After the rain and fog of July, August was a bit sunnier, but only relatively so. Regardless of the weather, the summer activities continued at a swift pace. On Great Cranberry the Ladies Aid held their 104th summer fair raising over $8,000 for various island projects. On Islesford the 26th annual Literary Evening had a full house and the annual Masquerade Ball took place with the music of Green Mountain Railway and a parade of clever costumes. Chris Wriggins, Marian Baker and their sons Adam and Danny won the grand prize with their “Mosquito Magnet” family costume. Some of the other great outfits were a group of cheerleaders including Meaghan Blank, Caroline Sholl, and Laura Merrill following two-year-old Oliver Blank as their football player, Starr and Graham Bright as “Rick Alley and his dog Coal” and the Philbrook family as “M and M’s”.
On Aug. 12, Acadia National Park held a reception at the Islesford Historical Museum to introduce its new exhibit in honor of Ted Spurling, Sr. Hugh Dwelley gave a talk on Jobs Landing, the area where the museum now stands. He outlined the history of that spot from Job’s arrival in about 1762 until the Park took over Sawtelle’s museum in 1948. Deputy Park Superintendent Len Bobinchock reported that the letters sent last spring by Cranberry Islanders had played a major role in securing the funds needed to have the Islesford museum open this summer.
The hottest day of the year on the Cranberries did not arrive until Aug. 28, bringing temperatures in the mid 90s on the eve of the full “sturgeon moon.” Inspired by the book, “Swimming to Antarctica,” a summer resident decided to take her own newsworthy swim. Carrol Lange swam all the way around Sutton Island wearing only a swimsuit and a bathing cap. Her circumnavigation took 3 hours and 36 minutes, starting at the town dock and swimming around the leeward side. The 54-degree water was choppy, but Carrol was followed closely by her husband, Tom, and their daughter, Julia, in a Boston Whaler. Our Dip of the Month Club members are in total awe.
This was the summer of “daughter sternmen” when three lobstermen took their daughters with them as crew. Ted Spurling, Jr., took his daughter Marya, Rick Alley took his daughter Ashley, and Dan Fernald took his daughter Erin. Marya has just left for her first year at Gordon College, Ashley has returned to the University of Southern Maine for her sophomore year, and Erin will stay on Islesford to continue fishing with her father in the fall. Over Labor Day weekend, Erin was married to her longtime boyfriend, Aaron Gray, in a beautiful outdoor ceremony in the garden of her parents’ island home. The wedding was perfectly timed to fit between the rain from Hurricane Frances and the plague of late blooming mosquitoes. Both Erin and Aaron are looking forward to staying on the island for the winter.
With September comes the start of another school year. Again there are no students for a school on Great Cranberry, though the Longfellow School remains open by a vote taken at Town Meeting last March. The school currently houses the collection of the great Cranberry Historical Society, and the adjacent library is one of the busiest small libraries in the state. On Islesford, the new schoolteacher, Lindsay Eyesnoggle, and her aid, Gail Grandgent, welcomed seven students back to school on Sept. 1. Heather Spurling is in eighth grade, Frances and Gretchen Blank in seventh grade, Melissa McCormick and Hannah Folsom in sixth grade, Abe Philbrook in third grade and Peter Philbrook in first grade. Parents and friends met at the playground for recess to take their traditional pictures of the kids on the first day of school. Several of the parents of this year’s students have their own ties to the Islesford School. Teddy Spurling and Mitchell McCormick both graduated from the school as well as Roy Hadlock. Amy Philbrook began her teaching career there in 1989.
There was also excitement on the road behind the school during the first week of September. Bradley Bryant and Henry Grandgent used 24-foot spruce logs, cut by Jason Pickering, to move the small white building from the Rudolph property to the Moran homestead. Jane Moran plans to use the building for a studio. The building is a “Hodgson House” built in Dover, Mass. in the early 1900s and until a few years ago there was a larger prefabricated cottage beside it on the Sand Beach Road site. I had often heard islanders refer to the cottage as a “Sears” house, so with a little digging on the Internet I learned that Hodgson was one of the earliest pioneers in the factory-built housing industry, and that Sears Roebuck came into the mail order house business soon after the success of the Hodgson Houses. “Sears” became the generic name for any of the prefabricated houses of the time. James Sprague, Frank Bunker and their crew erected the buildings for John and Marion Wells. Mrs. Wells later sold to Mr. and Mrs. Victor Wierman who eventually sold to Elise Anderson. It is Miss Anderson whom I remember from my childhood and from my move to Islesford in 1976, for she was a very pleasant older woman with striking white hair and smiling brown eyes, and she had the reputation of taking a morning swim every day of her stay on Islesford. She may have been the original inspiration for Dip of the Month Club. She certainly comes to mind for some of us every time we swim at the Sand Beach.
September on the islands is bittersweet. We now have some of the free time we yearned for in August but it feels a little bit lonely. The mail boat is less crowded, but the schedule has already been cut back to off-season status. We are finally seeing the bright clear days of autumn but for some reason the mosquitoes who were “not so bad after all” have returned with a vengeance. It seems odd and unfair to see swarms of this size and determination after an overabundance of gloomy summer days. This year when the transitional melancholy strikes, the antidote is to apply bug spray, put on a head net, and go out and pick from the bumper crop of little red berries for which our town was named. I’ve never seen so many!
– Barbara Fernald, Islesford
Sept. 12, 2004