“It’s always been a fishing village, that hasn’t changed,” said Bruce MacKay, 85, referring to how the 2002 closure of Naval Security Group Activity/Winter Harbor, the secret, low-key Navy base tucked away in Acadia National Park on the Schoodic peninsula, has affected the town of Winter Harbor.
And MacKay should know: he was a freshman in high school there in 1933, when construction began. Winter Harbor Town Manager from 1976 to 1980, He discussed the changes to his town sitting in his pleasant, light-filled house decorated with decoys collected from townspeople and collection of “logo” golf balls filling much of the living room wall. Why one hundred acres of a 2,300-acre national park came to be chosen as the site for a Navy base does not make sense to the casual observer. But it seems that when John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was having the carriage roads on Mt. Desert Island built, he found that the Navy had a radio station in its proposed path. Something about the rocks made radio communication with Europe particularly effective.
Because Rockefeller wanted his carriage roads built, he commissioned a study to find an alternate location for the radio station and discovered that Schoodic Point offered excellent reception, so the Navy built its base on National Park Service land barely visible from land or sea.
The base is a complete village. The most striking building is an architectural gem of brick and fieldstone, designed by Rockefeller’s architect, Grosvenor Atterbury, to be used as officers’ quarters. The base also includes a two-story, multiple-family housing unit; operations building; a building with restaurant, bar and meeting room for socializing; athletic field and tennis court; daycare center; gym; commissary; water plant; mess hall; medical and dental facility and fire house: about 50 buildings in all.
But the most interesting aspect of this unique set of circumstances is that unlike most military bases, nearly all the housing is in the town of Winter Harbor. It includes 20 single-family cape-style houses, 13 duplexes and an eight-unit multi-family building for a total of 83 units in the three complexes. When the Navy left, the off-base housing reverted to the town.
Former Town Manager and English teacher Allan Smallidge, 72, said, “The town acquired the housing through the good graces of the Congressional committee: Baldacci, Snowe and Collins. We worked with them, and the town formed a Base Closing Committee of town citizens who met and made some recommendations to the selectmen.”
The committee added two temporary selectmen to the existing three because there was so much work to be done. The committee also recommended that a corporation be formed to handle the housing. As it did so, Smallidge said, “A good friend, F. Eugene Dixon, Jr., offered to form a non-profit corporation to take the housing, sell it, and give the town the profit.” Because Dixon took so many details from the Board of Selectmen, Smallidge said the closing committee was not needed.
“Part way through the process,” Smallidge said, “we got a bill from the lawyer. Dixon thought it was too large, so he gave the town the amount equal to the bill. In a sense, he reimbursed the town for that expense.” Then, with regard to the recently proposed base closings, he added, “But Brunswick or Kittery are probably not going to find an F. Eugene Dixon, Jr.”
As of May 19, 2005, the current town manager, Roger Barto, 57, reported that all the Naval housing units had been sold. “The trust’s expenses, continuing legal fees, upkeep and maintenance needed to keep the property saleable will be deducted from the gross proceeds,” he said. “Net proceeds to date are at $4.7 million.”
How the money will be used or invested has not been decided, but Smallidge said, “If properly managed, it should serve us well for generations to come.”
This financial windfall is the positive side of the base closing. But most townspeople would agree with Smallidge, who observed that “when the Navy left, it decimated the school.” According to the 2000 census, Winter Harbor had a population of 988. After the Navy left, it dropped to 492. Winter Harbor’s elementary school was built to accommodate 180 students, but after the Navy dependents left, only 27 children remained.
Former art teacher Mary Lou Weaver said she misses “All the kids walking, playing, and riding bikes around town. It just gave a different feel to the community. They added something to the school, bringing their experiences from other countries.”
But at much the same time that the Winter Harbor grade school enrollment dropped so drastically, nearby Gouldsboro discovered mold in its aging school building. Winter Harbor, with all those empty classrooms, was able to take in the Gouldsboro students, filled the school to overflowing and formed a new school district. Because both the Winter Harbor and Gouldsboro school buildings are close to needing replacement, the town is negotiating with the state to build a new peninsula school. As Smallidge said, “Out of bad comes some good.”
Another negative impact of the base closing on Winter Harbor and neighboring villages was the loss of jobs. And jobs were in fact lost, but by the time of closing, rather than using local people or civil servants, the Navy was contracting out a lot of janitorial, construction and renovation services. Some workers lived as far away as Bangor and Old Town.
Winter Harbor, with its small population, can’t fill jobs advertised. Chase’s Restaurant, which is the town’s meeting place — some people come to the restaurant two and three times a day, as much for the social interaction as for the good food — has been unable to fill positions for a cook and waitress, and the sardine cannery in nearby Prospect Harbor can’t find production line workers.
Then, too, local businesses suffered losses when the Navy left town. For instance, Winter Harbor 5 & 10 owner Peter Drinkwater (WWF June 05) said, “We used to sell a lot of Christmas lights because Naval personnel didn’t get charged for electricity, so they’d light up their whole home, big time. Since they left, we still sell lights, but not like we used to.” Halloween candy and costumes sales dropped, too. Drinkwater said, “When you lose that many kids, it kind of kills trick-or-treating.”
And the complexion of the town changed. The Naval families tended to be in their twenties and thirties, with young children and were active in all the activities that related to the schoolchildren. The people who have purchased the former Naval housing are retirees or middle-aged summer people.
Drinkwater said that he would be hiring three people this summer because the number of summer residents has increased and because people buying the Navy houses, they are spending money locally. He said, “A lot of houses are going up for sale and the people who buy are from away.”
The town hoped that there could be affordable housing for townspeople, but people brought up in rural Maine are not used to apartment houses. Nor do they want to live in duplexes, so that plan didn’t work. The multi-family apartments will be made into condominiums and bought by people who don’t mind the lack of privacy.
Smallidge sees the change. He used to drive around in winter to see how many lights were on. “Five years ago,” he said, “the lights were there year round. The people who left were civilians who worked at the base.” Drinkwater sees change in his business, too. He said he is buying more summer merchandise: “Not touristy, but everyday things that people need in summer.” He said that because the Navy personnel turned over every two or three years, new families were always coming in to buy housekeeping supplies.
Lobsterman and Winter Harbor Harbormaster Dale Torrey is not pleased with the people who have bought the base housing. “I’d rather have the Navy than the people who came and bought these damn houses,” he said. His family has lived and fished here for five generations. His son makes the sixth. “Some of them are all right,” Torrey said of the newcomers. “The rest of them ain’t. They move in here because they love this charming little fishing village, and the minute they set their arses down, they want to change the whole thing, quick.”
MacKay recalled that when the base opened in the 1930s, “The townspeople were pleased. They were all for it,” he said. But after the romance wore off, the attitude changed to “What do we need them for?” The Naval personnel and their families bought their groceries at the commissary and had their own medical and dental offices on the base. MacKay said the same number of people shop at the IGA now as they did before.
Another thing the town won’t miss is the attitude of superiority on the part of people from the Navy base. Weaver said that looking back she feels that being a Navy town, in a way, stamps a community.
“The NAVSEC people are supposed to be the elite,” she said. “The unspoken (sometimes spoken) message was: the residents were “numb-heads,” and the Navy was going to show us how to do things right.” Now that the base is gone, Weaver said she feels the community is more itself again, with the “a-righting process” still ongoing.
Perhaps, as Smallidge said, what becomes of the Navy base in Winter Harbor and the top secret Navy installation in Gouldsboro will have more effect on the town than the housing. But that’s another story.