We Belong to the Rock.

Benet Pols December 1, 2023

My thoughts flittering between The Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge and the photos I was trying to make, I rapped on the door on Summer Street.

The copy I had owned had been deposited at the post office on my way down to the river. Rated by me as in “poor” condition, I was happy to send it on its way back to England even if I was only to gain $44. Originally printed in 1548 “in prose and ryme doggerel,” my copy had been reprinted in 1814 from an original in a printing of 120 copies.

Bedecked with a pair of imposing Nikons I stood on the porch hoping my knock would be answered. I had no back up plan. Behind me in the driveway was a middle-aged, lightly blistered, Subaru Forester bearing a “Save the FJWB” bumper sticker. The Frank J.Wood Bridge, a 1932 WPA project linking Brunswick and Topsham and bookended by Brunswick’s Cabot Mill on the South and The Great Bowdoin Mill of the Pejepscot Paper Company on the North dominated the view shed from this Summer Street home. The bridge has also been the source of long ranging community conversation as its inexorable end appraoches.

**Looking down river toward the Frank J Wood Bridge, and its replacement, now under construction, from a residence in Topsham.**

As it turns out The Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, despite its majestic title, is fairly prosaic: it ranks as the earliest known continental guidebook in English, but I didn’t know that at the moment. I had not considered it in any way since researching and adding it to my inventory back in October 2019. Patience is a big component of the used book business. When I awoke Tuesday morning to find the order, I completed the customs forms and packaged the book up and posted it. It may have been wanted for Christmas.

I started pondering its high-minded title during the mile and a half walk to the Topsham side of the river. I had stopped several times along the way to get photos from beneath the Frank J. Wood Bridge at Brunswick’s 250th Anniversary Park and from various other spots that might show the crews at work, their implements, and their progress.. A lot of clambering around on the river bank and various rock piles to get the best views gave me time for idle thoughts between exposure changes, consideration of the sun, and waiting for bridge builders, traffic, and pedestrians to do something more interesting.

There’s nothing like transparency. I rated it “poor” and am pleased someone will get some pleasure from it at $44. An 1814 reprint of a book initially published in 1548. The 1814 edition was in 120 copies and bears this notation, “This volume was faithfully reprinted from an almost unique copy of my own (illegible) and is presented to by friend Mr. David Showell, of Park Lodge, Kent Road. London Institution” It also bears inscriptions showing subsequent ownerships up through the middle of the 19th century. Its author, Andrew Borde, was an erstwhile monk, an occasional Suffragan Bishop, a writer of early fad diet books, a physician, a traveler, and an acolyte of Cromwell who wrote about all these topics. He died in prison after being convicted of keeping house with three loose women.

What sort of knowledge were we talking about? Spiritual, astronomical, philosophical, or scientific? How had in been introduced? Empirical, methodical study, force, or was it revealed?

I was about to back off the porch when the owner of the Subaru opened the door. I asked her permission to walk through her back yard to make some photos of the work underway over by the bridge. Work which will decidedly not be saving the FJWB.

I had been on the property before because in the side yard, hard on Summer Street, is a gravel labyrinth with an old millstone at its center. Assorted other relicts of ancient millworks and a flutter of Buddhist prayer flags welcome passersby from the street for a moment of reflection. But I didn’t think I should go around the back side the house armed like Ron Galella without asking permission.

The homeowner asked where the photos would find a home and I pointed across toward Fort Andross, as if to explain it all. I told her some will end up on the radio station’s website and a larger number would end up on my own website. The radios station’s listeners and followers seemed to enjoy seeing the bridge work the last time I had shared them through WCME. It gives people a chance to inspect what they might only catch a glimpse of while crossing the bridge.

“Of course,” she said and thanked me for asking, “not many do” she added. “Do you know what I’d suggest? go through the labyrinth and across the back where you’ll see a big rock.”

