The Penobscot Bay Regional History Conference, held on Friday, Oct. 10 in Searsport, offered something for everyone who attended. Confer-ence organizer John Arrison, the Museum’s librarian and archivist, brought together professional historians, historical society and museum personnel and volunteer researchers and genealogists in a mix of subjects that gave conference attendees a sense of life in the Penobscot Bay area from its earliest days of habitation to the present.
The Congregational Church Vestry, on the grounds of the Penobscot Marine Museum, couldn’t have held many more than the approximately 75 conference attendees, which, in itself, spoke to the conference’s increasing popularity.
Historian Nancy P. Alexander gave the day a strong start with her talk, “I’ve Got Family There: The Penobscot Bay as a Community.” Citing letters, bills, and other documents, she spoke easily and warmly, showing how people from isolated, rural communities traveled by water for social as well as business reasons and found friends, business partners and mates in other isolated seacoast communities.
The shape of Penobscot Bay allowed easy travel, as people could see where they were headed, whereas it was harder for people from Damariscotta to know people from Wiscasset. “You could say in Rockland, ‘Over at Greening’s Landing’ [now Stonington]” she said, “and someone would say, ‘Oh, I’ve got family there.’ ”
Alexander discussed the history of the region, starting before 1763, when the French lost power over the area to the English. From 1763 to 1810, she said, “a particularly homogeneous group” of native-born Americans settled the area, established communities and intermarried. “From 1810 to 1850, the towns took off,” she said. “Everybody was a farmer, a fisherman, or a seafarer, with logging in winter. By 1850, however, an enormous diversity in jobs began to develop.”
Don Garrold, a surveyor who volunteers at the Penobscot Marine Museum, explained the database he has set up, a historic geographic information system (GIS), for the historic properties of Searsport. He used as an example the mansard-roofed Carriage House B & B, a house once owned by artist Waldo Peirce. The Peirce family owned the property from 1948 to 1970. A printout of the Carriage House property lists owners from 1845 to the present, the years they owned the property, and slides showing photos, surveys, tax maps, revaluation photos, and inventories for the property. But nothing won the hearts of area museum and historical society personnel more than when Garrold said he’d be willing to help anyone interested in learning how to use the software, which costs about $300 or $400. He can be found at the Museum’s library on Thursday afternoons.
The real crowd-pleaser was Eagle Island lobsterman, caretaker, weekend mail-carrier, local historian and genealogist Robert Quinn, who spoke on “Eagle and Butter Islands: Their History and Tradition.” No one could have competed with his laid-back, lackadaisical charm as he told island stories, spicing them with off-the-cuff remarks. He began his talk by saying that carbon-dated rocks on Eagle go back 400 million years. Those on the other nearby islands date to only a couple million years. Despite the disparity in age, he said Butter Island was settled before Eagle and added that the name Butter was changed to Dirigo, but it didn’t stick.
After lunch, Mark E. Honey, who has spent 25 years working on Union River history, delivered a paper on his research of Whitcomb, Haynes and Whitney, “Ellsworth’s Last Great Maritime Company,” aided by his research assistant, College of the Atlantic student Edward Stern.
The Ellsworth firm built 170 vessels, mostly for the lumber trade, and Honey feels the company’s papers he worked on in the Maine Maritime Academy’s collection and one found at Ellsworth Falls in 2002, document “the twilight years of lumbering and the coasting trade in Hancock County.”
Stern discussed the coasting trade and said Ellsworth coastwise vessels went as far as the West Indies, but after 1900, when a lot of store merchandise came by steam or rail, became limited to the coastal U.S. and the Canadian maritime provinces.
Jon Johansen, who publishes Maine Coastal News, has been transcribing maritime articles from a publication called the Maine Mining & Industrial Journal, which ran from 1880 to 1918 and which covered much more than mining, from which he gleaned his conference subject: “A History of the Penobscot River in the 1880s.” His talked was filled with details, such as the existence of a sardine factory in Camden. “How would that go over today?” got a laugh. Camden was also the home of the largest anchor factory in the state.
By 1880, Johansen said, six to seven hundred million board feet of lumber were shipped down the Penobscot. Maine located its prisons so prisoners could mine lime for the state.
“A man could make $5 a day cutting out ship’s knees,” Johansen said, citing more facts. “All mattresses used in on the steamer STATE OF MAINE were made in Winterport.”
Johansen said he’d brought his computer with him and would be willing to search subjects of interest to conference attendees.
The final speakers for the day were John Doak and Duke Tomlin, who spoke on “Tugboating on the Penobscot River and Bay: Past and Present.”