THE North Country

There are thousands of miles of north country between the northern tip of Maine and the Great Plains. All these regions are on the margins of American life, with colder climate, poorer soil and weaker economies than the rest of the nation. All this is familiar to Franklin New Hampshire and Franklin counties in Maine, Vermont and New York. Bob Dylan sang about it in “Girl from the North Country” and “North Country Blues”. The Green Mountain Trading Post in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom has a community calendar called “North Country Notes”. Meanwhile, in 1997 Howard Mosher wrote a book entitled North Country about the northern borderland of the U.S. and Canada. Forty years ago a young poet, self-proclaimed “Captain America”, living in a Rochester suburb pined for the St. Lawrence Valley when s/he wrote a poem that began …”and so my friend, how are things in the North Country…..”
So, with the phrase north country so commonly used and shared, how is it that our neck of the woods has come to be known as THE North Country?
Perhaps the answer lies with Irving Bacheller, the region’s best know author, and his most famous book, EBEN HOLDEN: A TALE OF THE NORTH COUNTRY, published in 1900. Depending how you want to frame it, this work was the last best seller of the nineteenth century or the first best seller of the 20th century, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. It was also turned into a New York play. In any case, it was his ode to the North Country including local dialect and folklore. Despite the fact that Bacheller’s northern New York was already starting to disappear with the beginning of the new century, the identification with the phrase North Country may have been fixed in regional consciousness at that time.
A century later the phrase is very much with us. Its boundaries and definition may vary widely from person to person, but the experience of place is something that we share and that binds us together. While there may be many physical characteristics to point to, north country may be as much about a state of mind.