Jessie Lawrence Oak, home demonstration agent, 1929 to 1972

On a June afternoon in 1981, Jessie Oak sat in her house on Kathryn Street in Brunswick, Maine, and talked into Rita Breton's tape recorder about the 1930s. Breton was collecting memories of the Depression for the University of Maine's Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History, and Jessie had spent those years as a home demonstration agent for the Maine Extension Service, first in Knox and Lincoln counties and then across all of Aroostook. Partway through, her husband Merle came in from watching a baseball game, apologized for interrupting, and went back out.

Kingsbury and Solon

Jessie Mildred Lawrence was born at Kingsbury Plantation in Piscataquis County on August 6, 1906. The interviewer's form gave the 8th; Jessie corrected it on the tape. Her obituary names her parents as John M. and Inez (Huff) Lawrence. She grew up first on her grandparents' farm at Solon and then in the village, where, she said, her grandparents came to live with the family, "which is different from today."

In 1900 her father, John, was a boy of fourteen in the Kingsbury household of J. E. and Mary Lawrence, with an older sister, Jessie, and a sister Hattie, born in September 1883.

Jessie went from Solon High School to the University of Maine, entering with the class of 1928 and waiting on tables all four years to pay her way, on campus and at a Bangor country club. She began as a pre-medical student. "I had an aunt and uncle, both, that are doctors," she told Breton, and the aunt "in Oregon developed the first flu vaccine that was ever used during World War I." That aunt was almost certainly Hattie: Dr. Harriet Jane Lawrence, born at Kingsbury on September 13, 1883, who trained at the Boston University School of Medicine and became Oregon's first known woman pathologist. In 1918 the Oregon State Board of Health brought a culture to her Portland laboratory, and the serum she prepared against the influenza's secondary infections was sent to doctors across the state. Jessie switched to home economics and graduated in 1928 with a degree in Home Economics Education, a major in food and nutrition and a minor in home management.

Knox and Lincoln counties

After a year of teaching, Jessie joined the Extension Service in 1929, at twenty-one. Some of the farm women in Knox and Lincoln counties wondered, she recalled, what "a young girl like that" could teach them, and she was shy about speaking to groups. They became friends. She taught them to cane chairs and upholster the old sofas they already had, and to serve one balanced "Square Meal for Health" at every meeting, with ribbons at the end of the year for the families that kept it up.

Much of the work was making do. She showed women how to put new pockets in men's trousers and how to turn a man's shirt into a little girl's dress. The Extension Service ran gardening schools that told each family how many feet of row to plant for its size, so there would be enough to can and store for the winter, and it held community canning days in Grange halls and churches, where neighbors brought their vegetables and worked through pressure cookers on wood stoves, often more than a hundred cans in a day. Eight hundred to a thousand jars a season, she said, was typical for a household. She was working out of Rockland when the banks closed.

All of Aroostook

Jessie moved to Aroostook County on December 1, 1936, over icy, snowy roads, as the only home demonstration agent in the county; her territory ran from the Allagash to Benedicta. She stayed in one area for a week at a time, drove herself in summer, and in winter worked out of Patten, Houlton or Island Falls. Meetings ran from 10:30 in the morning to 3:30 in the afternoon, with dinner at noon. In winter men and women met together, often reached by sleigh, and Jessie remembered fur coats, buffalo robes and a soapstone at her feet, and arriving at halls where she and the county agent had to start the fire themselves.

She worked with doctors and nurses from the Department of Health and Welfare at clinics in schoolhouses, Grange halls and churches, where children were examined and vaccinated and Jessie taught the mothers nutrition. Families of ten or twelve children were common; one mother who came to her had eighteen. School surveys in Presque Isle, Houlton and Fort Kent, she said, showed a lack of vitamins A and C and of calcium, and along the St. John River, where there were dairy herds as well as potatoes, she taught women to turn milk into cottage cheese and pressed cheese. In the St. John Valley she had the Extension sheets printed in French, and at one Fort Kent meeting a priest came along to interpret. She also urged the 4-H children to save, even a few pennies, once the banks reopened; when she left Aroostook, she said, people joked that she was always after them to save money.

