Maine Memory Network

Hilton's Store, located at "the square" (the intersection of Route 194/Head Tide Road and Dock Road in 2020) was one of several stores in the Puddle Dock area of Alna in1909.

Owners Lil and Walter Hilton sold dry goods, groceries, shoes, and other staples to local residents. The store also housed the Alna post office.

The gable roof building just behind Hilton's Store was a grain store.

Hilton's Store remained in operation as a general store and post office into the 1960s. It was torn down about 1970. The building housing the grain store was moved in 1944 to a new location on Route 218 and became the Alna Store.

The Edson Giles store, near Fort Island in the Damariscotta River, was in the Boothbay village of Back Narrows next to Edson’s house. It was a typical general store of the time.

Carroll Gray, born in 1912, remembered the store well. "Those old time grocery stores had a very attractive odor about them that isn't found these days. Vinegar by the barrel, molasses by the barrel, salt pork by the barrel, and coffee ground as you waited gave these stores a delicious aroma. Ralph Giles's store filled that bill." The stores also were gathering places for local men to sit and shoot the breeze.

The group gathered in front of the store some time about 1920 included Edson Giles on the far right, Will Hutchins with his arms folded, George Gray by the window on the left, and Herm Poole, next on the left.

Edson ran the farm and store from 1904 to 1914, when he asked his son Ralph to return from Massachusetts to help him run it.

A poem, which appeared in the January 14, 1916 Register, did a tongue-in-cheek job of profiling the old small-town ways of the "setters."

In E. C. Giles's Grocery Store

A circle gathers ev'ry night, say twenty odd or more
Around the big invitin' stove in Giles's grocery store.
Nail kegs and cracker barrels take the place uv fine settees,
An' here the circle spends its time in most luxuryus ease.

Here's where the farmin's carried on; here's where the hay is raised;
Here's where cords uv wood are cut and where the stock is grazed.
Here's where the monstrous clams are dug instead uv 'long the shore
Great deeds are done around the stove in Giles's grocery store.

The women folk around the town 'low if these great affairs
Would only happen close to home they'd all be millionaires.
But while they're luggin' up the water or wood out uv door,
These warriors bold are fightin' still in Giles' grocery store.

The nights they come, the nights they go, spring, summer, winter, fall,
'An still they meet there regular, the setters, one and all.
I'd tell you more uv what they do, n' rake them fellers o'er,
But I must go and take my seat in Giles's grocery store.

The Sawyer's Island House was a favorite summer resort in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The resort advertised "pleasant rooms and good board for 15 or 20 ladies and gentlemen...on reasonable terms."

Visitors could enjoy fine sailing, fishing and bathing. The Bath and Boothbay steamers stopped there regularly, good roads with bridges connected to the mainland and other Islands, and mail arrived daily.

Summer people began coming to the island about 1870 when Zina Hodgdon took boarders into the house he had built in 1847. Over the next decade he converted his home into a hotel.

The adjacent building was originally Hodgdon’s shoemaking shop. He expanded it into a general store in 1870 and later made it into guest rooms. In the 1930s a single sink with running water and toilet upstairs and a bathroom near the kitchen on the first floor served guests. They required appointments to use the bathtub.

In the early 1900s Elton H. Lewis operated the resort. Fire destroyed it in 1964.

The steamboat "Spray" began running from Boothbay Harbor to Bath in 1865, with a stop at Sawyer's Landing. Zina Hodgdon became a steamboat agent about that time. A July 1877 ad in the Boothbay Register announced three stops a week at Sawyer's Landing.

Elton H. Lewis operated the Sawyer's Island House in the early 1900s. Fire destroyed the building in 1964.

Boothbay Harbor's west side was the location of the wharf for passenger boat, "Nellie G II", one of the vessels that carried visitors and residents to nearby islands. Across the harbor on the east side were, left to right, Irving Reed's shipyard, the freezer (cold storage), and the Catholic church.

