less about tourists. She just wished the state of Maine could manage what little public land it supposedly had under its control. Cousins described herself as a woman with struggles. The state considered her a “pauper,” the kind of person that public lands should help support. To her neighbors, Cousins was a “loose woman” and a “nuisance,” using land and trees that were more rightfully theirs.5 These three women—Cornelia “Fly Rod” Crosby, Fannie Hardy, and Olive Cousins—bring into high relief the ways in which forest property in 4.1 The Maine Exhibit at the New York Sportsman’s Show in 1897, the third year “Fly Rod” Crosby set up a log cabin in Madison Square Garden. Although she is not shown in this image, she was at the show and is credited with designing the exhibit. She was working for the Maine Central Railroad at the time. Collections of Phillips Historical Society, courtesy of Maine Historical Society. Maine Memory Network item 17572. 116 m chapter four Maine in the early twentieth century was no...