I had seen the rock. Standing on the FJWB looking upstream toward the falls a high granite promontory protrudes into the river side. All rock save a lone rugged evergreen doing its best to slowly cleave the rock. The rock was the reason I was at her door. I wanted to be on it with my cameras.

“Of course, we don’t own the rock,” my host added, “We belong to the Rock.”

And there was my introduction to knowledge.

Photos of construction of the new bridge to replace the Frank J. Wood Bridge, also known as the Green Bridge, between Brunswick and Topsham, Maine. These photos were made November 28, 2023. The replacement bridge and all related construction will be completed in 2026.

Photos of The Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, by Andrew Borde 1548, reprinted here in 1814. Photos made in October 2019.

Above the Swinging Bridge, Androscoggin River

Getting In Touch With My Inner John McKee

Benet Pols November 17, 2023

Whenever, I make a photograph like my Pabst Blue Ribbon can here, I always refer to it, silently to myself, as getting my John McKee On.

John McKee is a name from my past, a Professor at Bowdoin, a colleague of my father’s, and for a period of time, a noted photographer whose work made a difference. In the early part of this century as I began exploring photography myself, I reconnected with my childhood memories of John McKee’s photography, particularly a photo of a rusted hulk on Popham Beach.

On childhood trips to Popham our family would pass this wreck, or some other just like it. There were more than a handful down by the shore. Our family would generally approach the beach through the dunes off the Popham Road rather than through the State Park lot. I can’t say whether this was the result of parsimony, a general habit of tardiness, or if it was just the way things were done back in the day. I can say that the memory of the sand swept wreck, glorious in its rust, comes back to me every time I head down the Popham Road.

A personal Madeleine, no doubt triggered more frequently these last twenty years by the constancy of a camera in my hand. I went searching for the photo I remembered of the wrecked car and eventually found it in As Maine Goes, a catalogue of John McKee’s photographs in what proved to be an influential collection. I found the catalogue on line and bought it. Regrettably, it arrived pretty well banged up by its transit but I am glad to have it.

A scan of John McKee’s photo, “Dawn, Popham Beach” from As Maine Goes, Photographs by John McKee, Introduction by William O. Douglas, Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Copyright 1966 by the President & Trustees of Bowdoin College Brunswick, Maine 04011. Interestingly my copy, purchased on ABEbooks bears the stamp, “Withdrawn from MOMA Library.”

For several years now I have been intending to write him. I pass his home frequently on the Highland Road on my commute to and from work. I often walk the road from Pleasant Hill Road to Bunganuc Road. I eyeball the Bunganuc Stream’s outlet into Maquoit Bay winding by a legendary house on posts hard on the stream side. On the walk back, if the sun is in the right place its light is refracted through the slats on the cupola of Professor McKee’s barn. Along the road are signs noting that his property, which extends down across the road and down to Bunganuc Stream, is private but may be crossed with permission of the owner. The signs provide the name, John McKee. For several years now, since discovering that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in one of his earliest published works, written under the pseudnym George F. Brown, referred to us natives of Brunswick as Bungonuckers, I have wanted to walk along Bunganuc Stream to see what triggered Longfellow to decide that this little stream encapsulated the essence of our community.

“Having very little business of their own, they have ample leisure to devote to the affairs of their neighbors; and it is said, that even to this day, if a Bungonucker wishes to find out what is going on in his own family, the surest and most expeditious way, is to ask the person who lives next door.” The Wonderous Tale of the Little man in Gosling Green. The New Yorker, 1834.

Today as I wondered what to do with my can of PBR, I wondered again about John McKee and what approach I might take to ask his permission to cross his land to wander down by Bunganuc Stream.

It seems now I never will:

John McKee, Associate Professor of Art Emeritus, died on March 8, 2023, in Brunswick, Maine.

(The following notice was shared by President Rose on March 13, 2023)

I’m sorry to inform the Bowdoin community that Associate Professor of Art Emeritus John McKee died on Wednesday, March 8, 2023, in Brunswick, after a period of declining health.

