Here and Everywhere Else: Small-Town Maine and the World

By Andrew Witmer

Winner of an Award of Excellence, American Association for State and Local History (AASLH)
In 1822, settlers pushed north from Massachusetts and other parts of New England into Monson, Maine. On land taken from the Penobscot people, they established prosperous farms and businesses. Focusing on the microhistory of this village, Andrew Witmer reveals the sometimes surprising ways that this small New England town engaged with the wider world across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Townspeople fought and died in distant wars, transformed the economy and landscape with quarries and mills, and used railroads, highways, print, and new technologies to forge connections with the rest of the nation.

Here and Everywhere Else starts with Monson’s incorporation in the early nineteenth century, when central Maine was considered the northern frontier and over 90 percent of Americans still lived in rural areas; it ends with present-day attempts to revive this declining Maine town into an artists’ colony. Engagingly written, with colorful portraits of local characters and landmarks, this study illustrates how the residents of this remote place have remade their town by integrating (and resisting) external influences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781613769447

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HERE & EVERY

WHERE ELSE

Copyright © 2022 by University of Massachusetts Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-62534-665-0 (paper); 666-7 (hardcover)

Designed by Deste Roosa

Set in Museo Sans, Museo Slab, and Adobe Caslon Pro

Printed and bound by Books International, Inc.

Cover design by Kristina Kachele, llc

Cover art by Alan Bray, P. W. Knight & Son’s [Monson, ME], 1978.

Courtesy of Alan Bray.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Witmer, Andrew, author.

Title: Here and everywhere else : small-town Maine and the world / Andrew Daryl Witmer.

Other titles: Small-town Maine and the world

Description: Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021054478 (print) | LCCN 2021054479 (ebook) | ISBN 9781625346650 (paperback) | ISBN 9781625346667 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781613769447 (ebook) | ISBN 9781613769430 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Monson (Me.)—History. | Country life—Maine—Monson—History. | Country life—United States—History. | United States—Rural conditions. | Piscataquis County (Me.)—Economic conditions—21st century. | Local history.

Classification: LCC F29.M8 W58 2022 (print) | LCC F29.M8 (ebook) | DDC 974.1/25—dc23/eng/20211116

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054478

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054479

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

FOR MAUREEN, KATIE, BENJAMIN, & JOHN, AND FOR MY PARENTS

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

THE VIEW FROM HOMER HILL

CHAPTER 1

THE PATHS INTO TOWN

CHAPTER 2

FROM AWAY

CHAPTER 3

WRITING HOME

CHAPTER 4

OVER HERE AND OVER THERE

CHAPTER 5

WHAT IS RIGHT AROUND ME

AFTERWORD

SILICON VALLEY AND SMALL-TOWN MAINE

Notes

Index

PREFACE

Growing up in rural Maine, my brothers and I loved listening to albums by the Maine humorist Tim Sample. He told funny stories in an accent that sounded like most of our friends and neighbors. Our parents were from Pennsylvania, so we sounded different. Sample’s album How to Talk Yankee, which he and Bob Bryan presented as a guide to a foreign language, helped us slip into thick accents at will, dropping r’s left and right and sprinkling in as many ayuhs and wickeds as any native Mainah. Sample’s stories often involved tensions between native Mainers and people from away. Some raised questions about local belonging and how communities constituted themselves. In one bit, while speaking in character to spoof rigid definitions of insiders and outsiders, Sample held that his ninety-seven-year-old neighbor was obviously not a native because he had only lived in Maine since he was six months old. When the neighbor ventured that at least his children, born in state, were natives, Sample shot back, You can call them anything you want. But I tell you this: if I had a cat had kittens in the oven, I wouldn’t call them biscuits.

This story was about us. Even as we laughed, we recognized the truth behind the humor. Rural communities in Maine, and probably everywhere else, could be hard to break into. Some small-town residents seemed suspicious of outsiders and outside influences. Still, we knew just as surely that this was home. We felt far more like insiders than outsiders. And our town offered plentiful evidence, most of it lost on me at the time, that local people had created this place and achieved its greatest prosperity by deliberately forging connections with the outside world.

