WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

Maine: A Guide ‘Down East’ appeared in 1937 as the American Guide Series volume for Maine, written by workers of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of Maine and sponsored by the Maine Development Commission. In a preface signed by the State Director of the project, the editors set Maine within the larger national portrait the series was assembling — the State-by-State development that, as the perspective broadened, brought the Nation’s northeast corner into focus.

The preface is candid about the labor and friction behind a guide of this kind. The Maine staff, it allows, met the same trials as their fellow workers in other States: facts about Maine often bogged down before several accepted authorities at variance on a single point, and a lone item might baffle the most intrepid research worker. Verification and re-verification carried the personnel through turbulent days of production before the volume reached completion.

Following the pattern set for the series, the guide opens with essays on the general background — the Nation’s northeast corner, the Red Paint People and the Abnaki, history and State government, the industries of pine, paper, and power, the Maine farm, racial elements, folklore, education and religion, architecture, the arts, and handicrafts. It then describes the seaports and river towns of Augusta, Bangor, Brunswick, Portland, and Waterville, before laying out nineteen numbered highway tours with their lettered branches and a short series of island tours among the coastal waters.

A closing part turns from road to recreation, with sections on inland and salt-water fishing, hunting, canoeing, hiking and mountain climbing, riding, yachting, and winter sports, rounded out by a chronology, a selected reading list, and an index. The result is a portrait of Maine caught between its working coast and its woods — a book meant, in the project’s phrase, to bring the Maine scene to the visitor without being either romantic or encyclopedic.