History and Guide

Westmanland today

Today, there is very little of the old fashioned farming in Westmanland (or the colony), but Sven Bondeson and the Margison family do raise organic potatoes and beef cattle while Steve and Barbara Miller are carrying on a diversified organic market garden type of operation. Others are pursuing gardening and tree farm operations, but mostly the town has become a bedroom community for those working in other towns; a retirement/recreational area on the shore of Little Madawaska Lake; with a few scattered forme farms with absentee owners. About the only descendants of the earliest settlers now left in the town are Tom Hale (from Carl Gustaf Peterson and Emil Johnson), Ronald Nelson (from Nils Nelson); and perhaps Ernest and Sheldon Akerson (sons of George Akerson, who in 1941 took over the John Peterson place after Peter Viberg). Several residences have been built in recent years, and many camps on the Little Lake Road, with a fine new bridge and town road maintenance.

The Westmanland Town Hall (2001).

The second Westmanland schoolhouse is still used for town affairs but no longer as a school; the Westmanland Cemetery across the road continues as the main burial site and is well kept up; and Blackstone Siding is still used for logging and trucking operations even though the railroad is gone. Students are now transported to schools in New Sweden or Caribou by bus, not horse-drawn sleds. Mail service was originally provided from the Nelson Post Office at the Andrew Nelson farm on West Road; later from Jemtland and now Stockholm, with rural delivery beginning about 1908. The 1994 Maine's Swedish Colony Calendar features all of the log buildings from the early days of the Colony, including Westmanland. A summer's drive along Westmanland Road is still a pleasant and picturesque excursion. One may even continue on beyond Blackstone Siding through the woods to gain access to the pre-Civil War Goddard Farm, and eventually end up at Eagle Lake.

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