Fast-forward through college, two jobs in journalism, graduate school, and the beginnings of my career as a professional historian, far from rural Maine. Without much warning, but to my great delight, my academic interests, in combination with personal reflection and current events, began leading me toward a project on rural Maine. My research on nineteenth-century American missionary ventures abroad had required me to work across several scales of activity and identity and left me eager to learn more about how local, regional, national, and even global scales might become enmeshed in everyday life. Why not explore this topic from the perspective of one place, ideally a community I cared about and wanted to know better? Such a project might speak across the divide between academic history and rural America’s tradition of locally authored local history, a rift I saw as a loss for universities and for many communities. Years of conversing with family and friends, reading Wendell Berry, and settling into the community where I now live with my family had caused me to reflect more on my relationship with my native place. My choice to move on had been part of a larger history. During the decade that I graduated from high school and left for good, my rural county lost more than 7 percent of its population, reflecting national trends that left much of rural America reeling. What lay behind these changes, and what did it mean for the nation? In the past several years, political developments have drawn more attention to these long-standing questions. Both popular and scholarly analyses have tended to focus on the significant loss endured by those who remain in rural places and on the resulting feelings of helplessness and even rage. This was part of the story of the American countryside, but I was pretty confident it wasn’t the whole story.

Here and Everywhere Else surveys two centuries of momentous change in rural America by exploring the shifting relationship between one small Maine town and the wider world. Although the story includes its share of loss and disappointment, I worked to write the book in color rather in the gray of decline or the sepia of nostalgia, both of which distort our view of the past by pressing us to peer through the lens of the present. During most of the decades covered here, residents of rural areas were optimistic about the future. Many worked confidently to strengthen their rural communities by exploiting developments, including the growing power of industry and cities, that in hindsight might seem to have been their undoing. They fashioned the rich diversity of small-town America not by building walls around their villages but by combining outside influences in their own ways and for their own ends. Rural people were not simply acted upon; they were leading agents in the dramatic changes that transformed the American countryside, and they still are.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not exist without the Monson Historical Society. In particular, I’m grateful to Glenn Poole, Estella Kronholm Bennett, and Wayne Bennett for generously sharing sources and insights, patiently fielding my questions, and modeling deep commitment to a place and its past. Building on a tradition that has endured for generations, volunteers have done enough collecting, cataloging, scanning, transcribing, and writing about local history to fill many books.

I’m also grateful to the many Monson people (or people with an interest in Monson) who shaped this book by sharing their stories, advice, documents, or photographs. This includes Alan Bray, John Wentworth, Van Wentworth, Dawn MacPherson-Allen, DeDe Venott, Robb and Anabel Gray, John Tatko, Cliff Olson, Buster Emanuelson, Marie and Dick Welsh, Lyman Holmes, Carl Marsano, Elaine Roberts, Jeff Ryan, Alden Sprague, Jeff Russell, Craig Mathews, Carlson Williams, Wendy Weiger, Dan Bouthot, Dawn Potter, and Todd Watts.

Further afield, Micah Pawling offered guidance on Penobscot history, Charlotte McGill and Chris Huntington opened their Sprinchorn collection, and Dave Field shared transcriptions of Myron Avery’s letters. I’m glad for this chance to acknowledge their contributions and those of the following individuals and institutions: Tiffany Link and Sofia Yalouris (Maine Historical Society), Desiree Butterfield-Nagy (Special Collections, Raymond H. Fogler Library, University of Maine, Orono), Sam Howes (Maine State Archives), Melanie Mohney (Maine State Library), Claudette Coyne (Maine Historic Preservation Commission), Bill Low and Corie Audette (Bates College Museum of Art), Alida Brady (Smithsonian American Art Museum), Shannon Schwaller (U.S. Army War College Library), and Brian King (Appalachian Trail Conservancy Archives).

The Libra Foundation generously supported research and publication of this book while never once asking to see or approve any part of it. I’m also grateful to Craig Denekas and Owen Wells for taking the time to discuss the foundation’s history and work with me.