The boat's predecessor, "Nellie G," was built in Arrowsic in 1895 for Captain Amasa Williams, who brought her to town in 1902. He and his engineer, Charles Holbrook, ran the boat on the Squirrel Island to Boothbay Harbor route. Squirrel Island was a prominent summer colony founded by families from Lewiston in 1870.

In 1928 Amasa's son Walter Williams took over, with Charles continuing as partner and engineer. Wanting a faster boat, Walter and Charles in 1932 hired Goudy & Stevens shipyard to build the "Nellie G II." That 44-foot gas-powered passenger boat took over the route and continued under Williams until 1946 when Harold Dodge and Ross Dickson took her over.

After she made her last run to Squirrel Island in 1969, George McEvoy of Boothbay Harbor acquired "Nellie G II". He continues to own her in 2020.

The Oake Grove Hotel, opened by W. Herbert Reed, started as a household rooming house in the 1880s, and developed over the decades to be the largest hotel in the region. From a modest expansion in 1892 to accommodate more boarders, his hotel grew to have 146 rooms.

The hotel provided much more than sheets and food, with dances, concerts, and lectures often offered. At the height of the summer season in the early and mid-1900s, some inns had their own columns in the local paper. In late July 1916 the Oake Grove column reported outings in the boats "Gee Whiz" and the "Get2It" to the islands and an excursion to Oak Point for one of Captain Free McKown's clambakes. Boatbuilder Manley Reed took special care of the Oake Grove guests, making himself available for ferrying in the "Avalon."

In the 1920s the Oake Grove advertised rooms from $6 to $10 a night, all with private baths. The hotel had a dining room for chauffeurs through the 1950s.

During World War II the hotel closed for one year because of rationing.

Many employees returned year after year and met their spouses there. Reunions continue for 30 years after the Reed family sold the hotel and it was razed in 1964.

Rice Brothers, formed in the 1890s at the end of School Street in East Boothbay, was a shipbuilding company. In the early 1900s the sizable plant was one of the largest and most modern in the village. It built government boats, large yachts, sailboats, powerboats, steel boats, and even engines.

In 1919 its projects included some lifeboats for Harvard, seen resting on the shore.The Rice-designed passenger steamer "Bainbridge" and 152-foot steel beam trawler "Harvard" were under construction.

Local shipyards of the 1800s were usually outdoor operations, with small workshop buildings for tasks such as spinning oakum (a highly flammable operation), blacksmithing, or bench work. Rice Brothers had a meteoric rise from the 1890s. By 1916 the company had three two-story buildings as well as three one-story buildings.

Fire destroyed Rice Brothers on July 10, 1917, and its 100 employees were idled. The brick machine shop remained, shorn of its wooden superstructure, until torn down after another shipyard fire there 91 years later. In 1917 East Boothbay's horse-drawn hand-powered pumper saved the Frank Rice house, seen behind the foundry; it was saved from fire again in 2008.

Ocean Point developed as a summer colony between the 1870s and 1920s. Most of the cottages were built after the turn of the 20th century. The developers and the majority of the summer residents came from Augusta, traveling by steamboat down the Kennebec to the Ocean Point wharf.

These Grimes Cove cottages on Shore Road, built between 1887 and 1900, some in the turreted Queen Anne style, were among the first cottages in the colony. Lovicount Lyon was the original owner of "Hard-a-Lee," the cottage on the left. Javan Drummond’s “Cove Cottage” was next door. Henry Lyon owned the cottage on the right. The third one from the left was destroyed but lifelong Ocean Pointers rebuilt the bi-color house in the same design as the original.

The moored boat was a herring seiner. In the early 1900s, when sardine canning was a huge industry, herring seiners were common along the Maine coast, especially Down East. Boothbay Harbor once had six canneries. This herring seiner, "Ernest Lowell," was built in Lubec in 1902. In 1924 Oliver C. Dinsmore of Whiting owned her, and her home port was Eastport.

