Olof Olsson Nylander would not settle in Woodland, county of Aroostook, Maine until 1893. By this time his parents and sister had emigrated from Sweden, joining his brother Jacob in 1886 in Woodland. At the age of 37, Olof married a local Swedish girl, Wilhelmina Johansson and they had three children. The first, a daughter, died during her first year. The second, a son, was institutionalized with an unknown mental disorder at the Bangor State Hospital and later was moved to a nursing home. Their third child, another daughter, lived to the age of 96.
Their farm was self-supporting with gardens, crop land, orchards and animals, but life was not easy for this family. Olof would be gone for frequent and long periods of time doing field work which did not always result in financial rewards. If he were working for the U.S. Geological Survey, he might earn some income, but it was small. He was an expert in orchids, ferns, mollusks, fossils, minerals and field geology.
Olof was the first to find fossils in Aroostook County and four were named for him: a trilobite, graptolite, a starfish and a land snail; yet this did not earn him large sums of money. He was an expert on orchids and published papers about them. He sent one to Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, for which he received a thank-you note. In 1935, he discovered a new variety in the County which was later named Corallorhize Madulata var. flavida. In a forward of Nylander’s paper “The Orchids”, then Caribou superintendent of schools, Mr. R.J. Libby stated “To say that, when our country was in the making, nature showered her choicest blessings upon Aroostook with a lavish hand, is simply to re-state an accepted fact.” The paper, self-published like so many others, was shared with interested colleagues.
Olof and his wife set about raising and hybridizing beans. At one time they had about 30 varieties in a store in Caribou, 27 of which they developed. He raised and developed a wide variety of plants on his farm including ferns and orchids which he sold, giving the family a source of income. He even sold his plants to a nursery in Massachusetts for a period of time.
In 1923, a fire burned his forest gardens where he had thousands of plants growing, causing him great sorrow at the loss. In addition to painting, he was adept at several jobs: a handyman, game warden, surveyor, field explorer and a widely respected scientist.
In 1922, he spent a good deal of his time creating display cards with photographs and information about the Swedish colony in Perham, Woodland, New Sweden and Caribou for the great tercentenary celebration of Gotenberg, Sweden. There were several politicians from the state who promised to help defray the expenses for this project and the travels to Sweden, but he never received payment. His wife died in 1932, and sometime after, he took a room at the Lyman Hotel in Caribou. On New Year’s Day in 1939, a fire broke out and Nylander lost all his personal belongings and many of his field notes and copies of his publications.
Olof conducted geological and paleontological work from the Moosehead Lake area of Maine through New Brunswick to Pearce Rock, Gaspe Peninsula, Quebec. This work was to tie into work done for 40 years by Dr. Clarke of New York and Professor Schuchert at Yale College.
Most of what is know about malacology — the study of mollusks — and orchids of northern Maine is directly due to the work of Olof Olsson Nylander. His recognized expertise in Stone Age artifacts caused the state to ask him to review the artifacts of the Red Paint Peoples being found on Indian Island. He also discovered numerous minerals and expanded the knowledge and locations of previous findings of minerals in northern Maine that had the potential to create a profitable industry in addition to potatoes. He could not understand the logic that made farmers import lime for their fields when some of the purest lime in the world could be found in many lake beds. He found deposits of manganese and molybdenum in black sand repositories which are important for steel production. He found significant deposits of copper and believed gold was to be found in western Maine as well.
Olof Nylander was a generous man sharing his discoveries with many people in his field, including many at the state level who he believed should be exploring these minerals and developing a great mining district that would ultimately create excellent revenue for the region and the state.
In 1938, the University of Maine at Orono conferred an honorary master of science degree on Nylander during the tercentennial of the first Swedish settlement. University President Arthur Hauck, included during his speech, “his collections and publications have contributed particularly to our knowledge of the plants and minerals of his beloved Aroostook County, where happily the results of his labor and study are to be preserved in the Nylander Museum at Caribou.”
Olof Nylander was the first curator of the Nylander Museum. The city paid him $25 per week, which included giving lectures to local school children. Many of the artifacts on display in the museum today are identified with labels written by Nylander with his own ink, mixed from a mysterious black powder, stated Scott Martin during his in-depth research of Nylander. Much of the information contained herein is from the manuscript written by Mr. Martin, published in 2002, for a class on Nylander that was offered at the University of Maine at Presque Isle in 1999.
Walter Dale Currier would frequently accompany Mr. Nylander on his field trips of exploration and discovery. They went to a bog to learn if a certain plant Nylander discovered earlier was still to be found in the area. In a preface written by Currier for Mr. Nylander for “Castalia Tetragona in Salmon Brook Lake Bog”, January 18, 1938, he comments that he was neither a biologist nor a geologist, but he had gained much knowledge of his surroundings accompanying Olof on his field trips. As a summary to this article, I quote Mr. Currier: “Aroostook County will be better known and longer remembered because of the life and work of Olof O. Nylander.”
Editor’s note: Members of the Nylander Museum’s board of directors plan to write an informational monthly column throughout the 75th anniversary year.