Many colleagues at James Madison University, especially in the Department of History, have been good friends to me and to this project. Thanks in particular to Evan Friss for all of the long walks and wise counsel. David Ehrenpreis encouraged me to push forward at a crucial time. Thanks to Dietrich Maune and the Center for Global Engagement, I got to write part of this book in London. Thanks to Kevin Chamberland and a stellar group of JMU students, it was a semester filled with laughter and adventure as well as cold, rain, and (at the end) the shock of a pandemic. This book has also benefited from conversations with students in my graduate and undergraduate seminars on scale in the study of the early United States. JMU Libraries provided abundant and expert support. I’m grateful to Robert Aguirre, Chris Arndt, Maura Hametz, and Gabrielle Lanier for advancing my work on this book with grants from the College of Arts and Letters (especially the Edna T. Shaeffer Humanist Award) and the Department of History.

Jen Garrott and her team at C-SPAN pushed some of my findings about Monson’s history into the world by broadcasting one of my lectures, and it’s a pleasure to publicly return thanks.

Thank you to Brian Halley, Rachael DeShano, Sarah Culver, Courtney Andree, Sally Nichols, Deste Roosa, Dawn Potter, and the rest of the team at the University of Massachusetts Press for an enjoyable and rewarding partnership on this project. Thanks also to the external readers, whose incisive comments improved the manuscript. This book could not have found a better home.

Working on the maps with Kate Blackmer was a delightful experience that taught me far more about Monson than I expected. I’m grateful for help from Cliff Olson and from my parents and brothers. It takes a village (and a highly skilled cartographer) to draw one.

This book has been shaped by family members, including Eugene and Anne Witmer and Morgan and Marianne Whitebread, and by the community where I now live. Thanks to Mike Bailey and Mike Deaton, comrades in the Literary Association, whose friendship has enriched me and whose skill in reading has made me a better writer. Thanks as well to my wonderful neighbors, and to my church family at Christ Presbyterian.

My brothers, Tim and Stephen, were partners in exploration long before this book began. Tim, a registered Maine guide, fielded questions about local geography and topography, sorted through old deeds, and gamely drove his Jeep down a narrow four-wheeler trail as we traced the path Joseph Bearce took into Monson in 1815. Stephen’s writing about pastoral ministry in small places, and his deep commitment to his own, have educated and inspired me. Stephen offered smart comments on the entire manuscript. While I worked on this book, the three of us hiked the slate vein, climbed Katahdin, and with our families paddled Lake Hebron and Monson Pond.

My parents, Daryl and Mary Witmer, have spent most of their lives in small-town Maine. They were my first teachers, and have taught me much of what I know about what matters most. Both offered encouragement and valuable insights as I worked on this book.

My fondest thanks are for those I love the most. Katie, Ben, and John were with me for every step of this journey, from summer visits to Monson (wonderful) to sampling spruce gum (less so). They ask good questions, say funny things, and fill our home with friends, noise, and laughter. I love being their father more than just about anything in the world. As everyone who knows her will agree, Maureen is a joy and a light. Her kindness, strength, wisdom, and beauty delight and sustain me. She is my best friend. This book is for my family and for my parents.

HERE & EVERY

WHERE ELSE

FIGURE 0.1. Village of Monson, Maine, showing locations mentioned in this book.

INTRODUCTION

THE VIEW FROM HOMER HILL

When twenty-seven-year-old Sarah Mathews married Henry Hoar in December 1860 and moved onto the hill his father owned, she moved up in more ways than one. The Hoars had been farming their central Maine property for three decades. By the time Sarah joined the family, the value of their farm overlooking the village of Monson had placed them in the top 10 percent of the town’s landowners. Earlier that year the census taker had found Sarah living with her parents and working as a tailoress. Now she assumed the status (and the endless and exhausting duties) of a married woman keeping house on a busy farm. During the following years, Sarah gave birth to two sons, Wallace and Edward, and two daughters, both of whom died young. With a speed suggesting that the family name had become a burden, Sarah and Henry changed Hoar to Homer shortly after his father’s death in 1873, when Henry inherited the family farm. Sarah became the sole owner of Homer Hill when Henry died in 1882. She remained there for the rest of her life, tending the farm with her sons and keeping a watchful eye on the changes that transformed Monson and the wider world between her arrival on the hill four months before the start of the Civil War and her death in 1916 during the First World War.¹

