A fearsome place

Children gathering potatoes on a large farm in Aroostook County in 1940. Schools did not open in those days until the potatoes were harvested.

-- Photo by Jack Delano for the WPA

"This is big country, larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, nearly the equal of Massachusetts; its vastness more suggestive of the West than of New England. Its winters, people will tell you, are fiercer, its forests thicker, its rivers wilder than anywhere else in the East.''

-- Mel Allen on Aroostook County, Maine, in "There's No Easy Way to Pick Potatoes,'' in the September 1978 issue of Yankee magazine.