Chapter 16
Hired by the Maine Central Railroad to market the state’s outdoor attractions, Cornelia Thurza Crosby appeared at the month-long Boston Food Fair in October 1897, resplendent in a skirt that was as scandalously short (for the times, at least) as her fame was wide. Nicknamed “Fly Rod” for her skill at fly fishing, the 6-foot-tall outdoorswoman and columnist spearheaded an exhibition that consisted of a log cabin, a live bear cub, a chaperoned Indian maiden, a 107-pound squash, “stuffed deer heads with abnormal horns,” and members of the Penobscot tribe, who, the local media reassured anxious attendees wary of the savages’ dishabille propensities, wore clothes just like real people. Maine’s first licensed guide, and rumored to have shot against her friend Annie Oakley in competition, Crosby appeared at numerous shows in her signature Paris-inspired hunting outfit.
Like the real fictitious Wonder Woman, Crosby had her own origin story: Crosby came by her avocation and moniker after her doctor advised the sedentary bank clerk to pursue “a large dose of the outdoors” to alleviate problematic lungs, possibly from the tuberculosis that had felled her father and brother. Single and in her 20s, she left her safe, stable job behind and never looked back, landing housekeeping jobs in several large boardinghouses and hotels around Maine’s Rangeley Lakes region, befriending local guides who tutored her in the arcane ways of the woods, like a cross between Mowgli and Luke Skywalker.
As with most legends, there were kernels of truth scattered in the murk. Crosby was indeed often ill, housebound, and bedridden with unspecified lung ailments. On a bright June day in 1878, the sickly Amazonian was carried to the foot of Mt. Blue, where she caught her first trout with the aid of a pole made of a light-tan, malleable alder. For her, the experience was the gateway drug that led to a lifelong addiction to the outdoors that created her outdoorswomen persona. That same year, a friend gifted Crosby with an 8-ounce bamboo rod with which she found she possessed Jedi-like powers at fly fishing, later snagging 2,500 trout in a single year.
Courtesy of the Phillips Historical Society
Her arsenal of fishing gear grew as well thanks to a friend, Charles Wheeler—whose fishing rods earned a Diploma of Excellence and a medal at the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876—gifting her with one of his renowned fly rods. Equally adept at writing as she was at casting—some say she could throw a line 100 feet—Crosby started penning accounts of her angling and outdoors exploits under the pen name “Fly Rod,” which, like a proverbial fish story, expanded over time from mundane to mythic proportions. “Fly Rod’s Notebook” was first printed in the Phillips Phonograph newspaper in 1889 and grew into a hugely popular column. Over time the “Fly Rod” name stuck to her with the tenacity of a sandbur. Profiles, like one that appeared in the Chicago Evening Post, admired her Amazonian stature and compared Crosby, an early proponent of catch and release, to Thoreau. An anti-suffragette, Crosby’s stance against giving women the vote probably removed her sex as a bull’s eye for scorn and vitriol, despite her masculine endeavors.
Besides her writing, Crosby’s resume began to include exhibiting as well, starting with the inaugural Sportsmen’s Exposition held in 1895 in New York. Crosby oversaw the design of the booth, which consisted of “Camp Maine Central,” a 10-by-13-foot cabin, made from local lumber and crafted by a Grizzly Adams–type, with the added attractions of boats, boots, stuffed animal heads and fish.
Camp Maine Central became the belle of the ball. The crowds, numbering as many as 15,000 on a single day (Maine’s entire population numbered a few souls over 600,000), resulted in a rush of tourists headed to Maine, accessible mainly by Crosby’s employer, the Maine Central Railroad. After the show the booth was relocated to Central Park, an eco-friendly repurposing heralding a practice common almost 120 years later at the Expo 2015 in Milan, when Switzerland, Monaco, and more than a dozen other nations repurposed their pavilions, from greenhouses to schools.
Over the next decade, Crosby oversaw several exhibits all over the northeast. The Second Annual Sportsmen’s Exposition, for example, saw a larger cabin with a live tank of 1,200 fish to remind attendees of the extensive angling opportunities on hand in Maine. Crosby received an abundance of gifts through her appearances at exhibitions—an engraved Winchester rifle, a fishing reel decorated with pearl—but the greatest gift of the expo may have been her friendship with Annie Oakley. Meeting at the Second Annual Sportsmen’s Exposition, both women found much in common with each other. Both were extensively traveled, heavily religious, and overtly feminine. They cut a chic figure with fitted jackets and short, knee- or calf-length skirts, avoiding wearing the politically charged bloomers associated with suffragettes. Even so, Crosby once recounted that women at the expos viewed her as an “aborigine” and “first-class freak.” It was a view likely abetted by the New York World, when it grouped Crosby along with Oakley in a piece entitled “Four Women Who Can Use a Shotgun Better than Many Men.”
Hyped as the “Grandest Exhibit of Food Products Ever Seen in America,” the Boston Food Fair was to prove the crowning point of all the exhibitions Crosby supervised. Held in 1897—the year she became Maine’s first licensed guide—it boasted John Philip Sousa’s 50-piece band and (not surprisingly, given its setting) a piece of the actual Blarney Stone. Even with its many attractions, the Maine exhibit’s biggest draw was Crosby, whose statuesque presence, as usual, lured thousands. Newspapers noted the wisdom of the fair’s management permitting this “plucky Maine girl” such latitude with her state’s exhibition. Forgotten now, Crosby used exhibitions in part to leverage her skills and ambition, to become something singular, in an age when a woman’s ambition had to be quiet as a catacomb and small as a pressed flower.