John was born on October 20, 1936, in Evanston, Illinois, and grew up in Palatine, Illinois. He graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth as a music major in 1958 and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He earned a master’s degree at Princeton in 1962, where he did additional graduate work and was an assistant instructor in French. His black-and-white documentary film about undergraduate life at Princeton, “Princeton Contexts,” won the Silver Award (highest in the category) at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1962—an early indication of his talents as both a photographer and filmmaker.

John came to Bowdoin in the fall of 1962 as an instructor in Romance languages, a position he held until 1966. His photographs and accompanying catalogue for a 1966 exhibit at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art—“As Maine Goes…”—revealed some ugly truths about the environmental consequences of pollution, seaside dumps, and unchecked development along the coast. It was widely recognized as a catalyst for the environmental movement and for legislation banning billboards on public roadways in Maine. Following the exhibit, John was named the director of the Bowdoin Center for Resource Studies in 1966 to explore land-use issues along the Maine coast. The extraordinary photographs from “As Maine Goes…” also won him the National Conservation Communicator of the Year Award from the National Wildlife Federation.

His second exhibit of photographs at our museum—”Hands to Work and Hearts to God,” about Maine’s Sabbathday Lake Shaker community—was recognized by the Maine Commission on the Arts and Humanities with the 1973 Maine State Award for images that “…summon poetry out of simple things and do not yield to the obvious or the picturesque.” A major retrospective in 1984, “Photographs 73–83 John McKee,” also received critical acclaim for John’s artistry. His influence as a teacher was on display in a 1994 exhibit and catalogue of the work of his former students, “Bowdoin Photographers: A Liberal Arts Lens.”

John was a lecturer in the art department from 1969 to 1987 and an associate professor of art from 1987 until 2001, when he retired and was voted emeritus status. His former students established the John McKee Fund for Photography in 2002 to honor his legacy.

John’s faculty file contained a sealed envelope to be opened upon his death. Inside is a note, written in December 1990, informing the dean of the faculty that he did not want a memorial service: “Anybody who wants to, might some good day go for a quiet walk and enjoy looking about.” This was followed by “If a memorial minute must be read at some faculty meeting, it better not last more than sixty seconds.”

John’s life and career have had a lasting impact on the College, on Maine, and in his field. We join with his former students, friends, and colleagues in expressing our gratitude for the many ways he encouraged us to see the world around us with new eyes.

Sincerely,

Clayton

This is a drawing of John McKee in 1971 by another name from my childhood, Thomas Cornell. Cornell was a faculty member and artist at Bowdoin College. This drawing is seen in a catalogue of an exhibition of Cornell’s Drawings and Paintings at Bowdoin in 1971. *Bowdoin College museum of Art, 1971 By the President and Trustees of Bowdoin College.*

Down by the River, I Shot My Camera

Benet Pols October 30, 2021

Lately, I have been spending a lot of time down by the river getting high school students set up with photos for their yearbooks. I can tell you that the old people in Brunswick (those that went to school here in the 1970s and 1960s) aren’t joking when they talk about the pestilential condition of the Androscoggin back in the day. It stunk.

Now though, it’s kind of nice down there. The color this time of year is great and the bike path, the river walk, the town landing, and Pinette’s Landing all offer picturesque backdrops with the monumental old buildings, funky industrial remnants, and a several interesting bridge scapes.

One of the kids asked me about the building on the right here—-what it used to be? You can’t see it easily from the road as come into Topsham off the Green Bridge. It’s set back a little behind some smaller buildings on Main St., just past the Great Bowdoin Mill (a/k/a Seadogs). While it does a pretty good impersonation of an old mill building recently renovated into something trendy, it’s actually new, built within the last ten or fifteen years. So it didn’t used to be anything. There was something called the “Granny Hole” and a much shorter old truss bridge that used to connect the Great Bowdoin Mill to the chunk of land behind where the old Topsham Fire House used to be at the foot of Green Street..

