I didn’t know I had this photo. I don’t know who took it. I didn’t think anyone in our family was taking color photos in the early 60s. But here I am in Limestone, Maine, in October of either 1961 or 1962, sitting on a potato barrel, during a pause in the potato harvest. If it’s 1961, I am twelve going on thirteen.
Why am I picking potatoes at the age of twelve, like a waif in a Dickens novel, when I should be in school? Well, there is no school in Aroostook County, Maine, during the potato harvest. The county’s economy runs on potatoes, so school starts two or three weeks earlier than in other places and goes into recess during the harvest, so that everyone can work the potato fields — and by “everyone”, I mean *everyone*.
Only recently, apparently, are some school districts abandoning the practice. Nowadays, with more mechanization and stricter child labor laws (or stricter enforcement, maybe), it looks as if twelve-year-olds no longer go out in the fields in the freezing dawn to fill potato barrels by hand, at twenty-five cents per barrel, as I did. Of course, they’re not learning the value of a dogged work ethic, either, as I did.
Compare that photo with this one from about 1954, which looks as if it was taken by Dorothea Lange:
Photo Credit : Aroostook County Potato Picking, Maine, 1954. Photograph by Verner Reed; © Historic New England
And check out these articles about the current state of things in Aroostook County:
https://newengland.com/today/lessons-of-the-field-maines-aroostook-county-potato-harvest/
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