Haddencroft 2

As an idealistic college junior, I was anxious to spread my wings, gathering up all my life experiences, my new found college major and earnest intentions. Fresh off my epic Allagash experience, I had big plans to educate the emotionally disturbed, mentally retarded youngsters I was about to encounter. Turns out, I didn’t have a clue, not even a sniff of a clue at what I was about to be involved in. As with many endeavors we undertake, it’s probably a good thing we don’t know, otherwise we would wisely cower into a corner, or run scared, seeking some safer, less hazardous route to our chosen goals and aspirations. Standing in the courtyard of the previously sedate Haddencroft Summer retreat in Eagles Head, I was surrounded by other clueless, idealistic 20 somethings, waiting instructions and the ultimate assignment that would soon take my summers work to Tanglewood in Lincolnville, just a few miles north. The Haddencroft New Jersey elites had run a school in New Jersey and Maine since the time of Abraham Lincoln. The northeast branch of their glorified asylum had been designed so that these children and deeply handicapped adults would be well cared for in the summer months while their wealthy parents jetted off to the Riviera or some other paradise, secure in the knowledge that they were “given the best care possible”. Appearances are everything, don’t you see? Most of these folks rarely visited their own, preferring to blithely pretend they didn’t really exist. Standing in the Haddencroft courtyard in Eagles Head as I listened to our briefing, my eyes wandered the grounds. I scanned the hilltop as I looked up at a stately 100+ year old mansion, a granite surf-side tidal pool and several institutional looking buildings, designed to house the “inmates” and staff. Later, I learned, the daunting 5000+ square foot 30 room mansion was to house the Haddencroft administration offices, hold dinner parties and lodging for the families when they came north to write their endowment checks and sip fine wine. Except for the dour housing for the handicapped, this was truly a resort setting, with views and frontage second to none on the beautiful granite coast of Maine. Looking back on it now, we, the educated, young idealists, were indeed the “hired help” on this plantation. It was like the set of a movie and the film would turn out to be eerily similar to “Cuckoo’s Nest”. Surveying the crowd of other young idealists, I counted about 20 of us. Prepared in our various fields to train, entertain, nurse and educate, we were ready to greet our charges. Some of us were older, more experienced having spent two or more years in the trenches of Haddencroft, working in the newly formed “winter program”. Separate from the “adults” who only migrated up from New Jersey in the summer, this program was designed for school-aged Maine kids and was as a result of a deal struck between the New Jersey Haddencroft folks and the State of Maine. Designed to handle “end of the road” severely handicapped children, it was a marriage between the established ways of isolating the damaged, uneducable from the masses and the needs of the state, yet somehow assuaging our collective guilt along the way. The Maine kids, ranging in age from 7 to 18 years old, had a variety of disabilities. Some were mentally disturbed, some with terrible physical deformities and others were simply retarded, (a term no longer acceptably used today). Without exception, each and every one of them had issues that defied labels. Brochures were given to the parents and legislators, written by the do-gooders responsible for justifying the programs provided at Haddencroft. If you read them and believed them, you, as a taxpayer, could feel good about of the comprehensive nature of the training and remarkable progress sure to be made with these severely handicapped kids. Afterall, we were highly trained staff in a "state of the art" facility in an idyllic setting. As a young naïve, newly educated teacher to be, I think I bought into it too, at first.

Haddencroft

Much of this story will, for the most part, reflect the truth. To protect the identities of the poor souls I write about, some of the names and facts are changed and perhaps even exaggerated a little. As usual, however, truth can be far stranger than fiction and often more interesting.

Haddencroft, Part One

Tanglewood Forest, located in Lincolnville Maine is an idyllic spot. Home to the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) after world war two, then later the 4H camps in the 50’s and 60’s it has cathedral forests and the Ducktrap River Running though it. Sprinkled with log cabin bunkhouses, a water tower, ball fields, a mess hall, several utility buildings and a myriad of woods roads and trails, this spot is a true woodland paradise. Alewives and trout run in the rapids of the Ducktrap, eagles nest in its high trees and it boasts the only remaining natural Atlantic salmon fishery in the world. Today, most of its shores and watershed are protected lands with some of the most beautiful forest in Maine. I’m proud to say, much of my life has had some connection to it.

As a young man, in the late 1940’s my father worked that forest as part of his job with Camden Hills State Park. This was the start of his long career as a ranger for the parks in Maine. As a 16 yr old, I helped cut many of the hiking trails still in use there today. My sisters and cousins attended 4H camp there and later on as a college student, I would work there as a camp counselor for Haddencroft School as a wilderness instructor to handicapped kids with my wife to be.

The rest of this story will focus on this experience but my connection doesn’t stop there. In the last 15 years as the local land trust obtained easements to the lands surrounding the Ducktrap River Watershed, I was hired to appraise the land that would eventually be protected by forever wild easements.

For all these reasons, it is no wonder; I feel a real connection to Tanglewood.