Douglas Rooks
| Columnist
Sometimes creating a national monument is a lengthy and tortuous quest. Other times, it seems just to slide right through, as if leading a charmed life.
Maine was treated to milestones of both sorts last week.
The visitor center for the Maine Woods and Waters National Monument was officially opened by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who’s seems spent a lot of time in Maine lately. It’s been named “Tekαkαpimək,” a Penobscot term for “as far as one can see.”
The building is perched atop Lookout Mountain, with a grand view of Katahdin – “the mountain of the people of Maine,” according to its donor, Percival Baxter – and the symmetry between the most famous state park and the new national monument is fitting and deliberate.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post featured a report involving leaked information that President Joe Biden will create another national monument, the Frances Perkins Homestead in Newcastle, before he leaves office – just as Barack Obama established Maine Woods and Waters in 2016 after a long and contentious fight.
So far, the Frances Perkins story has elicited only praise – the attempt to elevate the 59-acre Newcastle property, already a national historic site, became public only recently.
The different reception owes something to the differing stories behind these gifts, but also illustrates how much Maine has changed in the 21st century.
First, we need to turn the clock back to the 1980s, when a Massachusetts-based group called Restore the North Woods proposed a 3.2 million acre national park encompassing one-third of Maine’s unorganized territory – dwarfing Baxter State Park, at 200,000 acres the largest park in Maine; Acadia National Park is 35,000 acres.
Restore’s plan garnered passionate support, but also determined opposition. While the enormous paper mills were already declining, their owners controlled most of the land, and had absolutely no intention of selling to the federal government.
Years later, along came Roxanne Quimby, the co-founder of Burt’s Bees, who received an enormous payout when she sold the company and began acquiring parcels east of Baxter with the intention of donating them for a national park.
Quimby alienated a lot of locals, however, by closing trails and gating entrances once open to the public. It wasn’t until she turned things over to her son, Lucas St. Clair, a less prickly advocate, that the tide began to turn.
St. Clair proved a master diplomat, and at the opening ceremony said he’d been fascinated by the site since finding it while surveying damage from Hurricane Irene in 2011. Aside from a run for Congress in 2018 when he lost a Democratic primary to Jared Golden, he’s been working on it ever since.
Though it will be years before it has anything like the visitor appeal of Acadia, we should remember that Acadia, too, began life as a national monument.
There’s a basic distinction between national monuments and parks. Only Congress can create a park, but under the 1906 Antiquities Act, the president alone creates monuments.
In the early days, relatively few monuments were established, and several “graduated” to become national parks, including Acadia. With ever-present gridlock in Congress, it’s been used more frequently lately, and Obama and Biden have acted numerous times; there are now more than 100.
Frances Perkins will fit right in. Once a relatively obscure figure, Franklin Roosevelt’s revolutionary pick as Labor Secretary ignited extraordinary achievements for the New Deal, including Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act. Together, they put the power of the federal government firmly behind working men and women for the first time.
Unlike the reception of Quimby’s original park plan, never attracting a single congressional sponsor, response to the Perkins monument has been positive, with the entire Maine delegation on board.
A letter from Gov. Janet Mills obtained by the Post called Maine “the cradle for amazing women leaders,” citing among others Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, who throughout 24 years in the Senate was the only woman. There are now 24, and 128 women in the House.
You might say that the Perkins monument is an idea whose time has come.
It’s also an indication Maine, at long last, has accepted its destiny as a tourism destination of international scope. Mills estimated Maine has 15 million seasonal visitors, and more than three million find their way to Acadia.
The “Paper Plantation” days are gone. We still need to build things, not least to ward off the worst effects of global warming. But protecting what we have is equally important, and though 40 years ago I would never have imagined it, we now seem ready to view the federal government as a partner, and not a foe.
Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter since 1984. He is the author of four books, most recently a biography of U.S. Chief Justice Melville Fuller, and welcomes comment at drooks@tds.net
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Publish date : 2024-08-23 22:04:00
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