In the beginning — 1976, in this case — David DeLorme created the Maine Atlas and Gazetteer, the indispensable book of maps Mainers still rely on for getting around in the absence of cell service. Later, as personal computers made their way into homes, David’s namesake business, DeLorme Publishing Company, released Street Atlas USA, on CD-ROM, and it became, for a spell, the most popular digital mapping product in the country. In the late 1990s, David, a freewheeling autodidact who prized big ideas, had what was, in a literal sense, his biggest idea yet: to build a 1-to-1,000,000 scale model of Earth that, just like the real thing, would tilt, rotate, and revolve. It would be housed in a three-story glass atrium, at the new headquarters the DeLorme company was building in Yarmouth, an awe-inspiring symbol not only of the company’s technological prowess but also of a world getting smaller and more connected every day.

Caleb Mason, a former DeLorme VP of consumer products, remembers thinking the giant globe represented something else too: “That very fine line that geniuses have between is this insane, or is this brilliant? Can it be done, or is it going to just fail?” 

Two years of work went into what came to be known as Eartha. Drawing inspiration from light but sturdy geodesic domes, David and his staff of 200, who all impacted the project in some way, engineered an aluminum truss structure mounted on a motorized cantilever arm. The shell is covered in 792 panels that feature a composite of satellite imagery, shaded relief, and road maps. Cartographer Mabel Ney helped compile the 140 gigabytes of data needed to make Eartha a reality. At the time, she says, it was an almost unprecedented amount of digital information, and if she were to write her own obituary someday, Eartha would take up a lot of real estate “because it means that much to have been part of it.”

Brook DeLorme, David’s daughter, was a teenager when she’d see her father, out in the parking lot of the company’s old Freeport office, spray-painting circles to get a feel for Eartha’s waistline — 42 feet, in the end. A story among former DeLorme employees has it that, late one night, while the globe was under construction, David was spied riding it around in circles, like a carousel. 

One summer day in 1998, hundreds of staff and guests gathered in the atrium to fete Eartha’s debut, cheering and whistling as the governor, Angus King, helped David snap the last panel into place. The next year, the Guinness Book of World Records declared Eartha the world’s largest revolving globe, a title it still holds.

Employees have often been found in quiet contemplation around Eartha. “Just to go sit and relax in front of the globe could stimulate some subconscious inspiration,” Mason says. The public often stops in for looks too, curiosity piqued by the glimpse that can be had from I-295. Mason recalls meeting a World War II veteran who teared up, reminded of where he had been and of friends he’d lost. Another time, Neil Armstrong paid Eartha a visit and gazed down on the model planet from the third-floor balcony, a perspective that must have felt somewhat familiar. And, one night, Mason found a young man, seemingly high on something, crouched in an Atlas-like pose in the pit beneath Eartha.

Years ago, when the original panels started to cave in, Brook DeLorme climbed chimp-like up into the globe, to prop them up with braces fashioned from curtain-rod hangers and blank CDs. When Garmin acquired DeLorme, in 2016, Eartha went right on spinning, and Brook says that as long as her family owns the building, Eartha will get whatever care it needs. In fact, the globe just got a facelift around its 25th birthday, with every tattered, faded section replaced. Now, the blues and greens look as vivid as ever. And David DeLorme still calls Brook to tell her when he’s driving by the office at night. Eartha looks particularly beautiful all lit up after dark, leisurely pirouetting into a seeming infinity.

Visit Eartha at the Garmin offices (2 DeLorme Dr., Yarmouth; 207-846-7000), where an adjacent café, Magno Terra (Italian for “Great Earth”), opened earlier this year.

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It’s a state historic site today, but in 1845, Katahdin Iron Works was an unlikely fledgling industrial site deep in the woods, just beginning a tumultuous stint as Maine’s only 19th-century iron foundry. At the height of business, 400 people worked there, many of them immigrants, running mills, furnaces, 16 charcoal kins, and more, and the town that sprang up around the operation boasted a company store, a hotel, and a school. Today, all that remains is one burn furnace and one charcoal kiln, across from the Katahdin Iron Works checkpoint to the KI Jo-Mary Forest, off Route 11, in Brownville. When you’re there, it’s not hard to picture the enterprise in its heyday, says Appalachian Mountain Club archaeologist Sarah Loftus: “You feel like you’re stepping into an entire world that’s disappeared.” 

The Katahdin Iron Works blast furnace was built a mile from Ore Mountain, home to a massive iron-ore deposit and a place where the Wabanaki sourced ochre. The years that followed its construction were a bumpy ride, Loftus says, with the operation intensively mining Ore Mountain, stripping the surrounding forests for charcoal, and damming the Pleasant River, ending anadromous-fish runs. The operation was never all that economically successful, she says. By 1890, charcoal-fired operations were obsolete, urban steel mills were springing up, and Katahdin Iron Works slid into ruin.

