These pages explore some curious byways of Maine literature, folklore, and history. Many of the texts reprinted here do not appear elsewhere on the World Wide Web.
Jonathan Buck's Tombstone
C.A. Stephens
Robert P. Tristram Coffin,
The Foot of Tucksport
Oscar Morrill Heath,
Jonathan Buck, His Curse
Many visitors to Bucksport, Maine (a beautiful town on Penobscot Bay), have seen the gravestone of the town's founder, Jonathan Buck (1719-1795), on which there is a fault shaped like a human foot. A legend has developed which attempts to explain the presence of the fault, supposedly caused the curse of a witch condemned to death by Buck.
The legend is completely unhistorical, as an essay by Valerie Van Winkle, Legends of Jonathan Buck, convincingly demonstrates. A pamphlet by Blakely B. Babcock, Jonathan Buck of Bucksport -- The Man and the Myth, (Ellsworth, Maine: The Ellsworth American, 1975), also does a good job of debunking the legend (pp. 33-40), emphasizing that: 1) No one was ever executed for witchcraft in Maine. 2) Jonathan Buck was a justice of the peace, not a judge. 3) The monument on which the fault appears was erected in 1852, long after Buck's death. 4) Such flaws are not uncommon in granite blocks.
In a ballad entitled The Foot of Tucksport, Robert P. Tristram Coffin tells the story, changing the name of the town from Bucksport to Tucksport and the name of its founder from Buck to Tuck.
The source for many of the details in Coffin's ballad seems to be a story entitled Jonathan Buck, His Curse, which appeared in a privately published book, Composts of Tradition (Chicago: O.M. Heath and Co., 1913), by Oscar Morrill Heath.
Maine author C.A. Stephens (1844-1931) wrote thousands of stories for The Youth's Companion, many of them set on a farm in the vicinty of Norway, Maine, and featuring a group of orphans (Addison, Theodora, Halstead, Ellen, Wealthy, and the narrator) being raised by their grandparents, the Old Squire and Grandmother Ruth. These stories contain a wealth of technical detail about rural Maine life in the last half of the nineteenth century, especially about such pursuits as making maple sugar, haying, cutting cordwood, bee keeping, cutting ice, etc.