Potato Farming

The story of potato farming in Aroostook County began in June 1807, when Joseph Houlton planted the first recorded crop of Early Blue, or Blue Nose, potatoes. Early settlers clearing land across the county soon planted more acreage after discovering that the region's well-drained loam soils and cool climate suited the crop. Early commercial shipments moved quickly; Fort Fairfield Custom House accounts from 1833 recorded 342,355 bushels of potatoes alongside 2,692 tons of starch, which consumed 670,500 bushels. By 1871, Alba Holmes converted an unused woolen mill in Caribou into the county's first potato starch factory, and a builder named Wheeler constructed another mill in Presque Isle in 1874, contracting acreage with local farmers to purchase potatoes at 25 cents per bushel. By 1890, forty-two starch factories operated across the county to absorb surplus harvests, expanding to 62 factories by 1900. When the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad reached Houlton in January 1894, joining rail links established to Presque Isle and Caribou in 1881, direct shipping opened to major urban markets like Boston and New York, spurring the creation of 1,000 new farms between 1890 and 1900.

Inventive growers and merchants shaped the industry at every turn. Elisha E. Parkhurst introduced potato spraying to produce good crops, built an early starch factory, and raised seed and table stock in Presque Isle, while E. L. Cleveland established a major commercial seed business in Houlton handling Green Mountain, Irish Cobbler, and Spaulding Rose varieties. Russian immigrant Hiram Adelman built one of the county's largest operations in Mars Hill, and Silas W. Taber patented an improved drop-axle wagon gear in 1903 that lowered wagon beds to ease loading heavy barrels in the field. Seeking scientific backing for their work, starch and potato leader Thomas Phair and fellow businessmen persuaded the Maine Legislature in 1913 to fund a dedicated demonstration station. In 1914, the Maine Agricultural Experiment Station purchased the 275-acre Greenwood Farm south of Presque Isle to establish Aroostook Farm, where researchers studied tillage methods, fertilizers, and disease management. Now encompassing 425 acres on Houlton Road as the University of Maine's research and extension center, the facility tests storage methods and breeds disease-resistant varieties, including the Caribou Russet released in 2015.

Fieldwork forged deep community rhythms throughout northern Maine. Early manual harvests relied on workers filling ash baskets and emptying them into wooden barrels, receiving numbered identification tickets to track pay. To support the fields, schools in Saint Agatha, Caribou, and across the county formally scheduled two- to three-week autumn harvest recesses beginning around 1945 so students could assist local farms. Even as mechanized one-row and two-row diggers began appearing in the 1940s and 1950s—such as those David Merritt adopted on his Pease Road farm in Mapleton to lay out potatoes for hand harvest into cedar barrels—manual pickers still set remarkable marks, including a picker who filled 142 cedar barrels in a single day at Donald Gallagher's Fort Fairfield farm in 1962. Growers continued to refine their fields over time, even experimenting with sugar beets as a rotation crop during the 1970s before dropping them due to harvest scheduling conflicts.

That deep agricultural past remains a visible part of local life. In Littleton, the Southern Aroostook Agricultural Museum preserves harvest heritage with historic barrel-making tools, seed cutters, graders, bags, and horse-drawn diggers in the Hagan Barn, alongside a giant harvest basket handwoven by Micmac artisan Richard Silliboy. In Fort Fairfield, the annual multi-day Maine Potato Blossom Festival, established in the 1930s, continues to celebrate the commercial industry every July when the fields come into bloom.