Merle

On Sunday evening, December 24, 1939, Jessie married Merle L. Oak, of Presque Isle, at her parents' home in Solon. The Rev. E. Milton Grant of the Congregational church of Presque Isle performed the double-ring service by candlelight, under an arch of evergreens. The Bangor Daily News described the bride's gown of royal blue chiffon velvet and her bouquet of violets and pink rosebuds, and noted that Merle, who had attended the Good Will school at Hinckley and graduated from Presque Isle High School, worked for Sears, Roebuck and Company in Bangor.

Merle Llewellyn Oak was born at Presque Isle on July 3, 1909, the son of Lyndon Oak and Melvina (St. Thomas) Oak, and in 1930 he was living with his grandfather, James H. Oak, eighty, on Second Street in Presque Isle. James Hastings Oak was a son of Lyndon Oak of Garland, the Maine State College trustee for whom Oak Hall is named, which made Merle that Lyndon's great-grandson.

Merle was one of five children. His mother died while they were young, and his father, unable to keep them together, placed them in homes with relatives and friends. Merle went to the Good Will school at Hinckley from 1923 to 1930, his obituary says, and for many years he was its oldest graduate; at a reunion late in life the school gave him a jacket in that honor. In September 2004, at ninety-five, he went back to Garland for Garland Days as the guest of the Lyndon Oak Memorial Library, and walked in the parade under its banner naming him "the great-grandson of Lyndon Oak."

The couple lived in Brunswick from 1941 to 1950. Merle worked at Bath Iron Works during the Second World War and later owned stores of his own: Oak's IGA in West Paris, the Hitching Post and the Variety Store in Presque Isle, and the Dairy Cup in Belfast.

Back to Aroostook

Jessie returned to Aroostook in 1955, when the county had been divided among three agents, and served the homemakers of central Aroostook from an office in the basement of the post office at Presque Isle. The agents took turns on a weekly television program, the Aroostook Homemaker, and wrote columns for the county's weekly papers. In September 1957 the University announced that she would be honored at Minneapolis that October for distinguished service by the National Home Demonstration Agents' Association, the only Maine agent recognized that year.

She retired in 1972, and in 1974 she and Merle went back to Brunswick. Jessie died at a Freeport nursing home on January 18, 2000, at ninety-three, and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery at Solon. Merle died at Augusta on April 9, 2007, at ninety-seven, and was buried beside her. They had three children.

What we're still looking for

• The uncle Jessie said was "a doctor in New York."
• A record naming Dr. Harriet Lawrence's parents, to confirm that the Hattie of the 1900 Kingsbury census is the Portland pathologist. Her birth date and birthplace match.
• The photographs Jessie mentioned on the tape, of the Burkettville women caning chairs and of an Aroostook dish-washing demonstration.
• Where Jessie taught before 1929: her obituary names North Troy, Vermont, and East Corinth Academy.

Sources

• Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History, University of Maine, MF040, NA 1516: "Jessie Oak, interviewed by Rita Breton," 20 Jun 1981, transcript, 21 pp., with University of Maine press release, Sept. 1957. library.umaine.edu/content/NAFOH/text/NA1516.pdf
• 1900 U.S. census, Kingsbury Plantation, Piscataquis County, Maine, household of J. E. Lawrence (Ancestry).
• Maine birth record of Merle Llewellyn Oak, 3 Jul 1909, Presque Isle (Maine State Archives; Ancestry).
• 1930 U.S. census, Presque Isle, Aroostook County, Maine, ED 64, sheet 17B, household of James H. Oak (Ancestry).
• Maine Marriage Index, 1892-1996: Merle L. Oak and Jessie M. Lawrence, 24 Dec 1939 (Ancestry).
• "Jessie Lawrence Becomes Bride," Bangor Daily News, 30 Dec 1939, p. 6 (Newspapers.com).
• Obituary of Jessie L. Oak, Bangor Daily News, 20 Jan 2000, p. 16 (Newspapers.com).
• Obituary of Merle L. Oak, Brackett Funeral Home, Brunswick, April 2007, and the Lyndon Oak Memorial Library's Garland Days story of September 2004; copies sent to the family by the library, October 2026.
• Obituary of Merle L. Oak, Portland Press Herald, 11 Apr 2007, p. B8 (Newspapers.com).
• "The Oaks of Garland," in Biographical Sketches of Representative Citizens of the State of Maine (1903), pp. 195-196 (James Hastings Oak, son of Lyndon Oak).
• "Lawrence, Harriet (1883-1974)," Oregon Encyclopedia. www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/lawrence_harriet_1883_1974_/