The Riverside Casino was a center of Southport’s social scene until September 5, 1937, when it was the scene of a spectacular fire. During Prohibition times in the 1920s and 1930s the Casino saw several "raids" in which Federal Agents searched for contraband liquor. It is recalled that several customers escaped by leaping from the porch where people are shown in the picture.

Beyond the Casino was the wooden bridge to Boothbay. In its later years the bridge was so rickety that the school bus stopped to let all the children off before crossing the bridge. The children walked across to re-board the bus on the other side lest the bus be lost and children drowned. The current (2020) steel bridge replaced this bridge in 1939.

Squirrel Island’s origins as a summer colony began in 1870 when a group from Lewiston/Auburn tenting at Boothbay enjoyed a chowder picnic on the island. In that enthusiastic group was Jacob B. Ham, who bought the island that July of 1870 for $2200.

Chartering of the Squirrel Island Association the next year, followed by the construction of twelve cottages, were the first steps in developing the island as a summer colony, A wharf, post office, hotel, chapel, library and recreation hall, then called a casino, followed. By the 1890s large architect-designed houses began to supplant the early small cottages.

The chapel, on the left, was built in 1880 and its steeple replaced in 1915. In the colony’s early years there were weekly summer Sunday services and evening prayer meetings twice a week. The casino, the forth building from the left. was built in 1890. There was no gambling, but summer residents enjoyed whist, euchre and bridge parties, covered dish suppers, dances, operettas, movies, and other activities. A. H. Davenport, a Boston furniture and decorating magnate, gave the Davenport Library, on the far right, to the island in 1905.

In 2020 Squirrel Island has about 100 summer homes. Homeowners have a 999-year lease on their lots and get one vote each at the Association annual meeting.

Ellsworth “Bub” Gray ran a store, the Newagen post office, and a boarding house on the shore, half way between the Town Landing and the Newagen Inn (2020 locations). A ship from Portland delivered his goods.

One time Bub hung a large stalk of bananas from Portland in the store, and they sold quickly. When the supply ran out, a customer asked why he no longer sold bananas. The laconic reply was, “Can’t keep up with the demand. Can’t be bothered to stock ’em.”

Another time a postal inspector dropped by and commented that the place needed sweeping. Bub commented, “The broom’s behind the door."

The store burned in 1927.

The Burnham and Morrill Company clam factory in Medomak was part of a chain of clam factories operated by Burnham and Morrill, which included another one in Friendship.

Immediately after the factory was built around 1900, forty or fifty Bremen men took up clam digging and kept the new factory supplied with the shellfish. Their wives and sisters were also employed, working inside the factory where clams were steamed in a retort and then placed on a table where the women picked the meat out of the shells by hand. Clams were then washed, weighed, sealed in cans, cooked under pressure, cooled and labeled. The clam juice was collected and canned as a separate product.

In 1940 the factory closed, and Grandville Brow of Friendship used the building for a time as a station for buying and shipping clams. Later Clifford Shuman of Medomak purchased the factory and bought and sold lobsters there until the late 1950s.

In 2020 the old clam factory is a marina and lobster wholesale/retail outlet operated by Blair Pyne.

Long Cove Point in Bristol began to be developed as a summer colony in the 1890s. Sixty-four lots were available for purchase at $10 to $25 each.

Named for Henry Chamberlain of Round Pond, the Chamberlain development had about 16 cottages and a post office by 1906. In 1910 a clubhouse, initially lighted with oil lamps and Japanese lanterns, was ready for use.

In the early 1920s four men purchased the Hackleton farm and marketed the property as “The Land of Treasured Vacations.” The colony added many more cottages in the 1920s and 1930s. Electricity reached Long Point Cove in 1925, and by 1950 the cottages had indoor plumbing.

Amenities included a kitchen, bowling alley and clay tennis courts. In the summer the club was a busy place, with whist and bridge parties, covered dish suppers, dances, croquet, clambakes, movies and other activities.

