Aroostook County Folklore: "And It Was This Big"
This StoryMap focuses on the "tall tales" of 19th century Aroostook County storyteller, Joe Stockford.
What is Folklore?
This StoryMap is part of a larger project called History In Stones: Mapping Cemeteries to Teach the History of Central Aroostook County. Click here to go to the website.
Unlike fictional stories or religious tales that either entertain us or help support a sense of identity, folktales are the commonplace, everyday stories we tell one another. According to Christine House in her introduction to Cultural Understanding through Folklore at the 1993 Yale-New Haven Teacher Institute, “Folktales have enchanted people for centuries. They were an important source of entertainment for peasants and princes alike in days of yore and still serve the same purpose today. But folktales also serve another purpose, that is, to tell us about the way life was for the common man. History books are filled with the names and dates and events which shaped our world. It is folklore, however, which remembers the hopes, fears, dreams and details of everyday lives . . . They tell us our history, they describe where we live, what our values are and ultimately who we are.”
Figure 1: The video to the right explains folklore and its importance to culture.
A folktale is simply a story told again and again, or a story told by one person to another that makes its way into a community memory. Think for a moment about the stories your family tells. Are there any stories in your family that get told year after year? Maybe it is the year your vegetable-hating aunt brought green sweet potatoes to a holiday meal? Or the story of the wedding dress your grandmother made from the scraps of men’s dress shirts during the silk rations of World War II? What makes your family story unique and special? How might your family story be interesting to others? If you were to write it down, what would your personal folktale teach others about you and your life?
In some ways, folk stories are how people find connection and develop a sense of community. According to an article in The Atlantic entitled "The Psychological Comforts of Storytelling" by Cody C. Delistraty “Humans have been telling stories for thousands of years, sharing them orally even before the invention of writing. In one way or another, much of people’s lives are spent telling stories.”
This StoryMap is about the stories that have been told over and over again in Aroostook County. It is about Aroostook County folklore. Much of the information for this StoryMap comes from Oral Interviews done by students in classes taught by noted folklorist, Dr. Edward "Sandy" Ives. Dr. Ives taught at the University of Maine and collected so many stories from people in Maine and Maritime Canada that he created the Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History . Copies of the transcripts of the oral interviews used in this StoryMap are housed in University of Maine at Presque Isle's Special Collections while the actual recorded interviews and transcripts are in the University of Maine's Special Collections in the Fogler Library .
Figure 2: "Aroostook War Song" Dr. Sandy Ives enjoyed folklore that was told through singing. He traveled throughout Maine and the Maritimes collecting songs to show that some communities would sing a song one way while another would sing it a different way. This song is about the Aroostook War that occurred over the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick in 1839. It started when Canadian lumbermen started cutting trees west of the Aroostook River which made people who considered themselves American very mad. This is what he sings about when he sings "west of the line." Notice the simplicity of the song and how he uses an acoustic guitar to play the music. This is a folk song about the British/New Brunswick perspective of the war.
Folklore in New England
Stories have long been important across cultures, as well. In the Aroostook Band of Mi’kmaq culture, stories and folktales are how each generation teaches the next how to work the land, where to fish and hunt, and what areas to avoid for personal safety. According to a 2020 article entitled “Storytelling is not Just Entertainment. It’s a Fundamental Part of Being Human,” author Christine Hennebury writes “Storyteller and writer Gary Green says sharing stories of people's experiences is not only valuable for promoting understanding — it can help us remember important information that can guide our future actions.”
For centuries, even the poorest of our communities would “sing for their supper,”exchanging stories for food. In times of struggle, it has often been stories that have kept us afloat. Delistraty’s article notes that “Stories can be a way for humans to feel that we have control over the world. They allow people to see patterns where there is chaos, meaning where there is randomness. Humans are inclined to see narratives where there are none because it can afford meaning to our lives.” When European settlers first started colonizing the lands, they encountered the stories of the Native Americans who lived here and gradually began to add their own to the landscape that surrounded them. For thousands of years, Native Americans had traveled the land and managed the wild fruit and migrating game with the help of generational stories.
Figure 3: This is a Mi'kmaq Creation Story called Woman of the Water and it shows the importance of oral stories to their culture. Notice how she talks about the interaction of men and women.
Colonists, though, were new to this land and the language and had to experience both as beginners. New animals, like beavers and moose, must have seemed like mythical creatures to early laborers who might have had little education before settling the area.
