George Robley Howe, August 4, 1860 - February 5, 1950. Mineralogist, naturalist, teacher. He was Uncle George to friends from Norway and well beyond Maine, a man who altered his life dramatically as he found new purposes, but whose center was never far from his home in Norway and the natural world he knew there.
George Howe was a Norway, Maine native, born and brought up on Main Street in the large house next to his father’s insurance office. George’s father Freeland was born in Sumner, and came to Norway in 1863, where he opened an insurance business and became one of Norway’s leading businessmen.
George was born in 1860, two years after his older sister Fannie; his younger brother Freeland Jr. was born in 1870. As Freeland Sr.’s family they were very much part of Norway’s social and business community.
Besides the insurance business, the elder Howe was involved in major Norway business projects, including the construction of the shoe factory and the founding of the Norway National Bank. The family were members of the Universalist Church; Freeland Sr. was well known as an avid and expert fisherman who made frequent trips to the Rangeley Lakes.
Early photos show George and Freeland Jr. fashionably dressed; Freeland was known as a fine dancer at the formal dances and balls held in town. After high school in Norway George went to Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. He spent three years there, then returned to Norway without graduating and took a job with an insurance company in Cleveland, Ohio, very likely arranged with his father’s assistance.
Tufts later granted George his degree, based on his experience as a mineralogist and naturalist. We do not know why George left Tufts; it is the first of the dramatic changes that occurred periodically throughout his life.
Dates for Uncle George’s life are not always easy to confirm. He left Tufts in 1882; seems to have been in Cleveland about 1883-4; and by 1885 had moved to New York City and become a reporter for the New York World. Freeland would later work for the World; and another Norway native, Don C. Seitz, became the paper’s business manager under Joseph Pulitzer and a widely known author.
The highlight of George’s work at the paper was the period of Ulysses S. Grant’s death in 1885. We have few specific details, but we know that George helped report on Grant’s last days, and was active in the movement to site Grant’s tomb in Manhattan.
George left the newspaper soon afterward and returned home to work with his father for a short time. Then he returned to New York, where he was "engaged in business" according to the Norway Advertiser. He may later have spent time in Hartford, Connecticut; the next firmly dated event is George’s marriage on April 11, 1888, to Emma Boardman, of Hartford, the daughter of a prominent Universalist clergyman. The couple returned to Norway later that spring, where George once again joined his father’s business. He soon found himself spending time away from Norway. George and Emma were in Auburn in 1890, when their daughter Marjorie, their only child, was born. By the middle of 1893 they were in Fryeburg; and it was then that Emma left and returned to Connecticut, taking Marjorie with her.
George’s 1897 divorce filing calls it "utter abandonment." There seems to have been little later contact between the two; Emma also prevented contact between George and Marjorie, who spent most of her life in Hartford, and died there in 1978. We can only speculate on these events and the reasons for them; but there is no question that Emma’s departure was the great crisis and turning point of George Howe’s life.
Abandoning his life in business, Uncle George turned to the natural world, to the mineral resources then being discovered and developed in Oxford County. Emma left in September 1893; George left the insurance job and went to board for the winter with a farm family in Denmark. Here George found himself near Pleasant Mountain, and learned that high grade amethyst had been found there some 30 years earlier.
He determined to rediscover the gems. He worked through the fall, then spent the winter studying natural history, fitting himself, perhaps without conscious volition, for a new life. Resuming his explorations in the spring of 1894, he found a vein of amethyst, and mined a substantial amount of gem quality material. He never revealed the precise location of his find, and except for some guesses the site of the deposit is still unknown.
The great Norway fire of May 9, 1894 interrupted George’s activities. The fire had destroyed a substantial portion of the business section, and the Howe insurance agency had an immense task in settling the claims.
Meantime, George’s discovery included some of the best amethyst known in the world at that time, and attracted interest from serious collectors. One fine specimen ended up in the hands of J. Pierpont Morgan, who sold it to a French dealer. The story has it that the Frenchman sold it in turn to the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Germany, a colorful tale but almost certainly not true.
By 1898 George was living in Norway again, and had developed a reputation as a mineralogist. He was associated in these activities with other local men, including George L. "Shavey" Noyes and Robert Bickford, who had grown up in Norway at that same time as George. We now see the beginning of another great change in George's life, as his sense of community and his increasing interest in all departments of natural history led to a project that changed people’s lives and would become the most powerful force in George’s later life.