Steamboats that brought the summer people docked at a wharf on the south side of Long Cove Point. Long Point continues to be an active summer community in the 2020s.

Automobiles and horses shared parking spaces in the 1920s in Damariscotta where concrete sidewalks were replacing wooden ones.

At the edge of the a dirt street, a horse-watering bowl stood in front of what locals called Lincoln Hall, with the photographer’s vehicle visible on the side street. The building had three stores on the street level and a large hall on the second floor. As of 2020, the Maine Coast Book Store owns the building, where movies and plays are shown in the hall.

The brick block behind Lincoln Hall was called the Day Block. Both of these buildings were constructed of Damariscotta River brick after the great fire of 1845, which burned 70 percent of the buildings on Main Street. The lucrative shipbuilding business in Damariscotta funded these elaborate brick buildings.

In the 1920s, the buildings on the left side of Main Street housed the businesses of Alvan Hussey & Son Dry and Fancy Goods, W. W. Keene & Son Hardware and Glenwood stoves, and a barber shop.

The Fiske House on Main Street, just east of the center of town, was the home of shipbuilder Benjamin Metcalf. He and Elbridge Morris built five clipper ships together.

Metcalf's large house later was one of the most prestigious hotels in Maine, with delicious meals served in the dining room. D. E. Fiske was proprietor of the hotel.

During World War II, Company C of the 181st Infantry, 16th Yankee Division was stationed there. More recently the building was a Recreation Center for Damariscotta youth. After the house was torn down, the building housing the First National Bank of Damariscotta (as of 2020) was constructed on the site.

Next to the Fiske House was the home of the Lincoln County News office. It burned in the great fire of 1943.

From the 1920s to 1940s Damariscotta Mills was the business center of Nobleboro.

Main Street (Bayview Road in 2020) paralleled the tracks of the Knox and Lincoln Railroad, which ran along Great Salt Bay in Damariscotta Mills on its route between Bath and Rockland. The Baptist Church. built in 1854 with the bell tower and bell added later, faced Main Street. The church closed in 1973 when only six members remained and in 2020 is a residence.

The fish plant in the lower left opened in 1892 for processing alewives (river herring). The fish migrated each spring from the ocean up the Damariscotta River, through Great Salt Bay, up the fish ladder stream into the mill pond, and then into Damariscotta Lake to breed. Behind the fish plant alewives swam into pens, where workers used dip nets to scoop them out for salting and pickling or fileting. The seven small shacks between the railroad and road were used to smoke alewives. The fish were a common local food, and thousands of barrels a year were exported to the West Indies and other foreign markets. The plant closed in the late 1960s.

More than fifty years later local organizations and towns funded a reconstruction of the fish ladder to ensure alewives will continue to run each year.

Until 1930 or 1931, Dresden residents and others relied on ferries to cross the Kennebec River to and from Richmond. Ferries from the Dresden landing also went to Swan Island, landing on the northeast end near the Tubbs house.

Beginning in the early 1800s, records showed a number of local people being “licensed to keep a ferry,” usually in one direction; a second licensed ferry operated in the opposite direction. Some ferries were sailed, with oxen and hay wagons, horses and buggies, and automobiles on board.

The people on the ferry may have been guests at the nearby Densmore House, a summer hotel owned by Joseph Densmore, a licensed ferry operator.

This house, which Captain Joseph Decker built in 1774 on Westport Island, had a connection to the French Queen, Marie Antoinette, during the French Revolution.

Captain Stephen Clough, Captain Decker's son-in-law, owned it 1793, when he was in France. Legend has it that he planned to save Marie Antoinette's life by taking her to Maine on his ship "Sally" to live in this house. However, she was arrested before he could intervene. When Captain Clough returned home, he brought with him French china, furniture, and clothing, said by some to be Marie Antoinette's.

At least four other places in America, including an entire village called "Azelium" near Athens, Pennsylvania, were also made ready for the French Queen and her court.

