A PAGE-TURNER AS WELL AS A HISTORY LESSON

WILDFIRE LOOSE
THE WEEK MAINE BURNED
50^th Anniversary Edition
By Joyce Butler
304 pp. Paperback
Down East Books. $15.95

Reviewed by Randy Randall

When I turned one, the state of Maine was on fire. Really. My first birthday was Oct. 22, 1947, and we celebrated down on the seashore, where it was safe, with our relatives. My uncle had come to rescue Mom and me when it looked like the old place was going to burn along with all the other hardscrabble farms in North Saco. Uncle Eb had to drive round about through the back roads of Scarborough and Pine Point to escape the oncoming flames. He had come for us because my dad, along with hundreds of other Maine men, was out on the front lines fighting the fires.

For that one week in October it seemed like the entire state of Maine was one massive raging forest fire. In about five days over 200,000 acres of woods, farmland, and homes were burned flat. Nine towns were almost completely destroyed, and many others were ravaged by the out-of-control fires. During the week about 150 separate wildfires were reported, all burning from Fort Kent to York.

This week has come down through our local history as “the fire of ‘47,” and it changed the state and its people forever. I grew up hearing stories about the fire, and when I was older, I could see the evidence in places such as Waterboro and Lyman, where the hillsides were covered with charred stumps and a lone brick chimney might be seen standing out in a field marking where the farmhouse had been. In the early 1950s, when Mom and Dad bushwhacked a path down to the shore of Swan Pond in Lyman, they scuffed up black ashes from the old-growth pine forest that had burned there. Their first task in clearing a place for a cabin was to saw down the black charred stumps of dead pines and firs.

Prior to the ice storm of 1998, the fire of ‘47 was the worst natural disaster to ever hit Maine, and even then I don’t believe the ice rivaled the fires for the scope of devastation. The fiftieth-anniversary edition of Wildfire Loose is a record of the fires and the events as researched and recorded by Joyce Butler, who is a historian and currently holds the position of curator of museum collections at Maine Historical Society’s Center for Maine History. She subtitled her book The Week Maine Burned. The first edition came out in 1979. Since then Butler has met many other folks who had either lived through the fires or whose memories were rekindled when they read her book, and they have told her their stories. These stories and other new information that has come to light over the years have been incorporated into this latest edition, which I would call the definitive description of the ‘47 fire.

By the time the fall of 1947 arrived, the Maine woods and underbrush were like a tinderbox ready to burst into flames. The snow had melted early that year, and there had been no significant rainfall since June 25. This was the worst drought in thirty years. The forest fire danger level was the highest possible. Governor Hildreth authorized additional funding to keep the fire wardens on watch in their lookout towers. At first he was reluctant to ban the woods, since hunting season was just beginning and so many Mainers derived income from that sport. When the woods did begin to burn, fires erupted all over the state, and all the fire-fighting resources of the state agencies, the towns, and the military were helpless to bring under control so many wildfires raging in so many places.

Some of the fires and the damage they caused became nationally renowned because of the press coverage and the notoriety of the people affected. However, other fires just burned on without being well known except to the men and women who risked their lives to save their rural homes and their communities.

The most notable fire was probably the one that burned Mount Desert Island and nearly wiped out the resort town of Bar Harbor. The papers of the day were filled with stories and pictures of the wealthy summer cottages on “Millionaire’s Row” that all went up in flames. The Jackson Laboratory burned as did most of Acadia National Park.

Almost equally as well known was the Kennebunk Fire or, more accurately, the multiple fires that burned their way from New Hampshire to the Atlantic Ocean. Kenneth Roberts was in residence then at his farm, Rocky Pastures, in Kennebunkport. He proposed to the firefighters that they could make a successful stand against the flames at his farm because the wide-open fields would provide a natural firebreak.

Joyce Butler recounts all these episodes and carefully sorts out the facts from the myths. She has faithfully documented the largest fires and has taken great care to describe the effect on the people whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed.

It might be strange to say this about what is essentially a history book, but Wildfire Loose is a page-turner. Sprinkled throughout the descriptions of the fires are accounts of families fleeing just in the nick of time as their homes burst into flames behind them. Crowded beneath an old tarp in the back of a truck, they barely escape with their lives as they race through the fire. There are unbelievable stories of the heroism of men ill equipped and ill prepared to wage war against the flames driven by the incessant autumn winds.

In York County a small airplane scouted the progress of the fires. The pilot warned the men on the ground of danger by dropping handwritten messages wrapped around a rock.

Then, too, there are the wonderful stories of the take-charge women who set up canteens right in their own homes and fed hundreds of firefighters from their little kitchens. There were women who made thousands of sandwiches and fried thousands of donuts and others who stuck by their country telephone switchboards, even as the flames glared in their windows. It’s hard to imagine that an entire town could be burned-the municipal buildings, the school, the homes, the farms-but that’s what happened.

The Fire of ‘47 is an amazing part of Maine’s past. Those who lived through it, like my dad, are now in their eighties and nineties. For many of these older folks, the memories of seeing the entire horizon aglow with flames or the sun blocked out by the clouds of black smoke are as vivid today as when they witnessed them in 1947. They still remember when they abandoned their homes or when they stolidly worked alongside a bulldozer, beating back the oncoming fire. When these survivors and firefighters are all gone, we will still remember because we will have Butler’s book to tell us about these brave, ingenious, and unselfish Mainers and the week they all watched Maine burn.