Who is your town named after? In the case of Houlton Maine, Joseph Houlton gets the honors for wandering up shortly into the 1800’s.
Houlton scoped the area now known as Aroostook County out, met the local Micmac and Maliseet Indian locals and sent word back for the woman and children to follow. Houlton Maine is the county seat, the “shiretown” for Aroostook County. Aroostook is the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined and on the Canadian border with the province of New Brunswick.
The attraction to being in what became Houlton Maine was rich soil, plenty of space, not a lot of people and opportunity for your family. The early witch trials of Salem Massachusetts also helped get families to consider moving in this direction to avoid accusations of being a which and wisked away in the middle of the night. There was not such danger in the Aroostook County area that became known as Houlton Maine.
Joseph Houlton is buried at this spot high on a hill overlooking the town of Houlton Maine which is at the beginning of Interstate 95. As a kid, my parents took myself and three brothers to the local cemetary in Houlton Maine where my dad’s parents, family was buried. And in Hodgdon Maine where my mom’s parents and older family members who had passed away. A cemetary was not made to feel morbid or a place of sadness. Death was explained as part of life, nothing to be feared.
The sense of history, being part of a large family and the local connection to other members with the same last name was learned early on and thru out our lives. I made the same pilgrimage to the cemetaries where my four kids asked questions, observed and learned about early family members and town fathers who helped shape where I live in Houlton Maine.
Do you visit cemetaries to do more than honor the dead? Cemetaries with their veteran sections and American flags waving braving, proudly are part of the experience to a cemetary visit. Tracking your past geneology is like a Sherlock Holmes adventure to many too that travel to Northern Maine to unlock the secrets, to find missing parts of the family trees. The answers to many questions about an area lie in a Maine cemetary and they are a location for more than your imagination if you happen to be Stephen King. King, the horror writer lives in Bangor Maine with his wife Tabitha.