In 1838 gundalows, or flat-bottomed boats, pulled by oxen hauled the house across the Sheepscot River to a site in Edgecomb that overlooks the river.

In more recent times three generations of the family of Lea Wait, a prominent mystery and historical fiction writer, have owned the house. In 2020 Wait and her husband, artist Bob Thomas, live in the house, where they run an antique print business.

Sunset Lodge was a favorite destination for lawyers, doctors and other vacationers from New York, Pennsylvania and other states.

In 1928 Chandler and Helen Stetson purchased the lodge and six cottages from J. Edwin Morrissette. They gradually expanded the business to include an enlarged lodge and 24 rustic hemlock slab-sided cabins facing Damariscotta Lake. The extensive waterfront had a sandy swimming area and fleet of traditional green canvas-covered fishing boats and canoes for guests. Many local people worked as cooks, guides, waitresses, and housekeeping staff.

Each year, Chan went to the Boston and New York Sportsman’s Shows to promote the business, taking a miniature diorama he'd made of the resort. His wife sewed new bedspreads and curtains for several cabins each year. Guests returned year after year for the good fishing, relaxed atmosphere, homemade meals, and reunions with friends. Weekly meal specials often included a lobster bake or a steak cookout. Telling “yarns” in front of the fireplace, sing-a-longs and home movies were frequent evening activities.

Chan died in 1961, and his son Robert and his wife Aileen continued the business until Bob's death in 1974.

The "May Archer," the first regular passenger ferry to Monhegan, was in service during the summer months from 1907 to 1916. Vessels more suitable for travel in winter weather were employed to deliver the mail from November to April.

Monhegan began to change rapidly during this time from a remote fishing village to a summer tourist destination. New homes for summer residents began to be constructed outside the village on the south side of the island. The four-story building with dormers was the Albee House Hotel, later the Monhegan House; the water tanks that supplied it were on the far left.

A notoriously unpleasant voyage to Monhegan on the "May Archer" inspired Clara Fuller to write a poem, "Song of Hate to the 'May Archer'" in 1915:

May you sail a sea of fire
And be wracked as you’ve racked me
Your bow be split and your stern be hit

And may you burn eternally
Rank as your own bilge-water
Cruel as a step-mother’s love
Had I, by heck, the Fates at beck,
Each day you’d land, on some far strand, a
Rotten roisterous wreck.

Traditionally Monhegan postmasters performed their duties out of their own home. However, not long after Elva Brackett (later Nicholson) became the island's postmaster, the post office moved to a designated building.

Elva began her job in 1919, when she was 24 years old and living with her parents. Her first post office was in the fish house north of the wharf that was referred to as "the Barnacle". Her father, Cass Brackett, bought land and built the Carina House for use as a store and post office by his daughter, Elva. The post office operated in this building from 1921 to 1929. Elva served as Monhegan postmaster until 1963.

Sidney Baldwin, a writer from Illinois, purchased the Carina in 1930 as a home for her gardener, Ira Achorn. This arrangement lasted until 1957, when Baldwin sold the Carina and her neighboring home back to Elva Brackett.

The building was a rental house for several years until the 1960s, when textile artist Robert Semple opened his studio and yarn shop and taught classes in librapoint there. Later the downstairs housed a general store, and the upstairs was an apartment and studio for the Monhegan Artist Residency fellow.

Harrison Humphrey (1841-1918) was a fisherman and a blacksmith who became known as Monhegan's hermit. The second of eleven children, Harrison came to Monhegan with his family in 1861 when his father, Joseph F. Humphrey, became Lighthouse Keeper. When Joseph died in 1862 Harrison’s mother, Betsy Morrow Humphrey, took her husband’s place, keeping the light until 1880. It is likely that Harrison assisted his mother, as he was listed as Lighthouse Keeper in 1870.

His blacksmith shop, where Humphrey posed, was at the corner of the Ice Pond and Deadman’s Cove roads. He also had a fish house at Deadman's Cove that was known as the "Hermitage."