There was a combination of circumstances operating around 1900. Organized youth groups were being formed everywhere to encourage physical education and teach good citizenship. George’s loss of his own family may still have been an emotional pain. And George observed that while the local youth had intelligence and energy, they had little direction. The area had produced some brilliant scholars, like the eminent biologist Addison Verrill; but George saw little of that drive for excellence in Norway’s contemporary young people.
So he turned himself into a leader and teacher of youth, a role that would define the rest of his life. He got together with Shavey Noyes, who was already a naturalist and had opened the Noyes Mountain later known as the Harvard Mine. Shavey had a distinctly Thoreauvian bent, and was an accomplished artist.
The two got together a small group of nine boys that included George’s two nephews, the sons of his sister Fannie Howe Morrison; and Shavey’s own son Gordon Max Noyes. They began leading walking trips in the area, focused on systematic study of the natural environment. The boys took notes, collected specimens, and organized and classified their discoveries. Shavey helped them learn to draw their specimens; Vivian Akers, later a talented artist and photographer, became part of the group and took pictures for it. Harry Packard, later a well-known freelance journalist, was already writing, and chronicled the group’s expeditions for the Lewiston Evening Journal.
The original group was called the Boy Scientists, and as the popularity of the organization grew it was split into multiple divisions. Each member was assigned a specific area of responsibility, for one segment of the natural world, so that there were young entomologists, mycologists and mineralogists, each a specialist in the field. By about 1904 the movement began to get wide publicity, with articles in the Boston Sunday Herald and the New York World Magazine as well as the Lewiston papers.
George was quoted in the Boston paper: "Going directly to nature, eschewing all dictation of their personal faults, and leaving them practically to find their own way to the higher discipline of character, I merely undertook to occupy their thoughts more and more with the unimpeachable facts of nature.
"Gradually they were led to construct, without much teaching, a classification of all the fauna and flora of Oxford county...."
This statement could serve as a summary of George’s work over the next several decades. It is important to note that George was not simply providing recreation, or teaching appreciation of the natural world. He encouraged participants - the groups eventually included both sexes and members of all ages - to immerse themselves in the detailed and systematic study of nature, a rigorous approach that under George’s remarkable leadership created great enthusiasm and commitment.
This example is from a 1905 New York World article describing Vivian Akers, then 19: "In the topmost branches of a pine he was endeavoring to keep his balance and photograph a nest of young crows. The wind was blowing hard, but he did not seem to mind it a bit,though it was difficult to strap the camera to the limb and get a focus."
George was as systematic in equipping the group as in teaching them natural history. He designed and had made special knapsacks that held equipment, supplies and collecting equipment sufficient for a trip of several days.
George and Shavey formed the Boy Scientists ten years before the Boy Scouts were started in the United States. Theirs was the first such organization o
f its kind in this country. Newspapers recognized it, and noticed its influence: "Norway can boast the first effective movement in the United States for interesting the boys in the active study of natural history and allied subjects.... Since the work has begun to attract attention similar classes have been formed in different parts of the United States, . . .all of which are now in correspondence with the pioneers in Norway."
The early history of the Boy Scouts involves a number of different individuals, and some confusing and competing accounts of what happened; but it seems safe to assume that because the Boy Scientists started so early, and because the Norway group was so influential, that the Boy Scientists helped to influence the shape of the Scout organization when it began.
Though busy with the youth groups, George continued his mineralogical work, which was besides its intrinsic interest a way of making money. For the members of the youth groups the fact that their better mineral finds could often be sold was also a motivation.
Then there were the fresh water pearls. About 1900 there was much excitement around the country about the pearls found in fresh water mollusks. George was already collecting pearls in local rivers, and he got the Boy Scientists started on this quite early. The best of the pearls were salable, and occasional large specimens were found, worth several hundred dollars. George’s brother Freeland, back in Norway after having worked elsewhere for some years, helped broker the finds.
Around 1910, when the Boy Scouts began organizing in the area, George seems essentially to have turned the youth groups over to them, as he became more interested in his mineralogical activities.
By this time George’s mineralogical contacts included New York gem dealers, the Harvard Mineralogical Museum and other academic institutions, and mineralogists all over the United States and in Europe.
In 1910, when there was a huge tourmaline find at the Havey quarry in Poland, it was George who organized and appraised the stones for sale, over $150,000 worth at the time, worth perhaps $3 million today. And in 1913 when the eminent French mineralogist Francois LaCroix planned a trip to America, he was referred to George as a l
ocal guide.
