An introduction to features from our October 2024 Edition:

I was brought up zipping around the worn wooden floors in a tricycle many times my age in my great-granddads old farm in Bethel every summer. I proudly learned to milk my first cow with my grandfather in Winterport. 

Generations of hardy farmers have looked on as the world around them has so rapidly changed. I have watched roof lines of once-sturdy barns bend with age. It happens over time in such a way that it’s often not noticed. Few of their decedents stay to farm, leaving many farms across our beloved state abandoned. 

Nature takes a toll, especially in the freeze-thaw cycle up here. Wallpaper once picked out by a blushing bride begins to peel. Cracks appear in the horsehair plaster walls causing them to crumble. Door frames warp so the latches no longer catch. Windows fracture and let in the drifting snow, which melts each spring between softening floorboards. Appliances tilt. Cupboard doors opened countless times by children climbing onto the counter in search of something sweet begin to open on their own, and sway in the breeze as tattered curtains billow. 

Wildlife calls these old farms home now. My grandfather’s barn is inhabited by gray fox where a row of dairy cows once lined up to feed when I was a little girl. The gentle cows would lick at my coat with course tongues as I snuck by, trying to avoid the cobwebs. The fields have gone to weeds and the fence posts lean, held up merely by the barbed wire still holding them together. Where my husband and I live now, in the woods of Bradford, there is a perfectly-coiled roll of barbed wire next to a large tree that has seemingly swallowed it. It’s as if the farmer set it down, and simply disappeared. The size of the tree gives away the years since it was placed there, and long forgotten. I showed it to my son, so he would not trip on it while playing on the edge of the brook.

To protect these time capsules, still carrying signs of happier days, their locations have been omitted from these articles. Maybe one less farm will be vandalized by youth so far removed from Maine’s heritage that they have lost respect for the property of others, even if it has been forgotten. 

A great-granddaughter of these homesteading families may come looking for an old farm she heard stories about with dreams to renovate the farmhouse, hay the fields, and fill the barn with animals—only to find all the hand-glazed windows busted out and the walls covered with graffiti. 

As you will see in the following features, some of these farms are simply vacant, not too far gone to breathe new life into. Others are simply too far gone, and even dangerous to enter. 

My husband and his father revived my grandfather’s 1952 Farmall tractor after being parked in his barn for so long the wheels had worked their way deep into the dirt floor. It felt good to hop on and drive it back into the sunshine—even if my rather old-fashioned grandfather asked my husband if he gave permission for me to be the one to drive it out. It’s seldom I saw the stoic man smile, but he did that day.

If you have a historical family farm still in use, please reach out to our publication. We would love to hear from you. Reach us by email at:

MaineHomesteadMagazine@gmail.com