Yarmouth student takes break to pick potatoes, see the world
Houlton Pioneer Times Photograph/Karen Donato
HARVEST TIME — 2008 Yarmouth High School grad, Julianna Lord, left, experiences potato harvest working with Houlton High students, Desiree Dow, Lainey Herring, and Martha McPartland on the Albert Fitzpatrick farm.
By Karen Donato-Duff
Staff Writer
18-year-old Julianna Lord has been riding high on a potato harvester in Houlton. Born and raised in Yarmouth, she is more at ease pulling lobster traps than potato tops.
Lord has roots in Houlton. She is the granddaughter of local resident, Barbara and the late Francis Pierce; her mother, Kendall Pierce Lord, is an alumnus of Houlton High School.
Lord graduated from Yarmouth High School in June, where she participated in cross-country, ski club and raced both Nordic and Alpine divisions. She was a member of the Environmental Club and the Interact Club, raising money for a variety of causes locally and globally. Lord also spent a semester attending school in the Bahamas.
She has been accepted at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., however, she decided to delay college for a year. The new term for this is “the gap year”. She is not sitting around taking a break though, far from it! She has her year planned and it is a very ambitious one to say the least.
Growing up in Yarmouth, she and her family would spend a week in the summer visiting at her grandparents’ cottage on Nickerson Lake. Lord also visited on other occasions over the years. She heard about the potato harvest from her mother and her uncles, Tom and Andrew Pierce. Her Uncle Tom told her they didn’t have harvesters when he worked and that picking potatoes was very labor intensive. They also recalled the tradition of starting school in August and having three weeks off to help with the potato harvest.
When Lord decided to take a sidetrack before college she made a list of all the things she wanted to do in a year. One of those being, a trip to Aroostook County to experience the potato harvest first hand.
Her Uncle Andrew had a high school chum, Terry Fitzpatrick originally from Littleton. His older brother Albert is a local farmer in Houlton. A phone call was made to see if there might be an available spot on his harvester. Unfortunately there wasn’t at first, but then Fitzpatrick learned one of his crewmembers was going to be away for the first week and Lord slid into the spot.
I visited the field on the Foxcroft Road on a mild and sunny day, a perfect day to be in the field. I found out the crew started about 10 that morning … mmm … this isn’t quite what I remembered from harvests I participated in. Back in those days, we were in the field by 6 a.m. and down on our hands and knees in the cold dirt shaking those tops, filling those baskets and dumping them into those empty barrels. 
Houlton Pioneer Times Photograph/Karen Donato
FITZPATRICK FARMS — Albert Fitzpatrick of Houlton is busy in the field harvesting potatoes with his harvester crew of high school students.
After taking some photos, I left the field wondering what time they would finish for the day. I decided to wait until the end of day two before I met with her to get the scoop on this adventure.
I called late Tuesday afternoon to set a time. Lo and behold, I found out she had gotten off work at 4 p.m. Her grandmother said that she was out for a run and stopping by the library.
How come I couldn’t do that when I was her age? Was it because I grew up on the farm and as a farmer’s child you were in the field before the crew and worked until dark? I only had energy to eat and crawl up to bed.
First question I asked in the interview was, “Why did you want to do this?”
She replied, “I wanted to have the experience that my mother and uncles had and I thought it would help me gain a new perspective of Maine. I wanted to give something back to the community where my mother grew up.”
She had already noticed the slower pace of the community and that it seemed much less hectic than the southern part of the state. Lord said she could see herself living in a small community later in life.
“What do you think of the job so far?” was the next question asked.
She smiled and said, “It’s not too bad, a little repetitious and you need to pay attention to what you’re doing. “
“Did you have any job experiences during high school?” was my next question.
She said since eighth grade she and a friend started a “weeding business”. They would weed gardens and flowerbeds of the residents in her neighborhood. She also tended 15 lobster traps to earn money. She said those jobs were different than the harvester experience, in that it was short-term work on a daily basis, rather than eight or more hours. She said that she enjoyed working with three local girls that made up the rest of the Fitzpatrick harvester crew: Desiree Dow, Lainey Herring and Martha McPartland, all students at Houlton High School. It was helpful to be with other workers her age.
From her comments about her experience so far, she then shared her goals for the rest of her year of adventure.
Leaving Houlton on the Sept. 29 she will spend only a few days with her parents John and Kendall Lord and on Oct. 5 she leaves for Costa Rica for ten weeks. She will volunteer in an orphanage and help in an elementary school teaching English.
Returning to Yarmouth in December she will spend the holidays with her family and then she is off to Patagonia, a region in South America made up Argentina and some of Chile. She will be sea kayaking and mountaineering. This program is through the National Outdoor Leadership School. Lord learned about this program through some friends.
She will be back home in the middle of April and for now nothing is scheduled. I bet her blank schedule won’t last for long.
I wondered how her parents handled all of her energetic goals. Her eyes sparkled when she said, “My mother is very supportive and gives me lots of encouragement, my dad, however is a bit reluctant. I think he is afraid I might not go on to college.”
I don’t think that he needs to worry. She seems wise beyond her years. Lord realized that she needed a break from the classroom and has demonstrated the maturity to delve into the unknown.
Oh, to be 18 again!
I had one last opportunity to speak with Lord before she left Houlton. She shared that as the week went on the days were longer and that they had worked into the evening. Lord admitted it was hard work and she was tired by the end of the week. From this experience she has gained a greater appreciation for the work that involves the growing and harvesting of our potato crops.