Viewed from what local residents called the South Side, New Harbor was a good example of how Maine harbors looked in the early 1900s.

Wharves and fish houses lined the shore on the right. Sam Tibbetts’ fish buying station was on the float at the center of the photo. To its left were a lobster smack or sardine carrier, where fishermen unloaded their catch, next to a big Friendship sloop with a dory trailing off its stern. Small lobster and fishing boats from the era of hand hauling were moored in the harbor.

Steamers used to dock in front of William Danforth's farmhouse on the left.

In 2020 the farmhouse and barn and the old wharves are gone, although some of the houses still stand.

Elbridge Baker, Jr. was an enterprising businessman who worked in lumber and “match splints,” farmed, and opened a country store in North Newcastle in the 1860s. In 1869 he was appointed Postmaster and had the post office in his store.

When Elbridge Baker died, Tildon Hodgkins, who had apprenticed at the store, took over the business and post office. He had a house built across the road from the store. It was a typical country store, which sold countless items and was the center of the community. Many goods came by train to Damariscotta Mills. Hodgkins also bought produce from local farmers and delivered groceries to many of his customers.

The North Newcastle Post Office closed in 1946. Hodgkins ran the store until his health declined; he died in 1968.

The Town House, on the right, H. Alvin Hall's Store, the post office, and the telephone exchange in the building next door, the large Grange building, and a school made up Nobleboro's town center in the early twentieth century.

Built between 1837-1838, the Town House's kerosene-lighted bead-board interior housed selectmen’s offices and space for meetings.

The Nobleboro post office and Back Meadow Telephone Company shared space with Hall's Store. In 1914 the telephone cooperative received permission to have a party line extending “from Noble monument to the Damariscotta north line.” The exchange also permitted members to make out-of-town calls but only during store hours.

The Nobleboro Grange, No. 369, organized in January 1901, built the high-roofed building in 1902. Its membership peaked at 160 in 1914 and again in 1947. As the farm population decreased, the Grange became primarily a social organization. The Nobleboro Grange and Waldoboro’s Meenahga Grange merged in 2010.

The Center School next door was one of twelve one-room schoolhouses in Nobleboro. Originally located down the road, this schoolhouse was rebuilt in 1892 on the site of the town pound.

William Sidelinger operated a blacksmith and wheelwright shop next to the school and lived in the adjacent house. Mabel Sidelinger, his great-granddaughter, lived in the house until she died in 1996 at age 105.

The Town House building burned in the early 1990s. The Grange is a private residence in 2020.

The "Castle" was a popular tourist attraction on the Pemaquid Peninsula in the early 1900s. It was a 1908 reconstruction of the stone western tower of Fort William Henry, built to protect English settlers from strikes by Wabanaki people and their French allies who had interests in the land and resources the English were attempting to profit upon.

In 1910, visitors could arrive by steamboat at a landing near the fort. The wooden sidewalk and railing kept pedestrians out of the uneven and sometimes muddy road. Throngs arrived on summer weekend outings after the historic site opened to the public. The site was a popular subject for photographs, as attested by the photographer's vehicle from the Eastern Illustrating and Publishing Company, a postcard company in Belfast.

Fort William Henry was the second of three forts built at this location. Fort Charles (1677-89) and Fort William Henry were both taken by the enemy and destroyed. Fort Frederick, the third fort, was built from the ruins of Fort William Henry in 1729, decommissioned in 1759, and later dismantled. Archaeologists have undertaken excavations at the site for decades.

Now Colonial Pemaquid State Historical Site, visitors in 2020 explore the tower and walls and view thousands of artifacts in the museum from the early fishing villages and forts, the Wawenock Tribe (culturally related to the Penobscots) of Wabanaki, and other periods of local history.

Phil Nichols built small sailboats, including three Friendship sloops. in this boat house on Breezy Point, off the road to Northern Point. He named his last boat “Surprise” because he was surprised when he finally got her done.