George’s father died in 1912, his mother in 1913. It is not clear whether his parents’ illnesses and deaths had anything to do with it, but George spent those two summers following the entire coast of Maine, on foot, a notable feat even for a person who was as much of a hiker as George was.
Mary Howe’s nurse during her prolonged bout with cancer had been Lena Furber. George’s acquaintance with her ripened after Mary’s death, and George and Lena were married in 1917. They were together only three years; in 1920 Lena herself died of cancer.
The marriage to Lena may have seemed like a new beginning to George, because about the time of the marriage he created a place to live that was very much an expression of himself. He bought land at the top of Pike’s Hill, which rises very steeply above downtown Norway, at that time clear field and pasture with spectacular views of mountains and lakes in every direction. George was later quoted as explaining that he had chosen the spot because he could see more lakes and mountains (115 peaks, it is reported) and more beautiful sunsets than any other place he knew.
Just below the top of the hill he built a small house, probably designed by him and Freeland, stucco, with clerestory windows running the length of the roof. It had only one entrance, a set of steps at the rear of the house that led to a doorway surrounded by rock and mineral specimens mortared into a wall where rose quartz, feldspar and other pieces from local mines drew the visitor’s eye. He called it Summit Study.
He surrounded the place with exotic plants, and built a rock garden with lovely specimens from the quarries. Birdhouses were everywhere; George was banding birds by the 1920’s.
George was 57 years old when he built the house. After Lena’s death he lived there alone for the rest of his life. One room was kitchen, living room and bedroom for him; the rest of the house was filled with books and specimens of minerals, birds, animals and insects. It was a museum, a library, a laboratory, and always, especially for young people, a school.
Some time in the 1920’s George was able to add the13.5 inch reflecting telescope given to him some time before 1930 by his friend Alpheus Baker Hervey, donated for the benefit of Norway’s young people. It stood originally near Summit Study, was lost for many years after Howe’s death, then found and restored in 1972. It currently belongs to Oxford Hills High School.
It may have been shortly after 1920 that George began to extend his activities to the children’s camps. It is not clear when he started working for camps, or how many camps he ultimately visited. By the mid-1920’s there were some 75 summer camps in the area, with a total population of 5000 campers; so opportunities for Uncle George would have been plentiful.
We have good documentation of his activities at two camps, Camp Mc-Wain and Birch Rock Camp, both on McWain Pond in East Waterford. McWain ran from 1924 until 1931, as a small (about 24 campers) girls camp. Birch Rock, for boys, started in 1926 and is still operating.
Helen Sanderson, one of the two founders of Camp McWain, had grown up locally and was undoubtedly familiar with George’s reputation. He began working at McWain in 1926. He normally spent at least one day a week at camp, and led a wide range of trips around the area, including visits to several mines, overnights to Streaked Mountain, and many visits to Summit Study, where the girls could sometimes sleep over and use the telescope in the evenings.
Birch Rock Camp was founded by William Brewster and Bartlett Boyden, both then living in Massachusetts; but Brewster in particular quickly made local connections, hiring Henry Cullinan, a protege and of Vivian Akers, as the camp’s first head counselor. Hugh Morton, whose family owned Paris Manufacturing, was also a counselor and a student of Akers.
So Uncle George, part of Camp McWain next door, was a natural addition, and appears in camp photos from 1926, Birch Rock’s first season. Akers also visited the two camps, where he took sets of photos for several camp seasons, taught photography at McWain, and joined George and the girls on some day trips, where he kept his camera busy.
George and the campers set up nature trails at both camps; and each of the McWain girls took home a mineral collection, the result of collecting trips to quarries, perhaps with the addition of samples from George’s pockets or the box he kept at home. No one returned from a collecting trip with George without specimens, and children who visited Summit Study usually left with a bit of amethyst or quartz.
William Brewster was a remarkable man in his own right who recognized George Howe’s worth. "Chief," as everyone at the camp called Mr. Brewster, was an instinctive leader who made decisions and acted on them. So it was typical that in 1930 Birch Rock constructed a new building to serve as the center for the camp’s natural history program, and dedicated it as the Uncle George Howe Museum.
