Make a gift in honor of the good that comes from BDN journalism in your hands, and help raise $60,000 this spring to support our reporting. Make a donation now.
In the dead of this winter, Scott Michaud stopped by the Caribou Historical Society to check the mail.
Greeting him and another member of the society was a long, skinny cardboard box. Inside: the answer to a mystery that had eluded northern Maine historians for nearly a century.
“As we opened it up, we could see it was some sort of cane,” Michaud, the historical society’s president, said in an interview with the Bangor Daily News. “I got excited because I knew the history of the Caribou cane that had been missing for many years.”
Topped with 14-karat gold and fashioned out of ebony wood, there sat Caribou’s long lost Boston Post Cane.
The Aroostook County city, which was a town until 1967, received one of 700 canes given to small towns in four New England states by the now-defunct Boston Post newspaper in 1909 as a stunt to increase the paper’s circulation. The 3-foot-long cane was to be awarded to the town’s oldest living resident.
Caribou did so, at least for a few decades, the historical record shows. But the last known recipient of the cane died in 1932, and despite attempts to find it and revive the tradition in the years since, the trail remained cold — until February.
The cane, as it turned out, had been in rural Pennsylvania — more than 800 miles away — since the 1950s.
As Greg Snowman explained in an accompanying letter, the city awarded the cane to his great-great-great-grandfather, David A. Snowman, who died at 92 years old in 1937. After David’s death, the cane ended up with his grandson, Milton Snowman, who moved to Coudersport, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s to start a potato farm.
Coudersport (population 2,371) is a rural hub along U.S. Route 6. It bears a striking resemblance to central Aroostook County, with a long history of potato growing and nearby Sweden Township, an early Swedish settlement. Caribou sits near Aroostook’s own historical Swedish colony in New Sweden and Stockholm.
Two generations after Milton Snowman moved, the cane ended up in his grandson’s possession, who decided that it was high time to send it back to Maine.
“As their descendent, I feel that it is long-past due that this Boston Post Cane be returned to its original home,” Greg Snowman wrote in the letter.
David Snowman is a familiar name to those who know the history of Aroostook County. He was the region’s last surviving Civil War veteran, having fought in the siege of Yorktown and the Battle of Williamsburg for the Union Army.
After the Battle of Savage’s Station, Snowman infiltrated a confederate camp and obtained information on the army’s future movements before being fired upon, according to his obituary. He was discharged from the Army in 1862 for permanent disability.
Snowman came from a lineage of soldiers. His father served in the Aroostook War — the two-year border dispute between the U.S. and New Brunswick in the late 1830s, in which the only combat death is reported to be a black bear. His grandfathers fought in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
A decade after his military service, Snowman settled in Aroostook County with his wife, Elizabeth. He served as a selectman and the superintendent of schools in Woodland, a town west of Caribou, for several years. He also worked as a teacher and farmer, and was a carpenter for more than 30 years, his obituary notes.
He built the Snowman Schoolhouse, Woodland’s only surviving one-room school, in 1895. The schoolhouse stands today as a museum operated by the Woodland Historical Society.
In the picture alongside his obituary, Snowman sports a fedora and carries a jacket in his left hand. In his right, Snowman leans on a cane, which the Caribou Historical Society believes to be the Boston Post Cane.
“He used it, look at how beat up it is!” Caribou volunteer historian Wendy Bossie exclaimed while examining the dents and scratches on the cane’s ebony.
“With this history stuff, if you wait long enough, sometimes the mystery is solved,” Bossie said. “It’s so serendipitous.”
Some of the cane’s past still remains lost to history. The historical society has only been able to trace four of its original recipients, and none from before 1925: Joseph Gary, a postmaster; W.H. Hamilton, a lawyer; Matthias Hutchinson; and Snowman.
At least 227 Maine towns received a cane, according to the Boston Post Cane Information Center. But Caribou’s has been missing for so long it’s not even on the center’s list.
“It was such a surprise to learn that the original Boston Post Cane for Caribou had been recently returned to the Caribou Historical Society,” City Manager Penny Thompson said. “I look forward to seeing it for myself.”
The city launched public efforts to find the cane in both the 1980s and 2022, wanting again to celebrate its oldest residents. After the 2022 search turned up no clues, Caribou purchased a replica cane to award to 105-year-old Anna Roberts. Roberts died last July, at 108 years old, and the replica is on display in the city’s municipal building alongside a plaque that honors all residents who have celebrated their 100th birthdays.
“Recognizing their contributions shows respect, strengthens community pride, and reminds future generations of the value of wisdom, civic involvement and shared history,” Thompson said.
The city is expected to continue using the replica and keep the original on display, lest it disappear for another century.
The historical society, which Michaud says needs volunteers and board members, is optimistic that the discovery brings newfound attention to their work.
“We’re hoping that this publicity of the cane arriving in Caribou unexpectedly will help this place grow,” he said.
