BANGOR DAILY NEWS • April 29, 2020
Foxes became a lucrative part of the fur trade in the late 19th and early 20th century. By 1920, Mainers had embraced the farming of foxes enthusiastically, with one family in Lincoln, the Gordons, dominating much of the trade. Frank Gordon, a dentist in Bangor, and his brother Fred, an optometrist in Lincoln, went all in on a fox farming venture, developing 15 fox farms — or ranches, as they were typically called — in and around Lincoln between 1919 and 1936. With the dawn of the Great Depression in 1929, however, the bottom fell out for most luxury goods. In 1952, fox farming was outlawed in Maine,