For as long as I can remember, there has been a family garden across the road from our old farmhouse in Auburn. It has been there for well over a hundred years. After this long, cold spring, it’s finally time to begin planting. 

My wife, Judy, and my brother, Jim, are the gardeners who maintain the annual tradition … appraising past years’ results and pondering new options. My role is some minor maintenance.

My newspaper research confirms that gardening has always been sort of a competitive sport. A clipping from the Lewiston Evening Journal in May of 1917 tells of an elderly resident of New Auburn who went to Olympian extremes in preparing his land for a garden he hoped would surpass his neighbor’s efforts.

“The residents of Prospect Hill, Auburn, are familiar with the fact that Mrs. Rouleau has had the best garden of anyone in that vicinity for several seasons,” it said. “This summer, however, she is to have a formidable rival in Thomas Shaw, who is now her nearest neighbor, living with his son, David T. Shaw, in the new house which he erected last year on Ninth street.”

The story said Shaw, being over 80 years of age, “has almost unlimited energy and seldom fails to accomplish that which he undertakes.” It describes how Shaw built a sewer line 370 feet long from his son’s new house to a gully the previous year.

“This year, he is devoting his time to making a garden,” the article said. “He leased four house lots from the Androscoggin Water Power Co., and as he has the privilege of using half of Ninth street, which has been laid out but never built, he has nearly three-fourths of an acre of land which he has been working for the past month getting ready for plowing.”

The land was covered with a growth of gray birches “which he cut down,
fitting up the larger ones for wood, and burning the brush off clean. He says there were about 300 stumps and roots and he has dug them all out, alone, with the exception of two very obstinate ones when his son helped him.”

Shaw buried one boulder, which according to his estimation weighed about a ton. He “shored” it up, dug out from under it, and when he got a bed large enough for it to go into, he knocked the “shore” away and it went into its bed with a thud, resting about 18 inches below the surface of the ground.

“Mr. Shaw is used to this kind of work, as he buried 13 big boulders on his farm in Bowdoinham one fall,” the story said. The largest was estimated to weigh about five tons. It required three days digging to make a bed large enough for it.

“Shaw rigged a skid back of the boulder, got ready a stout pry and then called his wife, who always wanted to be present at the ‘launching.’ Both of them bore down on the pry, thus forcing the boulder out into its new location, where it now rests two feet beneath the surface of the ground.”

Having been a tiller of the soil for more than 40 years, experimenting with seeds in different kinds of soil, Shaw understood the adaptability of certain seeds in certain kinds of soil.

Mrs. Rouleau had doubts about her new neighbor’s expertise. She told him the newly-cleared Prospect Hill land would not prove good for garden soil, but Mr. Shaw had great faith in it.

By mid-May, Mrs. Rouleau had the greater part of her garden already planted and her peas were growing nicely, but Mr. Shaw declared that he will beat her and have the first mess of green peas. He believed in waiting until the nights are warm before planting anything.

No follow-up story on the neighborly garden rivalry could be found in newspapers at the end of the summer. It would be nice to know whose garden won, but judging from the exertion Thomas Shaw put into preparation of his land, it’s a good bet that he tended that garden with great care.

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and a native of Auburn. He can be reached by sending email to [email protected].