Fannie Hardy Eckstorm and Her Quest for Local Knowledge, 1865-1946 (eBook)

Pauleena M. MacDougall is director of the Maine Folklife Center and faculty associate in anthropology at the University of Maine.

List of illustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Daughter of the Maine WoodsChapter One. Rooted in Place Chapter Two. Eckstorm as NaturalistChapter Three. Eckstorm as Ethnographer of Local WoodsmenChapter Four. Eckstorm as Ballad ScholarChapter Five. Coping with the Normal by Investigating the ParanormalChapter Six. Eckstorm as Ethnographer of Maine’s Native PeopleChapter Seven. Eckstorm and Clara Neptune BibliographyAbout the Author

MacDougall's riveting narrative reveals the remarkable writer, naturalist, and folklorist Fannie Hardy Eckstorm as a woman ahead of her time. With Eckstorm's story, MacDougall stirs us to think hard and long about attitudes then and now toward modernity and tradition, locality and nation, science and humanity.

This eminently readable biography has introduced me to Eckstorm in all her complexity. Whether it is exploring the Maine woods, researching the lumbermen's world and the history of ballads, or negotiating a friendship with a Penobscot woman, MacDougall provides us with the context and the personal voice that make this fascinating, complex, Renaissance woman come to life. In the process MacDougall challenges us to rethink the history of middle class women at the turn of the last century.

With consummate insight and clarity, MacDougall traces the multifaceted career of writer and folklorist Fannie Hardy Eckstorm of Brewer, Maine, who stood out as a key player in a small community of women pioneers in a man’s world of early-twentieth-century ethnography and folklore studies. Although constrained by the ideals of late-Victorian womanhood, Eckstorm crossed the boundaries of gender, class, and race to pursue a fascinating array of interests in Maine woodsmen and river drivers, Native American culture, New England natural history, bird and game conservation, and the expression of working-class pride and masculinity in folk songs and stories. Alive to the beauty of Native American traditions, Eckstorm gained a national reputation for her studies of Indian language, culture, and place-names. The common thread in these varied preoccupations was a keen appreciation for rural life and nature, a solid grasp of techniques in folklore, ethnography, linguistics, anthropology, and natural history, and a passionate faith in the dignity of New England folk culture. MacDougall’s biography is a glowing yet carefully balanced tribute to the life and works of Fannie Hardy Eckstorm and to her fascinating quest to establish the Maine woodsmen a true American type.