Penobscot-Piscataquis-Hancock Counties
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Brewer’s Larry Gorman North woods balladeer by Charles Francis “And when they see me coming, Their eyes stick out like prongs, Saying, “Beware of Larry Gorman! He’s the man who makes the songs.”
T
he above lines were written by Larry Gorman who is probably the best known and least-liked lumberjack to have worked in the north woods in the 1800s. Larry Gorman is the most famous lumberjack of the nineteenth century not because of his skills with an ax or a peavey, which were exceptional, but rather because he composed songs, seventy of which have been preserved. It is these same songs, however, that were responsible for making him the least-
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liked lumberjack of the time. They were biting satires designed to ridicule their unfortunate subject, who most often was someone who worked with Gorman or lived in close proximity to him. Moreover, he has been the subject of two books written by Maine authors, as well as a number of short studies in the country of his birth, Canada. Larry Gorman was born on the Trout River in West Prince, Prince Edward Island in 1846. Prince Edward Island, when Gorman was growing up there, was in a state of almost complete economic depression. For that reason, ‘Islanders’ left in droves to find work elsewhere. This meant either going to sea or working in the woods on the
mainland. Gorman was one of the great number of Islanders who traveled to the north woods of Maine and New Brunswick to find work. And it was in Maine, particularly in the area extending from Lincoln to the far reaches of Aroostook County, as well as on the Union River in Hancock County, where Gorman made his reputation. And what a reputation it was, for it included being made the central character of one of Holman Day’s novels, and having his songs collected first by Fannie Hardy Eckstorm of Brewer, Maine’s first great folklorist, and later by Professor Edward Ives, the founder of the Northeast Folklore Archives at the University of Maine.
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