The Turner Farm of North Haven, Maine is a historic site in more ways than one and it would require more than some feeble blog space to do it justice, but I will try to give a brief overview anyway. The farm itself was established in 1765 by a man from Marshfield, Mass. named Samuel Thomas. It changed hands a few times over the next few hundred years and ultimately landed in the hands of the Ames family, who seem to have owned it the longest. The restoration of this farm by the current owners and Jen Porter, the farm manager--and we cannot forget the hard-laboring farmhands--is an expressly impressive endeavor and I amazed at how well and how fast they are pulling it all together.
Of course, before the farmers came it was inhabited for seven thousand years or more by the Red Paint People--Native Americans who left quite an impressive shell midden along the shoreline that was excavated in the late 1960's by the archeologist Bruce Bourque. The quantity of artifacts unearthed on the farm is astounding and photos of these finds can be found in Bourque's books on the subject.
I have yet to find any arrowheads--and I have been looking--but I did find a late 18th Century King George lll half-penny with my metal detector, which I like to imagine belonged to Samuel Thomas himself...maybe even fell out of his pocket while he was building the first stone walls on the property.
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