Growing Up on Maple Hill Farm: A New England Farm Life

Born in 1948, master canoe-builder, artist, and author Jerry Stelmok spent his formative years on a 200-acre plot known as Maple Hill Farm. It was a family farm life that, for all its outmoded practices and seemingly endless work, Stelmok recalls fondly in this series of essays.

Purchased by Stelmok's grandfather in 1925, the farm was tucked away in the pristine beauty of the Maine wilderness. It was home not just to three generations of extended family, but also to sumptuous vegetable gardens and orchards, an eighteenth century Colonial-style home with an attached barn, and a colorful cast of farm animals of nearly every description. But what made the greatest impression on Stelmok was how his grandfather ran Maple Hill.

A Lithuanian immigrant, he clung to nineteenth-century ways, even using a pair of draft horses to power the entire operation until 1960. Stelmok recreates the world that was a constant source of wonder--the mixed herd of 40 cattle, the berry patches and gardens that boasted 3,000 tomato plants and supplied food for market and table, the woodlots that provided firewood and saw logs, and the surrounding forest.

With family photographs, watercolors, and enchanting prose, Stelmok evokes a bygone time and an airy, sun-dappled farmstead whose true magic was not just in the idyllic surroundings but in the loving home that his parents created despite lives seemingly so hard.