Daily journals kept by Sarah Homer and other family members during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveal a world pulsing with activity within narrow bounds: washing clothes, hauling logs, scrubbing floors, harrowing fields, tending cattle and sheep, clearing roads, hunting, fishing, attending church services, and visiting with neighbors. Sarah, Wallace, Edward, and Ann (who married Edward in 1904) keenly observed the human and natural rhythms of their place. Walking in her orchard one day in early May, Sarah spied two men out fishing, first boat seen on Lake Hebron this spring. Sitting at her open window in summer, she could hear church bells announcing an evening meeting and the town band blaring patriotic tunes on Independence Day. Toward the end of a long Maine winter, Ann reported, People are on wheels in the village and we heard Blue Birds. The Homer family delighted in birds. Sarah recorded winter sightings of chickadees, woodpeckers, and blue jays and rejoiced when warmer temperatures brought the kinetic cacophony of warblers, larks, robins, wrens, sparrows, and finches, drawing a thousand birds around our place today. One night in May, whip-poor-wills kept her awake past midnight. Wallace built houses for birds, read about them in books, and stuffed and sold hundreds of them in his taxidermy business. Impressed by the number of swallows’ nests on the north side of their barn, someone counted all 105. Like many other rural and small-town Americans, Sarah Homer and her family had a strong sense of what distinguished their place from every other, what made it, as the New England memoirist Jane Brox resonantly writes, here and nowhere else.²

Everyone agreed that Homer Hill offered the best views in Monson: the lake to the south, Main Street to the southeast, and hills and forest stretching away east and northeast to Borestone, Barren, and other Appalachian pinnacles. On some summer days, Sarah Homer counted as many as forty people walking past her home and up the hill to look around. New Englanders had long been captivated by such views of their villages. For instance, Yale College president Timothy Dwight’s 1794 poem Greenfield Hill surveys the world from a Connecticut hilltop, considering landscape, history, society, and politics and imagining every town a world within itself. The conceit highlights an important element of locality, focusing attention on what exists apart from outside influence, what is unique, what happens only here. But Dwight’s poem also notes the effects of commerce, warfare, and other kinds of movement in and out of the area. Its view from Greenfield Hill stretches around the world, from the history of Caribbean slavery to the future of American expansion across the continent, carrying, as the poet imagined, local virtues and values to the Pacific and beyond until peace, and piety, the world o’erflow.³

Sarah Homer’s view from Homer Hill (figure 0.2) was equally expansive. From its beginnings in the years following the War of 1812, Monson had relied on close connections with the wider world. Taking their part in four decades of antebellum placemaking, Henry Homer’s parents, William Hoar and Betsey Goodell, both arrived in Monson within several years of the town’s incorporation in 1822, joining hundreds of others pushing north from Massachusetts into central Maine lands taken from the Penobscot people. Betsey may have been among the women who in 1831 saved the village from an out-of-control fire that William had kindled to clear his fields. The two married and established a prosperous farm on the hill, profiting from a regional lumber boom that linked Monson’s farming economy to national and international trade circuits and embracing the agricultural improvements (such as sheep raising and livestock breeding) that soon swept across the rural Northeast. William and Betsey participated in other placemaking activities that situated Monson within wider networks. William spent $17 on a pew in the Congregational meeting house erected on Main Street in 1831. In reports from home, he and Betsey heard about the revivals of the Second Great Awakening spreading through Massachusetts, then experienced similar awakenings in their own congregation. Family, financial, and religious links with distant places were critical elements of the local world that William and Betsey passed along to their family. Directing their gaze to the Pacific vistas that had captivated Timothy Dwight decades earlier, Betsey (who lived with Sarah on Homer Hill until her death in 1895) and her grandson Edward both contributed hard-earned pennies to American missionary efforts in Hawaii and Micronesia.⁴

FIGURE 0.2. This photograph of Monson village shows Sarah Homer’s view from Homer Hill during the late nineteenth century. Courtesy of the Monson Historical Society.

