Echoes features Wade’s Bragg

    Herbalist Natalia Bragg of Knott II Bragg Farm in Wade is one of several people quoted in an article about the Maine Folklife Center’s Story Bank Project in the new Echoes magazine released Oct. 2.     “Some of these healing traditions go back before this country was new,” Bragg told an interviewer at the 2008 American Folk Festival. Her story is one of more than 50 collected and transcribed so far in a project dedicated to preserving stories of Maine people of all ages. Chace Jackson of Allagash, John Connors of St. Francis and Michael Corbin of Madawaska are other Aroostook County people mentioned in the feature story.
    “Uniquely Maine” is one of several in-depth features in the current Echoes. In a tribute to members of what journalist Tom Brokaw called “the greatest generation,” writer and historian David Bergquist of Hermon, chronicles the life and death of Houlton soldier Harold Hoskin, from his youth as an Eagle Scout and leader at Houlton High School, through his marriage and military service, to his burial in 2007 in Arlington National Cemetery. He quotes those who knew Hoskin and describes the dogged determination of the man who finally brought him home 60 years after his death in 1944.
    Other features include a visit to a community garden in Orono that helps feed local senior citizens and a profile of an artist from Frenchville with a career in Portland.
    In her regular “Old County Woman” column, Glenna Smith exercises her imagination in “The Newlywed and the Hired Man,” while editor Kathryn Olmstead’s “First Person Plural” column traces the events inspired by Echoes articles on Presque Isle’s famed race horse John R. Braden.
    In the third of a series of life stories, former musher Lucy Leaf of Surry, continues documenting her 1990s sled dog expeditions in Labrador with her then husband Sam Woodward.
    Published quarterly in Caribou and printed in Presque Isle by Printworks, Echoes is in its 22nd year of “rediscovering community.”