But it did make me wonder a bit what was downstream on the Topsham side. I have a sister used to own a house on Green St—-first right turn coming into Topsham, goes up and connects to Elm Street—her land went down through some swampy boggy land and to the river’s edge. So I wondered if there’s a place on the Topsham side where you can get down to the river. Turns out there is.

It’s one of those deals between the town, the Brunswick Topsham Land Trust, and a private landowner. It’s a short little trail, less than a third of a mile long that makes a crescent just below, on the river side, of the aptly named Riverview Cemetery. It’s called the Smart Property, though, based on signage, the landowners seem to have a different name now. You can get there from Town Landing Road, which is more or less someone’s driveway, off of Green Street. You’ll want to leave your car elsewhere, maybe on Elm Street. Or, you can come in from the other end of the trail which is at the back end of a parking lot at the River Landing Residences on Elm Street.

Roof line up on Green Street as seen from the short trail along the river front. The trail itself is easy walking, wide. Dry recently, but no doubt can be wet. It has just one short wooden bridge to cross. However the descent down from both sides is fairly steep and would be challenge for someone with mobility issues,

Looking back at Brunswick, the Green Bridge, and the Yellow Mill from a different angle can be interesting. I was surprised when even Da Eye Rize cast a nice rosy reflection of the setting sun.

There was plenty of bird action too though I didn’t catch any significant photos: an eagle took off right above me when I first entered the trail—-camera was still in the bag—but the eagle had the remnants of a fish which it discarded in the river before flying away. Evidently being considerate of the neighbors. Herons, terns, lots of ducks and small birds in the woods that I don't know about.

This patch of water used to be filled with a gruesome foam that in the colder months solidified to a chemical meringue. When the current or tide changed it’d calve, like an iceberg, and show an inside striped with different layers in the most putrid shades imaginable. Not so bad now though.

You can find information about the Smart Property here from the Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust, or from Maine By Foot. And here is some information about the Granny Hole Bridge.

A daguerreotype of Harriet Beecher Stowe from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Face of Brunswick since 1850. First editions, her imitators, detractors, and their work.

Benet Pols December 27, 2019

In the shadow of Bowdoin College where Harriet Beecher Stowe is reputed to have written Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the accepted canon of civil war literature has a distinctive abolitionist tinge. A first edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin evokes powerful images.

Consider whose hands this first edition may have passed through, one of the first 5000 copies printed. 295,000 more would follow that first year of 1852. By then Stowe had moved to Andover Massachusetts ending her two year sojourn beneath the pines of Brunswick. That is correct; she lived here just two years.

Volume I above was among the first 5000 printed, a “first edition, first printing." Volume II was in the “The Ten-Thousandth,” that is first edition, but third printing of 5000. Before being bound and sold in book form the story was serialized in a … — Volume I above was among the first 5000 printed, a “first edition, first printing." Volume II was in the “The Ten-Thousandth,” that is first edition, but third printing of 5000. Before being bound and sold in book form the story was serialized in a Washington DC based anti-slavery newspaper, *The National Era*. It ran in forty-one installments beginning in June 1851 while Stowe still lived in Brunswick and ending in April 1852.

What did this copy mean to those who held it? How did they acquire it? Was there an equivalent of pre-ordering on Amazon in 1852? Who was it shared with? Did the book pass from hand-to-hand among a circle of important, influential people? Imagine this very copy on the night stand of a person whose mind it would change. In 1852, with Uncle Tom’s Cabin new to print, Louisa May Alcott and her family moved from their Concord, Massachusetts home, Hillside, selling it to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Perhaps a copy was left behind in the shuffle.

The same first edition also provoked a broad but shallow counter reaction in the literary world. Instead of landing in the household of some abolitionist, it may have belonged William L.G. Smith and inspired his effort to refute Stowe’s work with his own Life at the South; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, As It Is. Sometimes known as plantation literature, or Anti-Tom novels, a collection of twenty-seven known novels tried to tell the “real” story of slavery.

