Description
Born in 1948, master canoe-builder, artist, and writer Jerry Stelmok spent his formative years on a 200-acre plot referred to as Maple Hill Farm. It used to be a circle of relatives farm life that, for all its outmoded practices and seemingly endless work, Stelmok recalls fondly on this series of essays.
Purchased by Stelmok’s grandfather in 1925, the farm used to be tucked away in the pristine great thing about the Maine wilderness. It used to be home not just to three generations of extended circle of relatives, 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 each and every description. But what made the greatest impression on Stelmok used to be how his grandfather ran Maple Hill.
A Lithuanian immigrant, he clung to nineteenth-century ways, even the use of a pair of draft horses to power all the operation until 1960. Stelmok recreates the world that used to be 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 circle of relatives photographs, watercolors, and enchanting prose, Stelmok evokes a bygone time and an airy, sun-dappled farmstead whose true magic used to be not just in the idyllic surroundings but in the loving home that his parents created regardless of lives seemingly so hard.