Across from Breezy Point is the village of Round Pond. Both the white Methodist Church, to the left, and the Little Brown Church, a Union church, were built in1853. The large white building to the left of the Methodist Church is King Ro Manor.

Brown's General Store was the center of the Somerville community. It stood at Somerville Corners, later called Brown's Corners.

The Brown Store sold everything: grains and feed, cordwood and lumber, food and clothing, and, of course, candy. Chickens were once raised on the second floor, as was discovered when the space was being remodeled as a dance floor. Charles F. Brown ran the store until his death in 1928, when his stepson Herklas took over its operation.

Horse-drawn vehicles shared the road with automobiles in 1915. The store did not yet have gasoline pumps, but later Herklas Brown sold Esso gasoline. He attracted the attention of Gordon Parks, an eminent photojournalist of the time, who chronicled American life of the 1940s for Standard Oil. Parks’ photos of the Brown family provided an intimate portrait of life in Somerville.

The store closed in 1962, and the center of the community was lost. In 2020 Somerville has no stores, the Sheepscot River no longer powers mills, and Somerville Corners is a sleepy rural intersection.

The road through South Bristol's town center (Route 129 in 2020) between Rutherford Island and the hand-cranked 1903 Gut swing bridge was known as, "The Bridge". It was a busy place on a summer day in 1911 with people shopping, chatting on porches, and strolling on the road or across the wooden bridge.

Signs advertised dry goods, fancy goods, ice cream, groceries, candy, and tobacco products for sale in the stores. The Thompson Ice Company's wagon was parked next to Edward Gamage's Drug Store. The sole vehicle on the street was from the Eastern Illustrating and Publishing Company in Belfast, whose photographer was taking photos of South Bristol for postcards.

The bridge crossed the Gut, the waterway between the Damariscotta River and Johns Bay and separated Rutherford Island from the Mainland.

In 2020 all but two of the buildings are still there, although some are much altered. Gamage’s store and the barn with the open door across the bridge are gone. The bridge has been replaced several times. The Thompson Ice Company exists as the Thompson Ice House Preservation Society in 2020.

The Rice Brothers boat builders in East Boothbay built the "Patrikos", a 27-foot vee-stern cruiser powered by a two-cylinder Knox engine, in 1908.

On this day in 1911 it had emerged from under the bridge and was passing the Thompson boat shop, with laundry drying, the Thompson Inn on the skyline, and the Jennings dance hall and store on the right. The man at the helm was almost certainly Edgar O. Achorns. "Patrikos" means “gift of the father” in Greek, and the boat was a gift from the father of one of the Achorns.

Dr. Harold Mott-Smith, Jr., a physicist and naval officer in World War II, purchased the boat in 1934 when he bought his summer cottage on Cliffords Cove on Rutherford Island. He removed the boat’s awning and name immediately. as they were not suitably nautical, but never renamed the boat. His family enjoyed frequent outings to Boothbay Harbor, Pemaquid, Outer Heron Island, and up river to Pleasant Cove to swim. Harold took the boat as far as the St. Johns River in Canada and to southern New England as well.

In 2020 local boat builder Bruce Ferrin, a friend of Dr. Mott-Smith, owns the boat. He restored her and renamed her "Doc’s Pride."

The Fiske House on Main Street, just east of the center of town, was the home of shipbuilder Benjamin Metcalf. He and Elbridge Morris built five clipper ships together.

Metcalf's large house later was one of the most prestigious hotels in Maine, with delicious meals served in the dining room. D. E. Fiske was proprietor of the hotel.

During World War II, Company C of the 181st Infantry, 16th Yankee Division was stationed there. More recently the building was a Recreation Center for Damariscotta youth. After the house was torn down, the building housing the First National Bank of Damariscotta (as of 2020) was constructed on the site.

Next to the Fiske House was the home of the Lincoln County News office. It burned in the great fire of 1943.