Louis Masur, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, observed: “A literary countermovement emerged: anti-Tom novels that sought to offset the claims of Stowe's fiction by showing slaves as content, denouncing the treatment of free blacks in the North, and portraying slaveholders as good Christians. The best-known of those included W.L.G. Smith's Life of the South; or, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" As It Is…” Masur noted that these novels did not sell particularly well. In part because Stowe had anticipated the retorts and possible pro-slavery responses by publishing, nearly simultaneously, A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin; it focuses on the characters in the novel and provides testimony from newspapers, slave narratives, letters, and other sources to support in its portrayal of slavery. Stowe argued that Uncle Tom's Cabin, "more, perhaps, than any other work of fiction that ever was written, has been a collection and arrangement of real incidents, of actions really performed, of words and expressions really uttered, grouped together with reference to a general result. ... This is a mosaic of facts.”

The Anti-Tom plantation literature included nearly thirty novels that attempted to blunt the impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This one, William L.G. Smith’s 1852 effort closely mimicked the look of Stowe’s work.

Consider whose hands these Anti-Tom novels passed through. What did it mean to them? How did they acquire it? Who did they share it with? Did it pass from hand-to-hand among a circle of important, influential people? The question is just as interesting, but from a diametrically opposite perspective.

Also hitting the shelves in 1852 this fake Uncle Tom could easily have been confused with Stowe’s original. Its publisher chose not to print the first clause of the title, Life at the South, on the book’s spine, instead going with just Uncle Tom’s Cabin and dropping in the subscript, “As It Is,” almost as an after thought. A coincidence, who knows?

Either way this particular piece of the Anti-Tom canon is worth a lot less today than the real Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As of this writing AbeBooks shows six copies running from between $88 to $366 depending on condition(my fair copy entered the fray at 88 and at some point I re-listed it at 66, it was listed online for 19 months before selling) . Meanwhile first editions of Stowe’s book run from $400 to $15,000.

An excellent source of material concerning Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive. This web based archive curated by University of Virginia Professor Emeritus Stephen Railton contains the original texts of UTC, along with contemporary news accounts, reviews, press notices, and editorials. It also includes the full texts of eighteen of the Anti-Tom novels as well as an exploration of Uncle Tom’s influence in children's literature, music, the theatre, and film.

Stowe was in Brunswick for just two years, deployed here as a faculty wife at Bowdoin. Her brief time as a Face of Brunswick has been recounted in one way or another for generations. During the latter half of the twentieth century most in Brunswick remember the Stowe House as a restaurant and inn that eventually added a motor court style addition. Now a National Historic Landmark, the house was purchased by Bowdoin College in 2001; the house itself serves as offices together with a historic site, “Harriett’s Writing Room,” which is open to the public. The local Congregational church has long marked a pew where Stowe was reported to have occupied for her two years in Brunswick.

More recently, Brunswick’s a new elementary school, opened in 2011, was named for Stowe. Even as Stowe’s work influenced generations, and world events, her legacy in town can still stir powerful emotions. A public dispute over just where she sat while she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin erupted in court battle between neighbors and the college. The neighbor claimed that Stowe had rented a room in their house to write in as her own rented home at 63. Federal Street was too chaotic; the college has long maintained that she likely wrote at home or in her husband’s office in Appleton Hall.

Other Related Books from the Rabbit Hole listed on AbeBooks.com

A first edition, first printing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852, Harriett Beecher Stowe (sold).

A first edition of Life at the South: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, As It Is, 1852, William L.G. Smith, $88 (Sold for$66)

A first edition of Two Little Confederates, 1888, a children’s story loosely based on the life of its author, Thomas Nelson Page, who grew up—white—on a plantation in Virginia. A reviewer on Goodreads tells us, ”This look at the Civil War through the eyes of two young Southern brothers exposes the many evils done to the South by the North.” Flipping through it and looking at the nicely done illustrations, you sense a strong tang of Gone With The Wind . $27 (Sold)

A first edition of Dred: Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1856, Stowe’s second novel concerning slavery in two volumes, $88 (Sold)