Figure 4: TIAM'S PROMISE Mi'kmaq Legend of the First Moose. This Mi'kmaq story talks about the creation of the first moose. Consider the relationship between the Mi'kmaq and the moose. Now think about how white settlers must have felt when they first saw moose.
The world-famous author of the chilling story, “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson once wrote a history of The Witchcraft of Salem Village. In it, she, alongside many other historians, noted that the Puritans who settled around Massachusetts believed the wilderness to be a frightening place where the devil lurked in every shadow waiting to steal a soul. The Puritans feared wilderness because it was wild and unknown. Stories of the devil, witchcraft and evil lurking in the wilderness laid the foundation for modern day New England folklore. Click here to learn more about this. Click here to listen to the podcast Dark Stories which focuses on scary stories set in forests.
Folklore Motifs: "So Big Stories" or Tall Tales
Since folklore are the stories shared orally through the generations, folklorists look for patterns in stories across cultures. For example, almost every culture has a creation story. Folklorists call these patterns folklore motifs and they have indexes about them. If someone in your family told you a story, you could go to the folklore motif index to see if you can trace the origins of the story since folk stories are told from one generation to the next. Click here to visit an index on folklore motifs.
After reading oral history transcripts from the Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History, this author found two easy patterns of stories. Some were the “It Was So Big” stories, in which tall tales of giant pumpkins, oversized fish, and horns of plenty seemed to offer the abundance during times of harshness and limited resources. And other stories were the ”Get Thee Behind Me” tales, in which devils, ghosts, and witches, filled with wild supernatural powers, were there to cause harm to others.
Figure 5: The video to the right explains the importance of tall tales in folklore.
The stories in this collection are of the “It Was So Big” variety. They will show you examples of the lives of people in Aroostook County in the later days of American settlements. Most of the stories in these collections were gathered by students at the University of Maine between 1950 and 1968 who were students of Dr. Sandy Ives. Students of Ives' folklore and oral history classes interviewed residents of the County, both young and old, to find the stories that shaped its culture. One of the most common stories we have all heard at some point in our lives is the “It was so big” story. Whether it was the giant fish your brother caught last summer and had to let go, or the buck your mom shot three falls ago that was so big she needed to drag it back with a forklift, or the County Fair winning sow that was big enough to feed an entire city, we’ve all heard our fair share of tall folktales.
Figure 6: "It Was So Big" or tall tales influence culture in many ways. For example, in this photo, there is a statue of an oversized moose which reflects the importance of moose to an area's culture. It also shows how people exaggerate their size.
Joe Stockford Stories
In Spring of 1962, University of Maine student, Hilda Maher, submitted her collection of folk stories typed by hand on an old, stainless steel typewriter long before word processing programs were a glimmer in the eye. She delivered these typed transcription of folk stories to her folklore professor, Dr. Sandy Ives. These stories all “come from the region around Hodgdon, Cary, Amity, and Houlton,” which she describes as “a farming district for the most past . . . [with] some railroading and some factory work; but at the time these stories originated farming and milling were the main industries." During the times these stories were collected, the community was poorly, and the economic status of the region was often dependent on “the demand of lumber and potato[e]s.”
A local legend of Hodgdon, Maine, was none other than Joseph Stockford, who moved to the area when he was 3 in 1845. According to Maher, Joe “was a man of average size, quick-moving and very convincing as a story teller. Nobody actually believed his stories, but he always had a good audience when he started telling [them].” Old Joe supported his large family by lumbering and mill working. When Joe died at 94, they say “he had all of his own teeth . . . [because] he talked so fast that his teeth had no time to decay.” He possessed an old Civil War saber he would brandish while telling his wild stories to try and get a scare out of his audience. “He was even known to come so near their heads that he would cut their hair!”
A woman named Villa Warman, daughter of Anna Howard, shared one of Joe’s tall tales with Maher. The story, it seems, had been passed to Villa from her mother who had herself heard it from her father, Frank Howard before he passed away. According to Villa and Anna, the story came from Joe himself: “Once when Joe was quite young, he waded out into the mill stream to sit on a rock. After a time, he seemed to be moving. Sure enough, the rock was moving. Joe stayed on just to see what would happen. Finally, the rock came up on the shore and Joe found that he was sitting on the biggest mud turtle he ever saw.” The irony of this story is that mud turtles are only about 6 inches in width.
A man by the name of Don Nightingale shared this Joe story with Hilda Maher: “Once when Joe was in Pennsylvania during the Civil War, he and his buddy were swapping tall tales. “Said the chum, ‘ Joe, I grew a pumpkin so big it took three horses to haul it from the field to the barn.’