As shipbuilding along the Medomak River declined in the late 1880s, new industries developed and provided jobs for residents of Waldoboro.

In 1888 the town invested in the construction of the Waldoboro Shoe Factory on the east bank of the river. The town paid $20,000 of the $32,000 construction cost.

The building was four stories high and contained 30,000 square feet. Water for the factory was piped from a new reservoir created across the road on Dr. Eveleth’s farm. Without electricity, the factory used gasoline engines to power a system of belts and pulleys to make the machinery run.

The factory produced shoes for only a few years and then stood vacant. The building finally sold at a loss to Holub, Dusha Company, which made button machinery parts.

This factory on Friendship Road (Route 220S in 2020), on the east side of the Medomak River, manufactured buttons for more than sixty years.

Constructed in 1888, it was first the Waldoboro Shoe Factory, a short-lived venture. The building sat vacant until 1920 when a company for button-manufacturing machinery moved in. In 1921 the Paragon Button Corporation started making pearl buttons from shells, initially shipped to California from Australia, Manila, and the Fiji Islands and then from California to Maine. About 82 people were employed by the company in Waldoboro.

Stanley Gerson and Rolsala Gerson of Patrician Plastics Corporation purchased the operation in 1943. In 1957 they converted it from pearl to plastic button manufacturing. By 1981 the company had only 25 to 30 employees, who made millions of buttons, dice, dominoes and poker chips.

The factory closed in the early 1980s, and the building has had no formal businesses since.

Great Falls in Whitefield was an ideal location for mills, which operated at the site from the 1770s to the 1930s.

A sawmill built by Jeremiah Norris was in operation by 1774. Abraham Choate and his sons added a gristmill to the site, which Benjamin King and his sons acquired in 1801. After Benjamin was killed in the mill later that year, his son, Peter, became the sole owner and offered shares to investors. The site became known as Kings Mills. A devastating fire consumed the double sawmill, three-story gristmill, cider mill, grain, lumber and John King’s home in 1834. The mills were rebuilt, and Peter’s descendants ran them until the late 19th century.

When Clara King married William Ford in 1858, the complex became the Ford Mills, which operated into the 1920s. William H. Ford built the gristmill, the building on the left, in the 1880s. The sawmill, on the right, generated electricity for the house next to the mill until electric power came to Whitefield in the 1930s. Hurricane Edna washed it away in 1954.

The narrow gauge railroad tracks of the Wiscasset, Waterville, and Farmington Railway carried lumber from the Whitefield mills.

Downtown Wiscasset was beginning to change in the 1920s. World War I accelerated the popularity of automobiles among working and middle class Americans. By the 1920s urban visitors were touring Maine by automobile on the Atlantic Highway (Route 1), and highway bridges were replacing ferry crossings. Fewer and fewer buggies were seen on Main Street in Wiscasset and other coastal towns.

The sounds and smells of the village began to change along with transportations and businesses in town. Gas stations and garages replaced livery stables and blacksmiths. Hardware stores catered to the new machines as well as older farm equipment. Cafes that served locals now beckoned tourists, and Main Street shops added Maine souvenirs to their inventory.

In 1920, Maine state business directories listed garages separately, but still listed livery stables. By 1930, the transition from 19th to 20th century transportation was complete.

Under a 1647 Massachusetts law, Wiscasset was obligated to provide schooling for its children between the ages of seven and fifteen. In 1800 a second law mandated district schools, of which Wiscasset would have six. The “Old High School” was the Garrison Hill School, one of those district schools.

Merchant and Revolutionary War soldier Timothy Parsons originally constructed the building as a private home in 1785. It was later moved to the other side of Hodge Street, where it served as a tavern. The Town of Wiscasset purchased it in 1860 for use as the Town Hall. During the Civil War it was used as a drilling place for the Home Guard.

The building remained the home of the Garrison Hill School until the Masons purchased it in 1910.