One of the recent mini-dramas reported in the international press concerns whether the Greek government has put some of its legendary islands up for sale as part of its obligations under the European Union’s bailout plan. “We give you cash, you give us Corfu,” as one British tabloid tartly put it.
Before you are tempted to smile at this particular island misfortune, it is helpful to remember that Maine, too, once auctioned off its publicly owned islands, although under very different circumstances. When Maine separated from Massachusetts and became America’s 23rd state in 1820, Maine legislators adopted a policy of selling off all public lands, including its islands, as quickly as possible. The goal was not so much to raise funds for state coffers, but rather to add land to local property tax rolls and bring settlement and development to America’s eastern frontier.
The policy worked, at least for the islands. Hundreds of Maine islands were sold at auctions that were held repeatedly between 1820 and 1880. The auctions began in Maine’s westernmost bays and proceeded to the increasingly sparsely settled eastern bays of Hancock and Washington counties. By the 1880s, however, steamship companies operating out of Boston began promoting Maine’s islands as fabulous summer destinations. You could take a steamer to Portland or Rockland and then get on a smaller steamboat for destinations in Casco Bay and Midcoast Maine. Peaks Island had four steamboat landings along its shore facing Portland. Islands like Butter Island in northern Penobscot Bay, then called Dirigo, had its own steamboat landing. Tourists flocked to seaside island hotels by the thousands.
It dawned on policy makers in Augusta that perhaps the state should stop selling its islands to the highest bidder in order that some remain for the general public to enjoy. Beginning in 1887, a series of administrative decisions by Maine’s Bureau of Forestry, which was in charge of Maine’s public lands, discouraged additional sales of its islands to private buyers. But it wasn’t until 1913 that Maine finally got around to passing a law prohibiting the sale of any other islands out of the public domain.
Then along came World War I, followed by the Depression, then World War II and the full flowering of the American love affair with the automobile. Pretty much everyone forgot about Maine’s islands—along with Maine’s other public lands.
Fast-forward some 60 years when something unexpected happened. An enterprising environmental reporter, Bob Cummings at the Portland Press Herald, was digging through Maine’s Bureau of Forestry records. Cummings discovered that the so-called “public lots,” which were the square-mile parcels of land that had originally been set aside in each of Maine’s 424 unorganized townships to fund a minister’s salary and other public expenses, had gradually been appropriated by paper companies.
With a big legal campaign led by Maine’s Attorney General, Joe Brennan, the state proved its case in court and regained control of over 600,000 acres of land for the public, while Brennan rode this populist victory into the governor’s office. But the huge public spotlight on Maine’s public lands also cast its beam on Maine’s publicly owned islands. Research quickly uncovered Maine’s forgotten 1913 law prohibiting any more sales of its islands. But which islands did the public still own? Embarrassingly, no one knew.
Hence the legislature created the Coastal Island Registry to determine which islands were still owned by the people of Maine. Unfortunately, the only way to prove which islands Maine owned was for private island owners to prove a continuous chain of title that extended back prior to the 1913 law. Among island owners, of course, there was a bitter outcry, but the governor and legislator figured that most island owners were from out-of-state and there would be less political fallout than if they tried to duck the issue altogether. During the course of the next several years, title research for each Maine island that had been registered was examined by lawyers representing the state. Most all were valid, dating back to the original island auctions of the mid 19th century. But other owners were not so fortunate.
The selectmen of one Maine coastal town, for example, who will remain nameless to protect the guilty, were looking over town maps one day in the 1960s and noticed six nearby islands that were not on their tax roles. So they hired a local realtor to sell them and provide their new owners with quit-claim deeds. The islands quickly sold, but their unsuspecting owners discovered, to their great sorrow, a decade and a half later that the deeds were not worth the paper the town had printed them on.
And that was how I got my second island job. In 1978, I was hired by Maine’s Bureau of Public Lands to conduct preliminary surveys of the more than a thousand islands that had been identified as publicly owned. Most of these islands were actually ledges, of interest to seals as haul-out sites, but were otherwise primarily notable as navigational hazards. But approximately 200 islands appeared to be large enough to be of statewide interest, and a few years later, I landed on each of them, under contract with the Bureau of Public Lands to describe their ecological features and offer recommendations for their use.
The moral of this story is that even if you believe that nothing says “super-rich,” quite as emphatically as buying your own island, it is worthwhile to remember that even the Greeks have not repealed the Latin dictum, caveat emptor. Let island buyers beware.