Figure 7: The photo to the right is of an overly large pumpkin. Based on the size of this pumpkin, you can only imagine "how big" the pumpkin was described by Joe's chum.
Joe came back a few minutes later with the following: ‘ I was down to the iron factory the other day and they were making the biggest iron pot I ever saw. Three men were inside hammering it into shape for a cooking pot. The men would stay in as long as they could stand the heat and then they would come out, cool off and back in again for more shaping. That was the biggest pot I ever saw.’ Joe's friend replied: ‘Why would they want a pot as big as that, Joe?’ Joe answered the question: ‘They had to have something to cook that pumpkin in, didn’t they?.’
Figure 8: 19th century illustrations of a cooking pot.
Source: Warman, Villa. 1962. MF277 NAFOH Raymond H. Fogler Library Special Collections Department, University of Maine, Orono, Maine.
Big Fish
No tall tale collection is complete without the story of the fish that was this big (*which is almost always accompanied by the storyteller holding her hands about two feet apart to demonstrate the imagined size. The distance of her hands would grow further and further apart each time she told it). Arlo Estabrook shared another Joe Stockford story with Hilda Maher. This was a "fish story." Estabrook said that Oro Alward claimed to have heard the story from Joe himself back in the day.
Figure 9: "The Biggest Fish That Was Ever Caught Was The One That Got Away" This 1908 postcard illustrates the exaggeration of how big a fish could be when someone is telling a story.
Like many 19 th century men of Aroostook County, Joe was no stranger to ice fishing and legend has it he was very good at it. One night, he and his friends found a spot at the “right time of the moon,” striking a fishing gold mine. “They cut a hole in the ice and before they could take the ice from the hole, the fish had pushed it out and were jumping high and thick.” As luck would have it, Joe’s and his buddies’ fishing gear was too far to reach because none of them expected the fish themselves to move an ice block up and out of the water as they had!
Figure 10: The drawing to the right illustrates ice fishing most likely in the late 19th century.
“The men took off their coon skin caps and every time they got near that hole, the hats were covered with fish. They had so many fish, they didn’t know what to do with them all.” Overwhelmed by the fish practically flying out of the hole at them, the men quickly formed a plan to slide a water-logged stump over the ice hole to block the rush of fish. “It was so heavy that the fish couldn’t push it out, but [the men]could hear them thump, thump, thumping against the bottom of the stump.”
Perhaps the shiniest tall tale Old Joe told was to Weltha Rouse who, herself, shared this story with Maher. “One day, as Joe was walking up the path from the mill stream, he saw something shining in the sunlight. It was so bright that he could barely look at it. He picked the object which was the size of a peck measure.” Now, a peck measure was a standard unit of measurement used by the Maidenhead Borough Council in the 19 th and 20 th centuries equivalent to 1.98 liters, or just about 2 gallons. According to Rouse’s retelling of Joe’s story, “Sure enough, it was a diamond!”
Imagine a diamond the size of a two-gallon jug! According to Sotheby’s , they recently sold a baseball-sized diamond for around seventy million dollars. Had Old Joe found such an enormous diamond, he likely wouldn’t have spent his time milling or lumbering, and could have retired into luxury! However, there might be some truth to this tale as Northern Maine is well-known to geologists as a place to find Herkimer and Pakimer Diamonds, a form of quartz crystal, not to mention Maine has been known to host other clear, crystalline minerals, like calcite and apatite , that could be said to resemble diamonds.
Well, Old Joe was said to have take the giant diamond “home and carved a vinegar jug out of it. No one could dispute this story because Joe had the vinegar jug to prove it.” Of course, you don’t need a mineralogist degree to know diamond would be far too solid to be carved by mere 19 th century hand-tools! It is, after all, one of the hardest minerals in the world, and that’s one of the many reasons it is so prized by collectors. A Herkimer Diamond (quartz crystal) is also very hard, but had he found something like Calcite, a clear crystal gem, it would have been pretty easy to carve. Mohs Hardness Scale is a geological measurement that demonstrates how tough different rocks, gems, and minerals are and thus how difficult they would be to carve or cut. Calcite is a 3 on MohsHardness Scale , whereas Herkimar Diamonds are a 7.5, and a true Diamond is a 10. So it is perfectly feasible that Joe could have had a hand-carved Calcite vinegar jug—except for one small detail! Calcite dissolves in vinegar ! So what do you think? Was Old Joe’s vinegar jug simply glass and a fun story to amuse the neighbors?
Source: Estabrook, Arlo. 1962. MF277 NAFOH Raymond H. Fogler Library Special Collections Department, University of Maine, Orono, Maine.