In the months and years after Sarah Homer moved onto the hill, the ties between Monson and the wider world dramatically reshaped local life. Scores of Sarah’s neighbors marched away from home during the Civil War. When Monson residents transformed their economy and landscape through intensive quarrying after 1870, the Homers advanced the slate rush by selling property to the Dirigo and Hebron Pond quarries. Wallace Homer sometimes earned extra cash loading slate for the quarries. Sarah’s diary shows her interest in how slate was changing Monson, noting her 1891 visit to the quarries and mills, long after Massachusetts capitalists had assumed control, and recording the gruesome deaths of several quarry workers. Sarah also monitored the transformations through her front window, in the mountains of waste slate springing up lower on the hill and the billowing black smoke of the new railroad line that snaked across her fields, linking the quarries to the depot on Water Street. Drawn by quarry jobs and carried by the railroad, immigrants from Wales, Sweden, Finland, and elsewhere soon began arriving in Monson. Sarah attended lectures about Sweden and concerts by Welsh singers. She and her sons were part of the overflow crowd that spilled into the yard for the 1891 dedication of the new Swedish Lutheran church, featuring singing, praying, and speeches in Swedish and English. When Edward married Ann Pennington, whose father was an English slate splitter, Sarah folded an immigrant into her family.⁵

The same decades saw city people arriving every summer in a nationwide rural tourism boom. The Boston writer of a popular guidebook enthused, The best outlook, by all odds, for the lover of natural scenery is from the top of Homer’s Hill, above the slate-quarries. The boosterish new Monson newspaper urged tourists to climb the hill to savor the beautiful and picturesque view and visit Wallace Homer’s valuable and interesting collection of taxidermied birds and beasts. Wallace and Edward also cashed in on big-spending tourists by crafting souvenir canoe paddles that the Monson painter Seth Steward embellished with images of stately moose and leaping trout. These developments, enabled by roads improved in summer and cleared in winter by the Homer brothers, and even more by the spur line that tied Monson to the Bangor and Piscataquis Railroad in 1883, linked the village to its state and region, to the nation, and even to the world.⁶

Many of the consequences for how Monson people constituted and understood their place may be glimpsed in the social lives of Sarah Homer and her family. Two years after construction of the new railroad line, Sarah left on a month-long visit to family and friends in Portland, Maine, and in Lowell, Boston, and Monson, Massachusetts. Back home on the hill, she welcomed guests and callers from southern Maine, Massachusetts, and New York and paddled up the lake to visit with summer campers at Indian Point. One regular guest was her nephew, Shailer Mathews, who often summered at the old family farmstead where Sarah had been born. As a young man, Mathews helped his cousins rake hay on the Homer Hill farm. He continued to spend summers in Monson, occasionally preaching in one of the village churches, during his rise to international fame as a liberal theologian at the University of Chicago Divinity School. A new seasonal element in Monson sociability emerged: missing family and friends as autumn leaves fell and the population thinned out for the winter. Sarah and her family whiled away the cold evenings of 1905 with Flinch, a card game popularized several years earlier in Michigan. Perhaps the sharp scent of citrus spiced the air as family members snacked on fresh fruit. Bangor and Piscataquis Railroad ledgers reveal that townspeople had begun eating out of place and season, hustling to the depot in subzero temperatures for treats such as oranges and lemons. Perhaps the housebound Homers entertained themselves by flipping through the autograph album that Wallace received for Christmas in 1880. Over the course of the following three decades, in a social practice that had recently become nationally popular, eighty-eight friends and relatives signed the album, often leaving quotations or personal messages. Most signers were local people, but a quarter were from away. More and more, Monson residents wove the fabric of locality and place, of what constituted here, from materials drawn from everywhere else.⁷

FIGURES 0.3 & 0.4. These undated photographs show Wallace Homer with his taxidermied birds in the parlor of the Homer Hill farm and Edward Homer paddling his canoe, perhaps on Lake Hebron. Courtesy of DeDe Venott.

To recover the view from Homer Hill, explicating the simultaneously bounded and expansive processes by which residents of Monson and countless other rural American places produced locality, this book builds on recent developments in academic history and on the concerns and commitments of locally authored local history. As Nicole Etcheson has shown, academic historians have long been interested in the insights opened through microscopic observation of particular places.⁸ In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, social historians studied major changes in colonial America through scrutiny of individual communities.⁹ More recently, scholars such as Mary Babson Fuhrer and Kenneth Shefsiek have written town histories that shed light on broader developments, and many studies now reveal the influence of microhistory’s quest for meaning in the microcosm, the large lessons discovered in small worlds.¹⁰

