Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Katahdin Sheep
In 1957, three hair sheep boarded a ship at the dock in Christiansted, St. Croix bound for Boston. It was the exact same route taken by young Alexander Hamilton in 1772 when he first came to America. Hamilton is considered one of the founding fathers of the U.S of A. The three sheep are considered the founding fathers of the Katahdin breed of sheep. (Actually, two of the three were founding mothers. The ram came to be called King Tut when they reached their final destination. I don’t know the ewe’s names, but if there is any justice or poetry to the story, they would have been Nefertiti and Cleopatra.)
Hamilton is the subject of a smash hit Broadway musical. The sheep are not. YET. If I can find a good composer to collaborate with, maybe I’ll work on it.
From Boston, Hamilton made his way south to New York. The sheep made their way north, to the tiny town of Abbot, Maine, where a sheep farmer named Michael Piel, a descendent of the Piel Beer family, was anxiously awaiting their arrival.
CLEO: (ON BOARD THE SHIP) Where are we going, anyway?
TUT: Someplace called Maine.
CLEO: Where’s that?
TUT: I don’t know. They say it gets really cold there.
NEFI: What’s cold?
TUT: Baah.
Abbot is so far up in the Maine wilderness civilization is just a rumor there. Its population according to the 1950 census was 452 humans, and Piel probably had a similar number of sheep. When I was a kid, my father would stop at the single little store in Abbot to buy bait (and, if I whined enough, perhaps a Twinkie) when we were going fishing in Moosehead Lake, which is even farther north. That was just about the same time the sheep arrived, but I never saw them, because Piel’s farm wasn’t on the road to Moosehead. It was on the other road. There were only two.
Piel, who knew something about genetics, began crossbreeding his new sheep with other breeds, looking for a hardy animal that wouldn’t require shearing. His plan was to use them to graze power lines, obviating the need for spraying or mowing to keep the rights-of-way open. After some measure of trial and error, he had exactly the qualities he was looking for. He named the new breed after Mt. Katahdin, the tallest mountain in Maine and the beginning of the Appalachian Trail. To the best of my knowledge, the power line idea never did pan out. I haven’t done any sophisticated research on the subject, but I’ve crossed a lot of power lines in my day, and never once have I seen a flock of Katahdins grazing under the high tension wires.
But the new breed was a success nonetheless, and Piel began receiving orders from all over America for some of his wonderful ovines. He also made a nice profit selling mutton and lamb chops, because Katahdins are quite delicious. Because they are hair sheep, they don’t produce wool, so Piel didn’t make money that way, but on the other hand, he didn’t have to shear them.
Katahdins are noted for being highly adaptable to a variety of climates and conditions, so King Tut and the Ewes (another great name for a rock band) coped just fine with the un-St. Croix-like weather in Abbot. Another fun fact about the breed is their natural ability to resist internal parasites – a desirable trait which not only improves the overall health of the flock, but also can significantly reduce costs for shepherds. The mama sheep almost always produce twins when they lamb, so the flock can grow faster than that of a charismatic preacher, unless of course, you overdo the lamb chop thing. We’ll be doing some butchering eventually, but the main job of our Katahdins here at Union Grove is something much closer to Piel’s original power line plan. Only instead of power lines, our sheep spend their workdays cleaning the vine lines of our fabulous seedless, thin-skinned, antioxidant-rich Muscadine grapevines of weeds, and trimming the polyculture cover crops between each line, fertilizing all the while. Multitasking.
Our shepherd-in-chief is the redoubtable Dane Jensen, who has a ton of experience with the process in the vine lands of California, where he was frequently mistaken for a movie star. He and his trusty sidekick, Sophie the Wonder Dog, are in charge of the whole ovine operation, and you can meet them both, as well as the great, great… grandkids of King Tut, when you visit Union Grove Farm. Which you should certainly do. Stay tuned for more information on this website.