The museum’s collection, long since dispersed, unfortunately, included some of George’s own specimens, notably a number preserved in formaldehyde. Unfortunately, these later froze during a cold winter and were destroyed. A taxidermy collection and a large butterfly collection in a wooden cabinet also appear to have come from George.The Depression had destroyed George’s basic income, which almost certainly came from inheritances from his father. By 1932 Summit Study was mortgaged, and a foreclosure threatened. And William Brewster set out to match George’s own generosity. He sent a letter to camps and Birch Rock alumni, asking for contributions; then, when George celebrated his 72nd birthday at camp that August, he was presented with the retired mortgage and a packet of congratulatory letters.
An occasion for happy tears, perhaps; but one may also say that this generosity was no more than a confirmation of George’s own belief in the inherent goodness of humanity. He treated others with generosity and kindness, believing firmly that it would be returned. And he was more often right than wrong
George’s work with camps continued through the 1930’s; and we know that he spoke often to local organizations like the 4-H Club. But his life was increasingly centered at Summit Study, which became more and more a kind of museum, archive and library.
In 1940 George celebrated his 80th birthday, which he marked by traveling north to climb Mount Katahdin, perhaps still the oldest person ever to reach Baxter Peak. He advised his young friends to stay in shape, so that they would be able to repeat his exploit when they were 80.
He had by this time an amazingly wide reputation. If we regard him as just a naturalist, or even a scientist, we are making a mistake. Beginning with the Boy Scientists about 1900, George showed that he was equally dedicated to connecting with people and communicating with them. By the mid-1930’s he was famous - but not in the way that the term is usually used. His love of people had made him Uncle George in fact, the gentle, welcoming old man who will always greet you with a smile and invite you in.
His unusual life and achievements made him a popular subject for journalists, and there are dozens of interviews and other articles about George from various papers, talking about his life and work. Summit Study became a place for everyone to visit, to George’s delight. He kept count. His guest books went back at least to the 1920’s, and every visitor had to sign.
His trust in his visitors was violated only once that we know of, in 1937, when the house was robbed and a number of gems and specimens were taken. The burglar was caught and most of the loot recovered, though George was never entirely convinced that the police had got the right culprit. The police had found it necessary to examine George’s guest books, which at that time held perhaps 100,000 names. Angered at the implication that his visitors were not to be trusted, George destroyed all the books; "These people are my friends!", he is reported to have said of the incident.
A 1931 Lewiston Evening Journal article gives a picture of Summit Study in those years: "Uncle George R. Howe, Norway’s scientist and lover of mankind, had just told his 700-and-somethingth visitors on a recent Sabbath afternoon - his July record at this Maine shrine - that in checking the facts in his register, he discovered that he had had visitors from 136 different cities and towns in Massachusetts alon
e....
"But, quite unlike Thoreau, Mr. Howe loves people, welcomes them, openly delights in the numbers who flock to his hill-temple, and gives himself to them unstintedly of the marvelous love he bears for all things inGod’s beautiful universe.
"There is no time to ask one’s health, one’s wealth, one’s destination, one’s future. Mr. Howe passes to things of immediate and intrinsic worth, and within two minutes - yes, one minute - casts a glamour about his visitors which enmeshes them in the family life of the chickadee which enters the Howe home, cheeps eagerly at his host, and departs reluctantly and unafraid; or the unusual tale of the sparrow, nesting in the grasses below his great paned windows, whose young Mr. Howe protected against a hawk and cats by setting sticks about the nest, and which bird followed him to his garden the next morning and begged cut worms from the human host, only to take upon herself the cut-worm habit, beating Mr. Howe to the task later dawns and digging her own breakfast, the while...she rid his garden of the pests.
"Children were eating plump blueberries in the grass behind the house. A young mother came up that steep ascent, bearing in her arms in the heat of the day a child of over two years, the latter to be caressed tenderly by this precious Uncle George and to be shown some of the pretty stones, part of the gem collection that enriches this man’s life...."
Perhaps a bit florid; but not inappropriately. George had become, without any real volition on his part, a sort of oracle, an embodiment of the things he had valued in his life since he turned to the natural world for spiritual sustenance.
At the same time, George was never less than an intellectual, preoccupied with his continuing encounter with nature but at the same time considering always the larger relationships that grew from his work. He and Freeland maintained a continual dialogue on matters of life, politics and philosophy. Freeland was never infected by the natural history bug, beyond being involved in the group’s various gem and mineral enterprises, often as a sales agent or broker. But he had studied at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, and his distinctive political opinions became increasingly radical during the 1930’s.
