Recently, retired geography Professor Paul Frederic was reminiscing about his childhood: “In Starks,” he recalled, “boys and girls would start school in shoes that were too tight and clothes that were too small. A couple weeks later, the checks from the cannery would start to be issued, and students would begin sporting their brand new school clothes.”
Frederic’s grandfather started a cannery in Starks; his mother worked in it, and he and his father planted corn for it. At this time of year, “everything else stopped. Even church services in Starks were suspended, so you wouldn’t have to be torn between canning corn and saving your soul.”
Frederic knows as well as anyone the impact that corn canneries had on Starks and other area communities. In fact, he has written a book about the subject, called “Canning Gold.” Frederic explains how corn canning actually began right here in Maine, where relatively cool weather in late August helps prolong the corn’s sweet flavor.
Isaac Winslow of Portland first tried to apply the new technology of canning to Maine sweet corn in the 1840s. The retired sea captain’s efforts to can the whole cob (predictably) failed, but once he figured out that he should shell it first, success followed.
To people who valued preserved food – sailors at sea, pioneers heading west in covered wagons, Civil War soldiers on the march – Winslow’s invention was a godsend. By 1880 the corn canning business was an important component of Maine’s economy and began to influence the rhythm of life in communities like Starks and Farmington, especially during harvest season.
Everyone labored in the canneries, said Frederic, not just the typical male worker, but children and women as well. In sheds separated from the dangerous machinery, young children husked the ears of corn. The rest of the workspace was segregated by sex. The most dangerous jobs fell to the men, and to the women went the dirtiest and most monotonous jobs, working the husker, cutter, can feeder or the inspection belt.
Eventually, Maine’s sweet corn industry fell victim to improved plant genetics. Growers in other parts of the country developed hybrids so that corn could be grown in warmer climates. Western Maine’s cool late summer evenings no longer gave local growers a distinct advantage.
In “Canning Gold,” Frederic the academic offers a wealth of statistics about the industry, but Frederic the native son remembers the corn shops nostalgically. “I watched the old factory near my childhood home and the people that worked there slowly fade away,” he writes. “Every time another section is taken down and with each death of a former worker I lose a bit of my tangible heritage.”
Luann Yetter has researched and written a history column for the Sun Journal for the past ten years. She teaches writing at the University of Maine at Farmington, luann.yetter@maine.edu.
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