|
Maine
Folklife Center |
Women Folklorists
Introduction |
Helen
Creighton |
Fanny Hardy
Eckstorm |
Joanna Colcord |
Helen Hartness
Flanders |
Louise Manny
Fanny Hardy
Eckstorm 1865 - 1946
|
Fannie Hardy
was born in 1865, in Brewer, Maine. Her father, Manly Hardy, was
a fur trader, and Eckstorm took numerous trips into the northern
Maine woods with him. In these trips she first heard the folk
tales and folk songs of the lumbermen, hunters, and Indians of
the region.
Eckstorm’s
interest in ballads was nurtured at Smith College. After
graduation in 1888 she returned to Brewer, and wrote about the
Maine woods and the game laws for publications such as Forest
and Stream Magazine. Two of these articles have been recently
reprinted in
Tales from the Maine Woods,
available from
The Maine Folklife Center.
She married Jacob Eckstorm, an Episcopal minister, in 1893.
|
 |
| Maine Folklife Center Photo
#340. |
Fannie Hardy Eckstorm acknowledged the difficulties that her
gender posed in collecting the folksongs of male workers:
"The editors of
this volume fully realized that collecting these songs was a
man’s job. We knew very well that we could not go into lumber
camps and the forecastles of coasting schooners, nor frequent
mill boarding-houses and wharves and employment offices and even
jails, where the unprinted, and too often unprintable, songs of
the kind we must seek originate and flourish. Had a man
competent to perform the task expressed an intention of
preserving these songs, we should not have undertaken the work.
But no man appeared steeped in balladry and versed in
folk-music, understanding the hearts of the people and wise to
interpret what he found in them. The old songs were fast
vanishing. With them would be lost all they represented of the
mental horizon of the pioneer, the cultures of the logger and
river-driver, the hunter and trapper, the sailor and hand-line
fisherman."
Fannie Hardy
Eckstorm and Mary Winslow Smyth, Minstrelsy of Maine:
Folk-songs and Ballads of the Woods and the Coast.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1927. Preface. |
|
After the death of her husband in 1899, Eckstorm resumed
researching and writing about Maine’s flora, fauna, and people.
Unlike the other four women profiled in this exhibit, she
apparently had no one moment when someone said, "why don’t you
collect folksongs?" Eckstorm’s interest in the Maine folklore
and folklife grew out of her childhood expeditions with her
father. Her interest in the songs and stories of the people she
met in childhood was similar to that of Joanna Colcord’s. For
Colcord, this meant the "American sailorman," for Eckstorm the
woodsmen, river drivers, and Indians of the Maine woods. The
first fruits of this interest were her 1904 and 1907 books:
- Penobscot Man (1904)
- David Libbey: Penobscot
Woodsman and River Driver(1907)
Eckstorm began
collaborating with Professor Mary Winslow Smyth of Elmira
College in New York in 1925. Smyth combed the coastal areas
while Eckstorm gathered woods songs. Two books resulted from
these efforts:
- Minstrelsy of Maine (1927)
- British Ballads from Maine
(1929)
|
 When young Fannie Hardy
traveled in the
Maine woods with her father, she learned to live off what the
land could provide.
In this photo taken by her father in 1892,
Fannie is holding one or more dead grouse.
Maine Folklife Center Photo #342.
|
Although she
continued to be interested in folk music until the end of her
life, in the 1930s Eckstorm’s attention began to shift toward
the language, history, and traditions of Maine’s Indians. This
interest resulted in two books:
- Indian Place-Names of the
Penobscot Valley and the Maine Coast (1941)
- Old John Neptune and Other
Maine Indian Shamans (1945)
Title Page,
Fannie Hardy Eckstorm and Mary Winslow Smyth, Minstrelsy of
Maine: Folk-songs and Ballads of the Woods and the Coast.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1927. |
Back to
Women Folklorists
|
|