Academic historians have also paid more heed to the local because of their interest in far larger scales of analysis. The broad perspectives afforded by Atlantic, continental, hemispheric, global, and transnational approaches shattered the profession’s long-held notion that the nation was the natural scale of historical inquiry. As Thomas Bender explained, The nation cannot be its own context.¹¹ Leading historians of nation-states now refuse to take nations for granted, instead examining nation-making as a historical process.¹² By prompting more historians to raise their gaze above the nation, larger scales of analysis clarified the importance of looking below the nation. Indigenous and borderlands local histories have flourished, advancing new ways of studying colonial encounters.¹³ Mindful that sprawling global histories risk obscuring human-scale activity, some scholars have used elements of local history to inject individual personalities and agency into their large-scale studies.¹⁴ Others have pointed to local history’s ability to challenge the teleology of modernity by showing that not every place is fully or finally integrated into modern world systems. As Anne Gerritsen argues, local history can reveal the divergent, the heterogenous, the fragmented, and the contingent. Global history often charts connection; local history can show what is singular, particular, unabsorbed.¹⁵

Scholars have also drawn attention to the place of the local in the creation of larger-scale identities. As the dominant scale of lived experience, where most thick meanings and loyalties are manifested, the local is the soil in which other allegiances commonly root and rise. American nationalism, for example, sprang up in local rites and activities in which individuals were asked to connect their local lives to national affairs.¹⁶ Even Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, radically scornful of local ties, spread most widely and influentially in local settings in the early American republic, engendering what the historian John Fea has called cosmopolitan rootedness.¹⁷ Such intermixture means that identities at various scales are often co-constituted. Benjamin Looker has shown that postwar Americans consistently drew on particular understandings of urban neighborhoods to define and debate national identity in the twentieth century.¹⁸ Anne Gerritsen explores cases in which the local produces the global and the global produces the local.¹⁹ These and other studies demonstrate that local identities and activities are invariably contained within (and essential to understanding) larger scales. The point of analytical embarkation matters less than how successfully one navigates the challenges of working across scales.²⁰

Just as historians of the nation have been compelled by the denaturalization of the nation to investigate nationalism’s invention and development over time, so local history must be aware of the constructed nature of local identities and loyalties and explain how they emerged, waxed, waned, and evolved in relation to larger scales of activity. The village cannot be its own context. Because it is more clearly and tangibly encountered in everyday life than other scales are, local is often treated as an established fact. Yet as the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai argues, locality never emerges naturally or automatically. It must be cultivated, sustained, and reproduced. The structures of feeling, activities, and material effects that characterize locality may be absent in even the smallest of settlements.²¹ Those who have lived in small towns know that the honest answer to a question routinely asked by curious outsiders, Does everyone there know everyone else?, is generally It’s a place where one could if one wished. Local history produces its most meaningful and portable insights when it explains rather than assumes local.

The local itself contains multiple scales. Below the nineteenth-century village we might find neighborhoods, streets, and other micro-localities, each with its own affinities, concerns, and histories looming large in the lives of residents.²² Above the village, scholars must recognize the tendency of nineteenth-century Americans to endow the county with more social and cultural heft than is now common, collecting the biographies of county notables, writing county histories, and printing county maps (often featuring images of area towns). People who live together on the same terrain may create clashing localities. The historian Anthony Kaye has shown that enslaved people across the antebellum South understood neighborhood differently from their enslavers and organized sociality, intimacy, and resistance around this distinctive arrangement of space.²³

For well over two centuries, national and global developments have played essential roles in the production of locality in the United States. The relationship between the national and local, and even more the global and local, is often understood as zero-sum: one waxes; the other wanes. Yet even the most burdensome demands of the nation have sometimes fortified locality, whether through compliance or resistance. In many Maine towns, the number of men who sacrificed their lives in wartime service to the nation is a point of local identity and pride. Similarly, the changes introduced by globalization might stimulate locality. As the nineteenth-century world grew more interconnected, local gained new meaning and importance. In 1850 a central Maine newspaper editor commented, Almost every thing seems to be assuming a local aspect. Each locality sends forth an appeal to sustain and encourage its own interests in preference to those at a distance.²⁴

The complex and constructed nature of locality, and its formative relationship with larger scales of activity and identity, requires a richer theory of local than the commonplace notion that it denotes something belonging exclusively to a particular area. The geographer Doreen Massey has challenged this essentialist and internalist account with an extroverted conceptualization of place and locality. Massey maintains that localities may never be understood in isolation from the world beyond. All places are constructed from articulations of social relations that