STRONG — Local students learned that many of their ancestors may have helped make American history more than 200 years ago.

On Thursday, students gathered to watch a Maine-made film, “In the Blood.” The 50-minute documentary, written and produced by Sumner McKane, showed the skills, life and character of Maine lumbermen and river drivers through rare archival films, photographs and oral histories.

McKane told the children that settlers moved from England to new Amercan colonies and Massachusetts owned the land before Maine became a state. Those who received land grants and moved north to farm and cut trees were expected to provide timber for Great Britain. This vast new source of lumber helped build the British Navy, as well as the kingdom’s houses, tools and bridges. White pine trees were so valuable as masts for ships that their preservation was written into the Massachusetts Bay Charter of 1691.

“Surveyors marked these trees with three hatchet slashes, called the ‘King’s Broad Arrow,'” McKane said.

Eventually, settlers began to chafe at the king’s restrictions and the fees and taxes they were forced to pay, and many of those early Maine pioneers fought in the Revolutionary War.

Early Maine woodsmen lived without today’s modern tools, including chain saws and skidders. They stayed for months in remote forests, working long hours, sleeping in bunkhouses and creating their own entertainment.

No one could have met today’s hygiene standards.

“They didn’t wash their clothes, and they usually slept in them,” McKane told the students. “They hung them up to dry on what they called the stink pole.”

Although these loggers get little coverage in history books, they made the state what it is today, he said.

“Up to the turn of the (20th) century, it was not a board of directors or a bureaucratic system that made the logging camp and industry successful,” McKane said. “It was the skills, integrity and personality of individuals.”

McKane and his band mate Joshua Robbins perform musical accompaniment to the film and have been visiting schools with grant funding from the Horizon Foundation. They will present a longer version of “In the Blood” at 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 8, at the Emery Arts Center at the University of Maine at Farmington.