The Way Things Were: Deer Isle in the Steamboat Era

For close to 100 years, from the 1840s until 1942, Deer Isle, an island off the coast of Maine, relied on steamboats for access to other parts of the state. During this era, the island was a place of small family farms with a strong seafaring tradition. In the last four decades of this time, Tom Haviland was part of this island life. In his final years, Tom penned a series of short stories and essays based on his early experiences and characters he had known. Through them, we get a view of what island life was like in these bygone days.

Throughout his life, Tom Haviland had a love affair with the state of Maine in general, and Deer Isle in particular. Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1897, he and his family came to the island in 1905 to visit Charles White, a close cousin of Tom's father. Charles was employed at the Dunham's Point silver mine, and had been urging the Havilands to come stay at their North Deer Isle home. Like so many others who came to the island, they were hooked, and by 1909 they had their own cottage on the shore of the Bowcat. In all the years from that first trip, Tom missed only one summer on the island. As he grew up, his friends were island boys, whose families farmed the land and followed the sea. Many remained friends for life. As a consequence of these associations, Tom developed a deep admiration for islanders and their ways; their sense of independence, their self-reliance, resourcefulness, trust and loyalty, not to mention their ability to find satisfaction and even amusement in a life that often was anything but easy. Ultimately, as he approached the end of his career as professor of English and head of the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania, he began to write a series of essays and stories based on his experiences and characters he had known. Some were published in magazines such as Down East and Yankee, but others have not been. Just before his death in 1969, he had begun to organize all these pieces into a book that he proposed to call Moose Island Folk: Tales of the Steamboat Era.

William A. Haviland studied anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his PhD in 1963. He is now professor emeritus at the University of Vermont, where he founded the Department of Anthropology. Previously he taught at Hunter and then Barnard College in New York City. He has done archaeological work in Belize, Guatemala, South Dakota, and Vermont. He studied the bones of kings and commoners at the ancient Maya city of Tikal and carried out ethnographic and ethnohistorical research in Maine and Vermont. His one hundred or so publications include several books, among these five textbooks, one on Vermont Indians (co-authored with Marjorie Power) and three monographs on work done at Tikal, Guatemala. His most recent books are Canoe Indians of Down East Maine and Floating Palaces, America's Queens of the Sea: Maine Island Mariners and the Big Steam Yachts (co-authored with Barbara L. Britton). Haviland and his wife, Anita, live on Deer Isle, where he serves on the boards of the Deer Isle-Stonington Historical Society and the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor.

Born in 1927, Carroll M. Haskell (known as "Cabbage" to most islanders) grew up on Deer Isle, graduating from Stonington High School in 1945. Over the years, he did all the things island boys did: besides getting into mischief, he clammed, went lobstering, worked on the granite quarry, went yachting, worked on a lobster carrier running from Nova Scotia to Montauk, Long Island, and served a short stint in the Army. In 1957 he came ashore and married the sister of this book's co-editor (Tom Haviland's oldest child) and took up a career with the telephone company. He is the author of Growing Up on an Island off the Coast of Maine, an account of his adventures on and off Deer Isle. Although he currently lives in Philadelphia, he still spends at least four months of each year back on the island.