Category: Communities

MBNA and the Midcoast Miracle Ten years ago, the credit-card lender was bought by Bank of America, but its legacy remains. BY TOM GROENING MBNA. Four letters that actually stood for nothing, yet oh-so-much, in the mid-1990s through 2005. The Delaware-based credit-card lender, spun off from Maryland Bank, National Association—hence… SEE MORE

Carving Out Funds for Island Affordable Housing By Tom Groening For a divorced mother of a five-year-old, moving to the island was a kind of retreat and a kind of homecoming. Except there was no home. Maggy Willcox, who today publishes the Islesboro Island News, grew up in nearby Rockport… SEE MORE

Counting Empty Houses Come Winter Affordable housing finds a foothold on Maine’s islands. BY ANNIE MURPHY Tiffany Tate knows the frustration of looking for affordable housing on an island where all real estate is expensive and rentals are hard to come by. She was raised in Washington County, but Tate’s… SEE MORE

Stonington: A Town on the Edge Contradictions abound, but resiliency abides. STORY AND PHOTOS BY TOM GROENING If anyone has a finger on the pulse of a community, it’s the guy who runs the town’s weekly newspaper. And what does Ben Barrows, general manager of the Island Ad-Vantages, think about… SEE MORE

Island Fellows: A ‘Peace Corps for the Islands’ Fellows reverse Maine ‘brain drain,’ provide extra hands BY ABIGAIL CURTIS The board funded the Fellows program in 1998, and the following year the first two hardy souls were placed on Monhegan and in Casco Bay. It was the kind of blustery… SEE MORE

The Winter Game Basketball on Maine Islands   The water pipes on Vinalhaven have frozen. Well, they may have frozen. No one really seems to know what happened, but an early January bitter cold stretch—daytime highs in single digits—has put some kind of hurt on the municipal water system. One… SEE MORE

On Halloween morning, as the Margaret Chase Smith crossed the silvery reach of Penobscot Bay between Islesboro and the mainland, the passenger compartment was abuzz with the sounds of giggling children putting the final touches on their costumes. The quieter, Carhartt-clad workmen who also rode the ferry for the three-mile-long… SEE MORE