Thirty-five years ago we first watched the remarkable film From Stump to Ship which documented logging in 1930 in Downeast Maine.   At that time the long lost film was making its heralded premier in rounds across the entire State of Maine in a series of public viewings.

      In Aroostook County, the viewing opportunity was in the Weiden Auditorium on the University of Maine, Presque Isle campus.  And it was standing room only.  The film was made in the silent-movies era.  It was a local effort to document an era of logging which a few visionaries rightly believed would be soon coming to an end.

     For many decades the film was misplaced and lost.  That it was eventually re-discovered on a dusty shelf is only a part of the story.  What is extraordinary is that when the film was finally found, it was securely attached to a printed script, designed to be read by a narrator as the silent film played. 

      As you will see and hear, the detail provided by the script is what makes this modernized film so valuable.  The narrator you’ll hear is Maine humorist and actor Tim Sample.  A little known fact is that, despite his noticeable Downeast accent, Tim was born in the Aroostook County potato town of Fort Fairfield.

      Our friend Ginny Williams father, Frank Pelletier, a lifelong logger and former Legislator, was the emcee that evening in Presque Isle.  After the showing, Frank took questions and comments from the audience.  Several different people in the audience revealed that they recognized this individual - or that - in the film, as a relation of theirs who worked Downeast as a logger some fifty years before.

Jim & Megan

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Where in South America potatoes first became domesticated, however, is still unknown. Recent genetic studies point to the Andean highlands in southern Peru and northwestern Bolivia as the crop’s birthplace, but a lack of direct plant evidence has made it difficult to confirm... Starch grain analysis, which is a relatively novel method, was key to finding evidence of potatoes because the tubers do not preserve well, Dr. Aldenderfer said. 'When a seed burns, you often get something left of a seed husk. When corn cobs burn, you get something left of the cob. When potato burns, it burns up — very seldom do you get actual bits.' The early cultivation of potatoes seems to have been part of a larger shift at Jiskairumoko, from hunting and gathering toward farming and herding, he added. Around the same time, people started to build more complex houses, and the beginnings of a social hierarchy emerged. In 2008, a team led by Dr. Aldenderfer found a gold necklace from Jiskairumoko dating back to 2000 B.C., suggesting that an elite class had formed by then.