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The Wood
Prairie Seed Piece
e-Newsletter
Organic
News
and
Commentary
Friday,
August 18th 2017
Volume
25 Issue 12
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In This
Issue of The Wood
Prairie Seed
Piece:
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Maine Tales.
Cosmic
Events.
Limestone, Maine
Circa 1997.
With all the recent media
attention concerning historic meteor showers and the upcoming Total
Solar Eclipse, we got to thinking about other
landmark cosmic events to impact Maine. About that eclipse:
some clever engineering students down there at the University of Maine
came up with
the bright idea of letting go of a helium-filled balloon after hooking
up a video camera which they expect will transmit eclipse images from
110,000 feet above Earth back to computer central where
the world can watch the Eclipse show on the internet.
Northern
Maine’s perhaps most memorable cosmic event of the past quarter century
was held exactly twenty-years ago this week. That was when
the legendary
Vermont rock group, Phish, decided they wanted
to hold a concert in the town of Limestone at the site of the former
Loring Air Force Base.
Construction
of Loring AFB began at the close of World War
II, when America’s newest looming threat became the Soviet
Union. Geographically speaking, Aroostook County is the
American soil located the least distance from Europe. So in
the post-war years, establishing a major Strategic Air Command (SAC)
base in the farming town of Limestone, Maine, became an irresistible
idea for our military planners.
In
building a base there was plenty to do in clearing the woods and
leveling the fields. What once had been 75 family farms up
through the 1940s were, with considerable effort, converted
into the most modern
base the Air Force had ever dreamed up.
Hard-working Mainers from as far away as our little town of Bridgewater
traveled to jobs up to Limestone for the multi-year jobs
bonanza.
The scale
of the Loring project – essentially
to build an entire city within a huge air base - was
massive and unprecented. Runways, hangers, housing,
commissaries, administrative offices, Post Office, fire department,
school, credit union, church, a 100-bed hospital - and more - required
rapid construction in a short period of time. There were jobs
aplenty and many, many tens of thousands of yards of concrete made
locally and poured for the Loring AFB project.
Coincidentally, with the development of Loring Air Force, Limestone’s
population soon swelled from 2500 citizens to over 9000. Security
on the fence-enclosed base was tight.
In certain areas which held especially high military importance, it was
rumored there were standing orders were to shoot-on-sight any
unauthorized person found wandering around. Though never
confirmed by base authorities, it was universally believed that
Loring’s 42nd Bomber Wing’s big B-52 bombers were outfitted with
nuclear warheads. What else might deter the Soviets?
The base
hummed, the decades passed, but after forty years of operation Loring
AFB’s mission of Soviet deterrence was deemed to have ended.
Loring AFB was closed in 1994. The economic shock of the base
closure, was severe to our local economy. While centered in
Limestone the bust-generating-closure was felt County-wide.
In short order, eight-thousand
residents departed Limestone wreaking havoc among local
businesses. Four local car dealerships closed within one
month of the announcement of the base closure.
The Loring
Re-Development Authority was invented to create the re-purposed economic
revitalization of Loring AFB. The processing of
defense department payments and the rebuilding of military HumVees are
two businesses which panned out. Many other proposed uses were
entertained. That first jaw-dropping Phish rock concert was
allowed, others followed.
Phish’s
primeval ‘The New Went’ Aroostook concert was held at Loring in August
1997. This prime time two-day musical event brought 60,000
enthusiastic and virtually all well-behaved
young people to
Limestone. Aroostook County, with the oldest median
age in the State of Maine – and Maine, the state with the oldest
population in these United States – got as close as we ever would get
to Woodstock.
Most memorable for those of us who did not
attend the concert were the epic traffic jams which created gridlock
and hopelessly clogged Aroostook’s few highways. Just as Aroostook County’s population was
beginning to nearly double for the weekend event, we
contrarily were headed south for an overnight family reunion at Aunt
Margaret’s camp on Hancock Pond in the western Maine town of North New
Portland.
Driving three-and-a-half miles from our Bridgewater farm we came to the
stop sign where Bootfoot Road meets U.S. Highway One. We were
headed south. Every
other vehicle in sight was pointed north, trying to get to Limestone, 40
miles away. Only we were moving but they
weren’t. As we drove south and watched the nonmoving
de-automobiled happy and carefree Phish fans we admired
their carefreeness and complete lack of angst. Five
miles west of Houlton, twenty five miles from that Bootfoot stop sign,
we whizzed by driving south. We saw what turned out to be the
beginning of Maine’s largest traffic jam ever, 65 miles from their
Phish-fan destination, potato town Limestone, Maine.
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Caleb,
Jim
&
Megan Gerritsen & Family
Wood
Prairie Family Farm
Bridgewater,
Maine
Click here for the
Wood Prairie Family Farm Home Page.
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Special Offer:
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Hull-less
Oats Cover Crop Seed. Among our Favorite cover
crops! |
Summer Photos From Wood Prairie
Family Farm.
More Wood Prairie photos taken by Caleb's sister
Sarah Gerritsen.

Stormy Clouds. Our Summer has been filled with
serial thunderstorms.

Elsie the
Cow. Ten-year-old milking matriarch of our
small herd of heritage breed Irish Dexter cattle
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Organic
Potatoes in Bloom. Looking southeastward across
our blossoming potatoes.
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Notable Quotes: Martin Luther
King Jr. on Silence.
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Recipe: New
Potatoes with Mint.
2 pounds small
new potatoes,
fresh out of the ground
Wash and put in
a medium saucepan with lid
Cover with
water, add a tsp sea
salt and boil until tender (about 20 minutes).
Drain off the
boiling water and toss the potatoes with plenty of butter, salt to
taste and plenty of fresh black pepper. One friend adds
chopped mint: "my British husband's favorite herb for boiled new
potatoes...gorgeous! Yum!"
Do try this recipe!
Megan
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Fresh New
Potatoes with Mint.
Photo by Angela Wotton.
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Wood Prairie Farm Quick
Links
Caleb & Jim
& Megan Gerritsen
Wood
Prairie Family Farm
49
Kinney Road
Bridgewater,
Maine 04735
(207)
429 - 9765
Certified Organic, From Farm to Mailbox
www.woodprairie.com
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