More Tall Tales
Now, Joe Stockford didn’t exactly have the corner on the tall tale market amongst the settlers of the Aroostook County area. In Fall of 1962, Ruth Ireland collected a number of stories in Limestone and Fort Fairfield. On October 13, 1962, Mrs. Faye Hafford of Limestone shared three remarkable stories with Ireland:
“Two men went fishing and they caught more firewater than they caught fish! They were on a river, and they got to paddling so fast they paddled five miles up a tote road before they discovered they weren’t on the river.”
“The mosquitoes are so big in Ashland that one took off and landed at Presque Isle Air Base when they were first building it, and the crew put 50 gallons of high-octane gas in it before they realized it wasn’t a P-38.”
Figure 11: This is a P-38 airplane. Mosquitoes this big would mean "Run For Cover."
John Stockford stories help to pull people together. You might be in another part of the United States and run into someone from "The County" and one thing you could have in common are the folktales of John Stockford and others. Tall tales are not the only type of folklore that helps develop the character of an area. As mentioned previously, folk songs can reflect the culture of an area. They show the characteristics that the people who live their use to define it. It helps to give them a "sense of place" which creates emotions that allows a person to feel an attachment to an area. This reinforces their identity. "The County Song" is a great reflection of what people in Aroostook County think of the area in which they live. Notice the words of the song while you listen to the video to the right.
Figure 12: The video to the right is an example of a folk song that helps define the characteristics of "The County."
Source: Hafford, Faye. 1962. MF206 NAFOH Raymond H. Fogler Library Special Collections Department, University of Maine, Orono, Maine.
Conclusion
Folktales are the stories of the people, and people tell stories to teach, to protect, to entertain, and to dream. Across cultures and generations, folktales share common themes called motifs that demonstrate people--no matter how different we may seem to be---share common experiences. The human experience is similar at its core, and folktales can show us just how big that commonality can be. Luckily for residents of Aroostook County, students of Dr. Sandy Ives' courses captured many of these stories that reach across time to connect us to these commonalities.
We end this StoryMap, with a nod to "It Was This Big" and the potato, the crop of Aroostook County.
Figure 12: The postcard to the right embodies the idea of "It Was This Big." Everything grows bigger in Aroostook County or so the postcard seems to portray.
On another potato postcard, the sender explains the importance of potatoes in a poetic, whimsical, and almost folklorish, way.
Seen everywhere [potatoes]; "the pot morsel of gossip;" hear of far and near; involves many problems is handled with great care; its presence heralded by every breeze; the substance of all meals; the "Roostook Tater."
Figure 13: A postcard with an "Ode to the Roostook Tater" which focuses on the BIG importance of such a little spud. The above poem is handwritten at the bottom of the postcard.
While the poem for the potato may not be the clearest poem, it shows that the person writing it feels a connection to the area and identifies with the importance of this crop. It is a folk poem; it was not written by a trained poet but by an everyday person who wanted to share his or her experience in Aroostook County. Such things are at the heart of folklore, folk songs and folk tales.
Author's Biography
Having earned her terminal degree, a Master of Fine Arts, in Creative Writing, Araminta immediately fell into a combination of social services and higher education instruction. For the past twelve years, Araminta has been a senior instructional designer, associate dean of graduate programs, an undergraduate professor in creative writing and ethics and a graduate professor of instructional design. In addition to teaching academic courses, Araminta also teaches wellness, crystal energy, and energy-healing courses online. She also presented with collaborators at art colleges across the U.S. at both the Online Learning Consortium and the National Art Educator’s Association conventions in 2022, and most recently was invited to submit a white paper on the status of art-based eLearning t0 a new Journal for Online Education this autumn.
Araminta is an accomplished author and educator, with books both in the popular genres and in scholarly research. Her first book, Blind Hunger, followed a group of young children while they navigated a zombie apocalypse in which all the adults were the zombies. Her coauthored writing manual, Write of the Living Dead, written with Dr. Rachel Lee, PhD, and veteran publisher, Stan Swanson, has been used to help teach both academic and creative writing in both secondary and higher education classrooms all over the country. Her most recent book, Crystal Intentions: Practices for Manifesting Wellness, was coauthored with YouTube Influencer, The Lune Innate, with Mango Publication, is available wherever books are sold.
Araminta is available for short and long term research writing assignments as well as audio-projects and podcasts. If you have questions about her work, or are interested in hiring her to write/produce for you, contact her at: mina.matthews@maine.edu
