With an odd nickname like Fly Rod, Cornelia Crosby was bound to attract people's interest. Not only that, she was six feet tall and unusually athletic for nineteenth-century women. Ironically, she tended to be sickly as a child, so her doctor prescribed being in the outdoors as a cure. Cornelia discovered she loved to hunt and fish in the Maine woods. As a young woman, she began to write about her adventures in a popular newspaper column, using the pen name "Fly Rod." The name stuck. Sadly, a knee injury put an end to Fly Rod's active outdoor adventures, but she remained beloved by many for the rest of her long life.
--Reviewed by Nina M. Osier, author of "Granite Island"
Cornelia Thurza Crosby's remarkable life (1854-1946) gave rise to a certain amount of legend: she was the first woman to legally shoot a caribou in Maine, held the first Maine Guide license issued, caught (but probably didn't release...) 200 trout in one day, and was rumored to have shot against Annie Oakley in a sharpshooting competition. Julia Hunter's insightful biography separates fact from fiction while exploring the career of a woman who worked tirelessly to promote the sporting life in Maine at the turn of the century.
Miss Crosby was an articulate writer herself, and her column, "Fly Rod's Note Book," was syndicated throughout the eastern United States. The Maine Central Railroad employed her to travel to expositions and fairs, where in her outdoor dress of dark green doeskin with a scandalously short skirt, she stood in front of a small log camp decorated with the paraphenalia and trophies of the sporting life, spoke with passersby about the delights of Maine, and showed them her scrapbook of photographs?enticing them to travel the rails to the woods.
Many of the photographs in her album were taken by E. R. Starbird, a commercial photographer specializing in Maine woods views. Nearly a hundred images?of hunting and fishing, sporting camps, lakes and streams and rivers, are reproduced in the second half of this book, along with an essay on Starbird's work by Earle Shettleworth. Excerpts from Fly Rod's writings add to this fascinating picture of the Maine woods at the turn of the century and provide further insight on the unusual life of this remarkable woman.