The whole of the old township is conserved by AMC today. Anadromous fish are returning to the river, Loftus says, and the forest has reclaimed the land. She’s conducted digs and surveys there, with volunteers from the Maine Archaeological Society, uncovering artifacts that suggest details about those who lived and worked there, the operation’s imprint on the land, and the demise of the bygone buildings, many of which were lost to fire. “The workers who struggled through this saga are worth knowing,” she says. “You can feel their histories when you’re standing underneath the tower of the blast furnace and listening to the roar of the Pleasant River.” 

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For lumberjacks schlepping through the north woods back in the day, crossing the west branch of the Penobscot River was no easy task. At various points along its banks, the means of moving everything from supplies to timber to horses to humans included, at one time or another, a highline pulley system, a cable ferry, rafts, bateaux, and floating bridges. Spring freshet reliably wiped out any fixed structures, and anything that floated was useless when the water was choked with logs during the drives. Waiting for the winter freeze and then walking across was the surest way to get from one side to the other.

Not until the early 1950s was a permanent solution arrived at, when the Great Northern Paper Company built the 300-foot-long Abol Bridge, near where Thoreau once camped on his way up the river. Originally, the bridge was a link in a network of old tote roads. In 1972, the year after the last West Branch log drive, Great Northern Paper completed the Golden Road, stretching the 96 miles from Millinocket to the Quebec border, and Abol Bridge turned into a thoroughfare for logging trucks.

The Appalachian Trail joins the road just a few hundred yards upstream from the bridge, and the bridge has come to mark the northern terminus of the 100 Mile Wilderness, Baxter State Park lies on the other side, and many a thru-hiker rests up at the Abol Bridge Campground & Store before venturing onward to Katahdin. A pedestrian walkway adjacent to the bridge has turned into a destination in its own right. It’s now a popular spot to take in a grand view of Maine’s tallest mountain, and, in that way, it represents one small part of the north woods’s fits-and-starts shift from an extractive economy to a recreational one.

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For the grand opening of the World War Memorial Bridge, on August 17, 1923, citizens of Maine and New Hampshire crowded sidewalks, watched from nearby piers, and caused a traffic jam by vying to be among the first to drive the new span over the Piscataqua River, between Kittery and Portsmouth. In the time before television, feats of civil engineering had higher entertainment value, surely. But people must also have sensed some symbolism in the moment. On a macro level, the ’20s were roaring with postwar prosperity and optimism, a new era of automobile travel was dawning, and the bridge would provide a key link in Route 1, funneling tourists up the coast (and lifting in the middle to allow ships to pass). On a local level, as the first toll-free Piscataqua crossing, the bridge kicked off an era of free-flowing transit over state lines. To this day, York County Mainers and Seacoast New Hampshirites are a fluid bunch. 

At the dedication ceremony, five-year-old Portsmouth resident Eileen Dondero cut the ceremonial ribbon, then rode with Maine governor Percival Baxter and New Hampshire governor Fred Brown on the inaugural drive across the bridge. During World War II, Dondero (whose married name was Foley) worked at the naval shipyard in Kittery, then she became the first woman elected mayor of Portsmouth. She lived long enough to repeat the ribbon-cutting ritual for the replacement Memorial Bridge, which was christened in the summer of 2013. And even if bridges aren’t quite the spectacle they once were, this one remains a perfectly pleasant way to get from there to here. 

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On the morning of August 8, 1943, three gunshots rang out across Clear Lake, a wilderness pond in Maine’s Allagash region. Members of the posse combing the dense surrounding forest stopped in their tracks. They were game wardens, state troopers, sheriffs’ deputies, rangers, and guides, and they knew that three rifle reports in the Maine woods usually meant a hunter was lost or in distress. 

On that day, however, it likely meant something else: someone within their ranks had found something. Or someone.

For more than two months, the men had been hunting the “Phantom of the Allagash,” a bearded bogeyman who haunted the north woods carrying a pack basket, an ax, and a shotgun he wasn’t afraid to use. Officials believed the man was, as a state-police bulletin put it, “a nervous, high-strung type who may be close to insanity . . . a very dangerous character [who] will shoot on sight.”

The search had been a slog through some of the most remote, blackfly-infested reaches of the eastern U.S., the wild lakes country where the southeastern sweep of the Allagash River drainage melds into what’s now the northwest corner of Baxter State Park. The men had spent weeks away from their families, clawing through thickets, plagued by unrelenting heat and bugs, scouring the forest floor for clues. All the while, they looked over their shoulders, knowing the phantom had already killed once and had fired shots at others.  