Norway people remember visiting Socialist meetings on the hilltop near Summit Study during the 1930’s, likely organized by Freeland. By 1940 or so Freeland described himself as a Communist and subscribed to the Daily Worker. In his later years he could be seen on Main Street with his bright red tam o’ shanter and bushy white beard.
George had already found his goals elsewhere. If we go back to his early words about "Going directly to nature..." we see the germ of what became nothing less than an effort to rethink and reorganize the American educational system. George had it planned from a very early date, but though he left notes and pieces, the work never took final form.
In a 1911 newspaper article he is quoted this way: "My future work is to be descriptive rather than any other phase of this industry. In fact, I consider that this is to be my life work. I am now engaged in preparing a work which is to be published in three large educational volumes, and this will be for the benefit of future co-operators. My first aim is to establish an international congress of education which will be largely along these lines. It will be a study of self and environment, and will be an au
xiliary system of education independent of our school and church systems of today and devoted to the youth of the world. We only have a faint glimmering of what these gem treasures that are locked in our rugged hills mean to the future civilization of the State and the nation. The first volume of my work will be entitled: Our Natural Environment, and this will show the possibilities of Maine and her gems. Then will come a volume on our social relation and environments, while the last one will be devoted to a new educational system. This will show the importance and the value of atmosphere, climate and geological structure in the development of the race. A country or a section that can produce only iron may become, like the Romans, a race of imperial conquerors.... The purely agricultural regions will develop a race of gentle men and women.... It is only when we combine all of these that we have the necessary elements for a well rounded and symmetrical race. When to all these is added the mysterious and subtle psychological influence which comes from ever beautiful and delightful gems we have the possibilities of a race grander and nobler than the world has ever before seen. This in brief is the future of Maine and her people. It is a horoscope that is full of joy and beauty, but whose possibiliti
es are at present but dimly foreshadowed." We may add to these thoughts the handwritten page from the collection of the Norway Historical Society reproduced below, as succinct a statement of George's philosophy of life as
we may find.
As George grew older, he found himself increasingly alone with his thoughts. Financial need had reduced his mineral collection, and selling parcels of land had left him with less than ten acres around Summit Study.
He depended upon friends and neighbors for most of his food; and the Town of Norway forgave his property taxes for the remainder of his life.
The photo above, part of a set of portraits taken by Eleanor Easton Ives in 1944, now in the collection of the Norway Historical Society, shows him in his favorite spot, his ever-present cigarette in hand, sitting in front of the window at Summit Study, looking out to the world of trees and brush that had grown to cover the naked hilltop.
He moved finally to the Bradburys’, just down Pike’s Hill from his home, where he died on February 5, 1950. The story told is that he settled down in bed one day, explaining that he knew he was about to die and was prepared for it. He died a few days later, as gently and calmly as he had lived.
Memories of Uncle George remain vivid in Norway six decades after his death. It is fair to say that for half a century he was a unique source of inspiration and vitality for the area and its people, with a broad and lingering influence. He was a man who embraced constant growth, curiosity and learning in himself, and encouraged it in others. He grew up in a time when an increasingly broad knowledge of the natural world had created a flood of new information and a dazzling variety of discoveries. Addison Verrill, the biologist who grew up in Greenwood, next to Norway, was by 1900 world-famous for his work at Yale, and was ultimately credited with discovering perhaps 1000 new species.
This science of investigation, description and cataloging was fundamental to George’s own work, and was basic to the approach to nature he taught to others. He reached backwards from these methods towards a view of the world more like that of the Transcendentalists, where intimate connection with the natural world is a pathway to spiritual development.
His science created George’s reputation with mineralogists. But he reached out to the human world as avidly as to the natural world. He believed firmly in the innate goodness of human beings, and in the possibility of improvement, convictions he brought to every encounter with others, regardless of their age or status. In the bits of film we have of George with campers we see him dressed in a business suit, squatting or kneeling on the ground with the children, closely surrounded as he talks or points out something of interest with long, expressive fingers, constantly gesturing, reaching to illustrate a point, touching a child on the arm or shoulder to emphasize it. His enthusiasm shows clearly, along with his eagerness to communicate with his listeners. If we are to remember George Howe, it is in this role that it is best to think of him. It is, perhaps, the way George himself would wish to be remembered.
David Sanderson, June 2005/April 2006
We thank Vandall King, historian and mineralogist, for permitting us to use information from his research on George Howe. Birch Rock Camp and the Norway Historical Society generously loaned photos from their collections. Camp McWain material is from the Sanderson family collection.
