For 14 years the Penobscot Marine Museum has held a daylong conference on different historical aspects of Penobscot Bay, its islands and the surrounding mainland.
Library and Education Director John Arrison, who organizes the conferences and introduces the speakers, said he also enjoys storytelling, and for the last couple of years he has been trying to get people to tell their personal experiences of working in maritime industries. He brings together amateur historians as well as professional scholars interested in the Penobscot Bay region.
Six of the seven subjects offered this year have been or will eventually be published, and research on three of them was done at the museum. They ranged from a lecture on how artist John Marin tried to capture the push-pull of energy physics in his paintings of Penobscot Bay, read by retired professor John Conron, to a performance by five people (including an eighth-grader) reading a collection of mid-19th-century letters written by members of Belfast’s Williamson family. History Footnotes in the Correspondence of a Belfast Family: The Williamson Family Papers, edited by the Belfast Free Library, was published in 2002; Earth Music: American Modernist Landscape Painting, Conlon’s book, will be published in 2006.
John Hanson, editor of Maine Boats & Harbors, and David Getchell, who edited National Fisherman for 30 years, discussed approximately 50,000 images, now owned by the museum, of Maine’s working waterfronts captured and identified by Red Boutilier from the 1960s to 2002.
Other amateur historians who told of their personal experiences have also been involved in gathering information for local histories. Bertram Snow of Rockland spoke of his family’s and other Rockland shipyards. Captain LeCain Smith, whose A Maritime History of Brooksville will be published in 2006, described his work, as did Lobsterman William Colby and the Thorndike brothers of South Thomaston.
Bob Allen and Ted Morse, the last speakers of the day, were the last men to work the now dismantled steam cranes at Searsport’s Mack Point. They described what an effort it was to use machinery built in 1896 and 1905.
It should also be noted that lunch, including homemade mushroom-barley soup, was delicious.