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Dickens Farm Is
Home to Eastbrook History
“Life on the farm”
is more than a turn of phrase for Tim and Louise Dickens. Because
even longer than there has been an Eastbrook on maps, the farm along
Route 200 has belonged to Tim Dickens’ family.
Tim and Louise Dickens believe they live in Eastbrook’s oldest
standing house, dating from at least 1819. |
Tim Dickens can
trace his lineage back to one of Eastbrook’s earliest settlers, John
DeMeyer.
Noticeable for its
two large, white barns and its neatly cut fields, Dickens Farm is
Eastbrook’s biggest working farm. With about 1,200 acres, it keeps
the couple busy year-round.
In summer Tim and
Louise cultivate blueberries and look after 22 camps on Abrams Pond.
In winter they turn to Christmas tree harvesting and wreath
production.
And always, they
think about the generations of Tim’s family that worked the farm for
more than 180 years before them.
Tim and Louise
believe they are living in Eastbrook’s oldest-standing house, dating
from about 1819. Inside is post-and-beam construction for the 18
rooms. Outside, though, is a more telling piece of history.
There is a stone on
their property, a flat, engraved marker that for years Dickens’
father, Reginald, would mow over. It commemorates John DeMeyer,
Tim’s great-great-grandfather.
The short version
of how the Belgian-born DeMeyer landed in Eastbrook is this: Born in
1789, DeMeyer served in Napoleon’s army in Spain under Bonaparte.
Captured by the British in 1812, he was brought to Canada’s
Campobello Island as a prisoner-of-war.
DeMeyer escaped in
1815, stole a fisherman’s skiff and rowed across to Fort O’Brien at
Machiasport. The land at Eastbrook was given to him for having
fought under Napoleon.
Tim and Louise
Dickens presume that the house was built by 1819, because of facts
they learned from the 1820 census.
Notes indicate
that, living on the very property, were: “8 members of family, 1
free white male age 26-45; 1 free white female age 26-45; 1 person
engaged in agriculture.”
Tim and his father
moved the stone in 1988 from a field, where frost through the years
had fractured it, to what is now a barn. They cemented it in a
corner so the property’s origins never will be unclear.
“We are proud of
this, and we wanted to preserve the stone,” Tim Dickens said. “But
to be honest, no one outside of the family has ever asked to see
it.”
The DeMeyer Farm
became known as the Dickens Farm when Tim’s father took it over. The
elder Dickens had come to the farm as a ward of the state, whom Fred
DeMeyer brought in as a 12-year-old.
“Fred DeMeyer is
the only grandfather I ever knew,” Tim Dickens said.
Tim Dickens, who is
a 1971 graduate of Sumner Memorial High School, has been honored for
his blueberry farming. Twice he was the second runner-up for the
Maine Jaycees’ Outstanding Young Farmer of the Year award.
“They put all the
farmers at the same table at the banquet,” Dickens said. “They
wondered if growers of potatoes, blueberries, apples, trees would
have anything in common.
“But I’ll tell you,
there was never a lull in that conversation. Farmers can talk.”
The Dickens raised
their three daughters on the farm, and Tim is wistful about the good
life.
“There really
aren’t too many working farms left around here; most of them are
gentlemen’s farms,” he said.
“But we are
flat-out busy between April 1 and mid-December.
“We have hired a
lot of kids who got their start here, their first job. They’ve all
moved on to bigger and better things, but they come back and talk.
And that feels good, because we’re a family farm.”
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