Brownfield Maine:
An Illustrated History
An Illustrated History
Publication History:
First published in 2019 as an illustrated historical study of Brownfield, Maine.
Brownfield, Maine: An Illustrated History is a material and visual study of Brownfield’s past, grounded in archival research, landscape analysis, and the town’s surviving material record. Rather than presenting a conventional chronological narrative, the book examines how settlement, environmental change, domestic labor, and community memory become visible through maps, photographs, objects, and documentary traces.
Drawing on town records, diaries, school reports, glass-plate negatives, and family collections, the book reconstructs local history through fragments rather than synthesis alone. It situates Brownfield within the longer environmental and cultural history of the Saco River Valley, emphasizing continuity, adaptation, and the layered relationship between people and place.
The book represents an early phase of a longer research trajectory focused on material culture, archival evidence, and landscape history in western Maine.
This book begins with ice and ends with fire.
Climate shaped life then, as it does now.
Proceeds benefit the Brownfield Public Library & the Brownfield Historical Society