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From Our Archives
December 1979

December 1979
Photo by Tom Jones, cover by Tom Schenk

A Long Tradition

From “Farmstead at the Crossroads,” by John Lovell, in our December 1979 issue.

December 1979
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In Gorham, the Mosher family is getting ready. Gathered at the Long View Farm this Christmas will be three generations of Moshers, most of whom are still a part of the town their ancestors first came to nearly a century before Maine became a state. Today, the family lives in a house built in 1810 by Benjamin Mosher, a large, Federal-style structure with eight fireplaces and lots of room for holiday festivities. When Benjamin’s grandson was married in 1895, the wedding presents included a set of china that has remained in the house ever since, now brought out only on holiday occasions.

The patriarch of the family today is 86-year-old Albert Erlon Mosher, who, with his wife, Emma, will preside at the head of the dining room table he made himself many years ago. Emma’s Christmas Eve dinner is a family tradition. She cooks the turkey, and everybody brings something.

Erlon Mosher has spent his entire life on this Gorham farm, and he has seen other farmers falter. Over the years, Mosher has weathered the worst that drought, Depression, and disease could levy, and he knows that nothing more can part him from his farm. He has kept it intact for his son, as did his father, and his father before him.

In 2013, Erlon Mosher’s son — also Albert Erlon Mosher, though he goes by Albert — accepted the first-ever Heritage Farm Award from the Cumberland County Farm Bureau, in recognition of the Mosher family’s six-generation tenure on the land. Today, Albert Mosher still grows hay at Long View Farm, 246 years since the first Mosher bought the property.