“Logging in the Maine Woods: The Paintings of Alden Grant”

“The ice was rotten and getting ready to go out,” remembers Alden Grant, 83-year-old Maine guide, logging camp clerk, and artist. “My uncle and I were hauling boom logs across the lake with a pair of little roan mares. We were walking along, and he was telling me stories about Beaver Pond. All of a sudden, it seemed as if I was just climbing right uphill. I looked around, and off in front of the horses, that ice was rolling right up. My uncle let a yell out and started the horses running and the ice leveled out. But the ice went out the next day. It’s a wonder we didn’t have the team in–out in the middle of the lake.”

Through his 19 color paintings reproduced in “Logging in the Maine Woods”, Mr. Grant offers a guided tour of the 1915 to 1928 sporting camps and logging camps of the Rangeley Lakes region of western Maine. Inspired by both environmental concerns and the skills of the timber men, Mr. Grant shares his knowledge about life in the woods with the men who cut down the four-foot-wide “pumpkin pine” and the balsam fir to provide lumber and paper.
“Logging in the Maine Woods”- Book $17.00 (includes S&H)

• 80 pages. Includes text by Mr. Grant about each painting.
• 19 full color reproductions of Mr. Grant’s paintings, photographed by Mr. Melville McLean, Fine Art Photography, Lewiston, Maine.
• Forward by folklorist Dr. Edward Ives of the Maine Folklife Center, University of Maine, Orono, on Maine’s timber heritage.
• Preface by Museum founder, logger Rodney Richard of Rangeley, Maine, on the beginnings of the Museum.
• Introduction by folklorist Dr. Margaret Yocom of the Museum and George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, on Alden Grant’s life and painting, on the art of loggers, and on paintings like Mr. Grant’s that memorialize lives well spent.
• Edited by Margaret Yocom and Stephen Richard, Museum Festival coordinator. Funded by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, with additional support from Franklin Printing of Farmington, Maine, and the Rangeley Lakes Region Historical Society.