Category: History

Island Journal

Sears Island’s Long Industrial Courtship

It’s 3:58 p.m. on Dec. 21, and the sun is about to set over Sears Island, the forested, causeway-connected spot in upper Penobscot Bay where we’ve come to observe the Winter Solstice. It’s cold out there—20-something degrees and windy—and we’re parked with others along the road leading to the island, watching the sun dip over Mack Point to the west. The event we’re here for isn’t really the sunset but something called “Solstice by the Sea,” imagined and engineered by Friends of Sears Island, a conservation-minded group dedicated to protecting Sears Island in its current undeveloped state. SEE MORE

Island Journal

How Far Can a Fish Run?

Alewives, a sea-run fish, are a sustainable source of bait for lobster and halibut. These fish are harvested at Damariscotta Mills and then loaded into local fishermen’s trucks. It’s not rocket science. “Take a freshwater fish, put it in salt water, and you’ve killed it. Take a marine fish, put… SEE MORE

Island Journal

Fifty Years of Cleaner Water

The site of the Continental Mill in Lewiston on the Androscoggin River as seen from Auburn, the western bank. Textile mills like the ones in Lewiston as well as paper mills upstream contributed significantly to the Androscoggin’s degradation in the 1950s and 60s. PHOTO: JACK SULLIVAN Fifty years ago, Maine… SEE MORE

Island Journal

The ‘Undeclared War’ on the Reviled Cormorant

One summer morning in about 1963, I was fooling around in my 14-foot flat-bottomed punt near the beach on Mackerel Cove. Probably I was wrestling as usual with the oversized 15-horse Johnson outboard that was attached with clamps, twine, and hope to the punt’s frail transom, I can’t remember exactly.… SEE MORE

Island Journal

When the Irish Invaded Canada

Less than a year after Robert E. Lee relinquished his sword at Appomattox Court House, a band of battle-hungry Mainers boarded a steamship in Portland. Armed with revolvers and Bowie knives, the volunteer soldiers had no intentions of traveling south to reignite the Civil War. Instead, the Irish immigrants sailed… SEE MORE

Island Journal

What We Mean When We Say ‘From Away’

Back in the early 1960s, we’d pile into the wood-panel station wagon and drive from our house within mystic earshot of the Two Lights foghorn to Massachusetts to visit my father’s family. The North Shore seemed interminably far away. We kids preferred the shorter drives to our mother’s sisters’ homes… SEE MORE

Island Journal

A Century Ago, Children Were Seafood Processors

Phoebe Thomas went running home down the busy Eastport street from the sardine cannery before the work shift was over. She was crying. It was an August day in 1911. Phoebe was eight, not quite as old as the century, and had sliced her thumb with a sharp knife while… SEE MORE

Island Journal

An Island Funeral

Mrs. Moore died last Thursday and was buried Saturday it was thought to be the largest funeral ever attended on this island. The Cutter from Bass Harbor brought over a great many, and other boats from various places in Tremont . As described in the diary of one Susanna Gott,… SEE MORE

Island Journal

Henri, Bellows, and Luks: The Ashcan School in Maine

Storm Tide, Robert Henri, 1903. Oil on canvas, 26 x 32 inches Whitney Museum of American Art At the end of the 19th century, something of a battle began in American art, between the academicians and a group of independent artists. The former, represented by the National Academy of Design… SEE MORE