The Miseducation of a Yankee

by Lyn Mikel Brown

Beginnings

Each summer during the 1920s and 30s, Jane Sagendorph, Marian’s mother, traveled from Philadelphia to Vanceboro and then by boat to her log cabin retreat on Star Island in the middle of Palfry Lake. When she could no longer make the trip, she left the island and cabin to Marian and son-in-law, Roger Hale.

Roger’s father, Frank, was a hardworking rags to riches sort, a textile magnate worth millions. Roger and Marian, benefitting from Frank’s largesse, living in upscale Chestnut Hill, just west of Boston. They were so wealthy, Roger didn’t need to work. “Life was one big, long picnic,” his son Judson writes.² The couple entertained, went to elegant parties and traveled. Roger played polo and tooled around on his 42-foot sailboat.

When Roger and Marian’s first son, Drake, began experiencing unpredictable spells and violent behavior, they sought medical help. With few answers, they found their way to the Rudolph Steiner School in Switzerland. Steiner, an Austrian scientist and philosopher, was the founder of anthroposophy, an approach to physical and mental health that emphasized the spiritual benefits of the natural world and the arts. Their son responded positively to the school and so, after a time, they left the boy in Switzerland.

The Hales dreamed of building their own experimental anthroposophy center, a place to explore Steiner’s theory and its relationship to nature, education, medicine, the visual and performing arts. Marian was an opera singer and especially attracted to the Steiner philosophy. Their familiarity with Star Island made Vanceboro the obvious choice. In 1936, using a million dollar trust fund his father set up, Roger Hale purchased 12 thousand acres, most from Eastern Pulpwood Co., some from local landowners. The purchased land surrounded the entire town and included over ten miles of lake and river front property.

The Hales began their project in earnest. In addition to buying Stillman Armstrong’s spool mill on Spednic Lake, Roger Hale hired local men to construct two sawmills and then to build nearly fifty structures, including a seventeen room house, a school, greenhouses, a woodworking shop, barns, a lab, and a theater.

The Hales gathered “a veritable herd of horses” for work and play (they trailered riding horses for Marian and Roger from Santa Fe, New Mexico).³ They hired local horse whisperer, Frank Smith, as their main teamster and Carl Hanson as their blacksmith. Teachers for their Mainewoods School, a Waldorf school for 1st-8th grade, came from Switzerland. They hired a couple from New York to chauffeur and run the kitchen. The Hales lavishly furnished their new house with silver wallpaper, original paintings, and a grand piano. Sunrise Farm as they called the entire enterprise would became a spiritual beacon, an educational experiment, a destination for artists and performers, educators and doctors.

And for a time it was all of this. The Hales hosted famous opera singers, artists, and doctors, shuttling them to and from the farm to Star Island on their 26-foot cabin-cruiser, the Milky Way. Marian gave performances and wrote, directed, and produced a series of plays, the most ambitious being a theatrical production of Cinderella staged outdoors with a real coach and horses driven by Frank Smith and casting students from Mainewoods School in the main roles.

But it didn’t last, couldn’t last. Roger Hale, his son suggests, built too much, too quickly; spent too much and ran out of money. Hale’s father continued to support the farm for a time but in the end, facing debt, agreed to bail Roger out only if he sold Sunrise Farm. And so, just eleven years after purchasing the property, The Hale family moved back to Chestnut Hill. In 1949 Roger Hale hired Henry. S. Anthony & Co. to auction off the farm.

The Miseducation of Judson Hale

Judson Hale was just three years old in 1936 when the family first moved to Star Island and buildings began to go up at Sunrise Farm. He was still a boy when the family returned to Chestnut Hill. Age and memory are a funny thing, but neither fully account for the inaccurate and sometimes patronizing way he describes Vanceboro and the people living there at the time of his parents’ experiment.

Judson Hale tells his readers that Vanceboro, at the time of the family’s arrival, was “a two-class society: poor and dirt poor.”⁴ If you weren’t working for customs or the railroad, the saying went, you were working for Hale. That wasn’t entirely true, of course. There were roughly 700 people living in the village at the time the Hales arrived. Local folks owned and ran shops and general stories and gas stations. There was a fairly new school with a principal and well-educated teachers, a post office, a town sheriff. There was WPA work and lumbering and river drives and sporting camps. It was true, the Depression lingered and families welcomed the extra income. Some found full time work at Sunrise Farm. Local men farmed the Hale property, worked in the mills and built the Hale’s buildings. Others cared for the herd of dairy cows and other livestock. Local women cooked and cleaned. But Vanceboro was an active railroad hub and international border crossing at the time and doing just fine before the Hales arrived.

In a chapter fittingly called “Audacity,” Judson Hale describes the shock of arriving in a place so remote “there were no inns, hotels, motels…no drug store, no golf courses, no tennis courts, no swimming pools, no summer people, no library, and no organizations like Lions, Rotary, Women’s Club, Historical Society.”⁵ Their shock says more about the rarified air the Hales breathed than Vanceboro, itself. In fact, there was a station restaurant and hotel. There was an active Knights of Pythias fraternity, Masonic Lodges in McAdam and Danforth, each with an active Order of the Eastern Star. There were sporting camps and lodges with world-class hunting and fishing. The entire lake region was a swimming pool. There was a beautiful well-maintained baseball field and a successful town team. There were lively school events and Catholic and Methodist churches where parishioners planned annual picnics, spring socials, and bingo nights.

