“Way Back on a Farm in Norway, Maine ”

___Vivian Akers, Dunham snowshoe brochure, Ca. 1926

Crockett Ridge, 1880

Alanson Mellen Dunham - it is pronounced “a - LAN - son”, accent on the second syllable, a Dunham family name for several generations, interesting because none of the successive Alansons seems to have been called by that name familiarly. So Alanson Mellen Dunham, Junior was “Mellie”, occasionally “Mell”, and signed his formal documents “A.M. Dunham”.

Mellie’s home, probably ca. 1910

    Mellie’s father came from Paris, Maine, to Crockett Ridge, just west of the village of Norway, Maine, overlooking Lake Pennesseewassee. He settled there and built the farm where Mellie was born on July 29, 1853, and where Mellie would spend his life. In those days small Maine farms were self- sufficient places. Mellie - and his wife, Emma Richardson Dunham, a local woman whom he married in the fall of 1875 - never lost that practical independence, or the fundamental dignity of being plain country people.

Mellie’s early memories would have included seeing local men returning from the Civil War, hearing their stories, and perhaps stories of the many Maine soldiers who did not return. He grew up hunting and fishing, with a love of the outdoors shared by Emma and passed on to the Dunham grandchildren. “A dead shot,” the newspapers later said of Emma, and pictured her nonchalantly holding up a red fox she had killed.

Emma with fox, 1920's

He must have had the instincts of a tinkerer and craftsman from his boyhood, and the touch to go with it, because we hear first of his craftsmanship with snowshoes. “When he was 12 he traded for the frames of an old-fashioned pair of snowshoes and filled them with rawhide,” reports a 1906 newspaper interview. Later, in his early 20's, he began making snowshoes for sale.

Whitman’s history of Norway (1924) says “Clarence M. Smith was the designer and maker of a snowshoe that turned up at the toe. Alanson M. Dunham, Jr., began making snowshoes at his home for the trade in a small way and employed Mr. Walter F. Tubbs and others. He broadened the toe of the shoe and made a long and short kind.” The result was a showshoe that became the model for local makers and manufacturers. The Tubbs family were neighbors just down the road on Crockett Ridge. Walter Tubbs eventually started his own company, and by the 1930's Norway boasted that it was “the snowshoe capital of the world.”

Receipt for snowshoes,1905

Mellie’s most famous customer was explorer Robert Peary. Peary was born in Pennsylvania, moved to Portland, Maine at age three, and graduated from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine in 1877. He spent the next two years working as a surveyor in Fryeburg, Maine, not far from Mellie’s home in Norway, before joining the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, then the Navy.

We do not know how Mellie’s friendship with Peary came about, but by the time Peary was planning his 1905-06 expedition they were friends. The February 1906 interview quotes Mellie: “I always said I had rather make snowshoes for Peary than for any other man I know of. Early last spring a letter came from my old friend, asking me to make the snowshoes for his party. I added a special pair for my old friend and also shoes for Mrs. Peary and Master Robert.”

Mellie with Peary Snowshoes, 1905-08

After the 1905-06 expedition failed to reach the Pole, Peary went North again, in 1908-09. He reached the North Pole in April, 1909, on Mellie’s snowshoes, one of the few pieces of equipment that Peary did not manufacture for the expedition himself. As the photo shows, the special shoes Mellie designed for Peary were unusually long and narrow; one newspaper account says that it was Peary himself who developed the design.

It was a matter of some pride for Mellie when Peary was quoted as saying that the Dunham snowshoes never failed him. Peary showed his appreciation in return by bringing Mellie gifts from the Arctic that filled a room at the Dunham home, and included a narwhal tusk and a whale vertebra that the grandchildren used as a kind of exotic rocking horse. Lowell Barnes, Junior was Mellie’s first great-grandchild, the son of Rose Noble Barnes and Lowell Barnes. In a 1982 magazine article he remembered Mellie’s house:

"When I was a small boy living with my great-grandfather, there were long periods of time when I had no other children to play with. I used to go into the room with all the artifacts - it was like a museum - and sit for long hours at a time. I memorized every artifact; and were I an artist, I could recreate that entire room very precisely. I particularly remember that there was a whale's vertebra in the middle of the room. It was so large that when I sat upon it, my feet would not touch the floor. In another corner there was a kayak made out of hide that leaned obliquely in a corner, and next to it were three harpoon-type of spears made of ivory. There was a walrus skull with tusks that was very impressive to me in another corner of the room. It was all very, very fascinating.”

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