On one of the days with an early taste of spring last month, Nate Michaud, Mike Felton and I met the NATHANIEL ZACHARY in Bass Harbor for a trip to Frenchboro. With Zach Lunt at the helm we boarded the family lobster boat at the Morris Yacht dock and made a rolly crossing through the troughs of an easterly swell. David Lunt was aboard, watching his grandson pilot the vessel out through the Black Island Passage past the salmon pens on the way to Lunt Harbor.
Mike Felton planned to spend the day at the one-room Frenchboro school to meet with the teacher, Lorna Stuart, and her first and seventh grade pupils. Nate was on his way to a Frenchboro Future Development Corporation (FFDC) meeting concerning the island’s affordable housing program and to discuss the plan for reopening an island post office now that the postmistress and her family had ‘removed’ to the mainland to be with their kids during the high school years on the mainland. Also aboard were Jim Hatch, an affordable housing specialist who has been involved with FFDC since its inception, and Rich Gardner, another FFDC Board member. I was along for the ride and the fine weather.
After tying up at the public landing, Selectman Gerd Hasal met us and we made our way up the hill to the Firehouse and Community Building for the FFDC meeting. Two of the Frenchboro “homesteaders,” April and Tim Wiggins and Marissa Rozenski, were seeking approval to refinance their mortgages, as FFDC holds notes on the six houses that have been sold to the islanders at low interest rates. Another young islander, Kyle Spratt, had made an offer to purchase the only remaining unsold house in the program. FFDC has a board consisting of a majority of year-round islanders with a minority of off-island organizations like the Island Institute. By the time the meeting ended, the refinancing had all been approved and the board had approved the purchase offer on the final house.
On the way down to the harbor after the meeting I asked David Lunt and Gerd Hasal to reflect on Frenchboro’s affordable program, now that the last house had been sold. Gerd said he had been skeptical about the program after the houses had been completed in 1988 and the first “homesteaders” had arrived. None of the original group survived the transition to island life on Frenchboro. All had fallen by the wayside by the early 1990s. Divorce took its toll on some, isolation and privation on others. One homesteader saw the engine of his small lobster boat quit in a gale of wind off the island’s forbidding back shore and never recovered his courage. The economy was in recession, lobster landings were low and FFDC had a large loan obligation to the Maine State Housing Authority. That was the low point. FFDC had little choice other than to rent the houses to generate revenue for loan payments. Most of the renters were even less suited to Frenchboro’s remote way of life than the original homesteaders and they left a bad taste for the program in the mouths of many islanders.
But slowly, Gerd said, the sons and daughters and relatives of established islanders began to apply to FFDC to acquire island housing in the $65,000 range. FFDC renegotiated its loan with the state housing agency. Lobster landings began ticking upwards, enabling this group of islanders to succeed in fishing where others had not. The program that planned to have sold six houses in three years took 13 years to complete. The complicated formula to recapture the value of the subsidy in the housing proved to be a disincentive to purchasers and was dropped. Nevertheless, the houses are finally all full and there has been something of a baby boom on Frenchboro. With Marissa’s baby due at any moment, there are 11 children on island who will be entering school in the next one to five years. And a parents group has formed to start a preschool. From the standpoint of enhancing the school-age population on this small island, the program has been an unqualified success – even if it has been a long time coming. But then, as the Chinese philosophers remind us, perseverance furthers. Especially on islands. t
Philip W. Conkling is president of the Island Institute.