The people of Vanceboro provide a kind of comic relief for Judson Hale. He gives them a dialect more likely to be found in Jonesport than a town bordering New Brunswick, where no one says bahgain for bargain or ayuh for yes. In bits of dialogue good for a laugh but most certainly never uttered, local people sound uneducated and, well, stupid. For example, Hale recounts an acquaintance’s report of an overheard exchange between a customer and local storeowner, Aubrey Tague (misspelling Teague throughout the book).

Anyone who knew the well-spoken Mr. Tague, himself originally from New Brunswick, would never, for a minute, believe it.

The man with the glass eye was, in fact, John (Jack) Rankin Grant from St Croix, New Brunswick, himself unlikely to speak in such a dialect.⁶

On many occasions, Judson Hale positions his mother, Marian — her training as a opera singer, her sophisticated upbringing, her clothing and manners, “her cultured Boston accent”⁷ — against the uncouth, uncultured townspeople. She was a lady, unlike a local woman with her “small, snuffling, raggedy” children.⁸ Vanceboro people, he wrote, were in awe of Marian Hale and her efforts, a “first step in bringing culture and the arts” to backwoods Vanceboro.⁹ To be sure, by the time the Hale’s arrived, The Armstrong Picture House had closed, along with the other productions offered there. But of course, there was the movie house in McAdam and a variety of performances came through town on the railroad. Families could take the train to St. John, Calais, Bangor or Boston for events and they did. And while opera may not have been on the Vanceboro docket before the Hales arrived, there was a lot of local music and art, a rich cultural heritage, with fiddlers and singers and poets and dancers. Vanceboro and neighboring towns across the border shared a unique way of life and culture seemingly lost on the Hale family.

In the end, Judson Hale writes, their venture brought out “the best and worse in Vanceboro.”¹⁰ The best, Hale implies, was the townspeople’s initial embrace of his family, their appreciation and compliance, their hard work in the service of Roger Hale’s vision.

The worst was twofold. First, the local suspicion of the German-speaking visitors to the farm and the Swiss teachers the Hales hired. Though not a full excuse — there was some nasty behavior¹¹— in truth, it was a scary time. Hitler was on the rise in 1936. Canada entered the war in 1939; the US in 1941. The two countries shared a fear of Hitler’s army. Yet, had the Hales protected themselves less from “backwards Maine living”¹² and built a deeper trust and connection with the community, such suspicions may never have taken hold.

Second were Hale’s accusations that he had been “stolen blind” by his workers.¹³ Roger Hale, his son suggests, was just too honest, an easy mark, someone who paid too much for local work and in the end fell victim to unscrupulous employees. But Hale held the purse strings and was in full charge of all operations. There may have been some light-fingered laborers or wasted lumber or equipment, but the suggestion that this accounts for a million dollar foundering fails the sniff test.

Epilogue

Sunrise Farm went on the auction block on Oct. 26, 1949. Everything went, from land to buildings to farm and lab and mill equipment. In an echo of the earlier land purchase, building construction, and failure of F. Shaw and Bros. tannery, dozens of local folks like Paul Susee, Frank Gatcomb, Daniel and Philip McIver, bought back land and buildings. Like many current and seasonal residents, the Luppi (Crandlemire) family and Alaine and Christopher Hinshaw can trace their camp property to Roger Hale. My grandmother, Louise (Hodgkins) Main, brought up on High Street, bought the Hale farmhouse with its seventeen rooms and six bathrooms and opened a fishing and hunting lodge. Her sister, Muriel (Hodgkins) Kegin, helped cooked for the lodgers and soon after, my mother, Diane (Main) Brown, newly divorced, moved in with her children, my brother and sister.

My father, Lindy Brown, was a Vanceboro teenager when the Hales arrived, one of the local boys who chose the railroad over working for Sunrise Farm. Years later, when The Education of a Yankee was published, he gave a copy of the book to my mother as a Christmas present, a reminder of her time on The Farm, as our family called it. The two of them read and talked about Judson Hale’s version of Vanceboro and his off-kilter descriptions of people they knew so well. As was often the case, my mother struggled more with inaccuracies than my father. She wrote Hale a letter informing him that he’d confused Aub Tague with someone else and let him know her mother bought the farmhouse. It’s safe to say, his response — his misrepresentation of her name, continued use of Teague for Tague and pleasant lack of accountability — did not delight her.

In his novel, This is Happiness, Niall Williams writes, “A hundred books could not capture a single village.” We all have our stories and family histories of Vanceboro. But we can and should take care not to cast personal memory and family loyalty as fact, as truth. There are, no doubt, bits and pieces of Sunrise Farm sitting on dusty barn shelves and tucked in garage and basement boxes, no denying the significance of the Hale’s presence and its impact on Vanceboro. There’s also, we know, another version of the story.

Footnotes

1. A Brahmin refers to a socially or culturally superior person, especially one from New England. ↩︎
2. Judson Hale, The Education of a Yankee, Harper & Row, 1987, p. 33. ↩︎
3. The Education of a Yankee, p. 57. ↩︎
4. The Education of a Yankee, p. 53. ↩︎
5. The Education of a Yankee, p. 35. ↩︎
6. Thank you to Terry Cummings for this information. ↩︎
7. The Education of a Yankee, p. 59. ↩︎
8. The Education of a Yankee, p. 61. ↩︎
9. The Education of a Yankee, p. 59. ↩︎
10. The Education of a Yankee, p. 59. ↩︎
11. The Education of a Yankee, p. 95. ↩︎
12. The Education of a Yankee, p. 156 ↩︎
13. The Education of a Yankee, p. 163. ↩︎