The whole of Maine’s north woods region was on edge. The anglers, paddlers, and campers who normally filled the woods each summer had largely kept away. Those who lived and worked in the forest were anxious. A fire warden stationed at Second Lake had walked off the job. Gatekeepers had threatened to.

Did the three shots mean the north woods could rest easy? Had an end come to Maine State Police Case C-442, the longest manhunt in state history? Or did the gunfire indicate something more disturbing? Three shots, after all, were how the whole affair had started. 

Two months earlier, on the evening of June 3, a Registered Maine Guide named Wesley Porter had sat down for dinner with three clients at a remote cabin on the north shore of Webster Lake, at the southern edge of the Allagash. The day had been ideal for fishing, and Porter knew how to put his “sports” onto fish. A 46-year-old potato farmer and father of eight from nearby Patten, Porter guided on the side for a sporting-camp owner named Arthur “Chub” Foster. He took Foster’s parties out to fish and hunt to make a little extra money doing what he loved — and guiding helped keep his mind off the fact that two of his sons were fighting Germans on the battlefields of Europe.

Porter, who’d been away from camp all day, caching supplies, asked his clients whether they’d been down near the dam at the east end of Webster Lake. Someone had messed about with supplies he’d stored there. No roads led to the long, 530-acre pond. Its only link to civilization was a telephone line that ran a couple of miles west, to the caretaker’s station at Telos Dam. The day before, the quartet had hiked nine miles to reach the camp, following winding Webster Stream, and Porter knew it was unlikely many others were around. For one, few were foolish enough to tangle with the blackflies.

But his clients — Robert Jarvis, 27; Robert Hames, 40; and William Buchanan, 52 — told Porter they’d been nowhere near the dam. In fact, they had spent the day three miles away, trying their luck on another nearby pond. 

After dinner, as Porter cleaned up, the three stepped outside. Hames and Buchanan took seats on the porch, lighting their pipes. Jarvis descended the 14-foot ledge in front of camp to throw a line in the water, hoping to catch the next day’s bait. The fisherman heard a splash as Porter stepped out to clean off the dishes, tossing food scraps into the pond. Otherwise, the evening was quiet, until a scratching noise somewhere behind the cabin piqued Hames and Buchanan’s interest. The pair stood up and grabbed their .22 pistols, figuring it might be a porcupine. 

Suddenly, the evening was rocked by a thunderous boom.

Jarvis whirled around to face the camp. “What in hell are you fellows shooting at?” he screamed. Two more blasts shook the dusk, and the young angler ducked. Ammunition cut the air over his head. 

“My god, Wes, what’s happened?” Jarvis heard Buchanan cry. He scrambled back up the ledge to find Porter lying on the ground, the dinner pan still in his hand, blood pooling around his head. The guide was bleeding profusely from behind his left ear, a gash on his neck, his upper lip shredded, and two of his front teeth missing. 

Buchanan rushed inside and dialed the caretaker at Telos Dam. Soon, the great north woods phone tree was rippling, with calls reaching the sheriff’s office in Greenville. Jarvis canoed down the lake, looking for help. 

About an hour later, Piscataquis County medical examiner Frederick Pritham arrived by float plane to find Porter still hanging on — unable to move or speak, but breathing. Kneeling beneath the dull glow of a kerosene light, the doctor confirmed the obvious: Wesley Porter had been shot in the head. The assailant, Pritham estimated, had stood 30 or 40 yards away as they pulled the trigger of a small-caliber firearm. Pritham did what he could to keep Porter comfortable, but there was no moving the severely wounded guide. Wesley Porter died of his injuries shortly after midnight. 

Early the next morning, deputy sheriff Dave Knowlton and state trooper James Mealey arrived in a Civil Air Patrol plane. They confiscated firearms from the Massachusetts sports — Mealey would turn them over to forensics — and grilled each one independently, finding that all three told basically the same story. Later in the day, Lieutenant Merle Cole, a 19-year veteran of the Maine State Police and a backcountry specialist, arrived to take charge of the investigation. The first suspects were the obvious ones: Porter’s clients. Did any have a beef with their guide? Did they get to drinking and become belligerent? 

In Greenville, the state pathologist removed particles from Porter’s brain, which Cole told reporters were “drop lead or buckshot and contained no alloy such as would be found in a rifle or revolver bullet.” Meanwhile, ballistics on a Remington Kleanbore shotgun shell found at the scene showed two distinctive characteristics: the way the firing pin had scored the shell and an unusual lubricant used in the barrel, bacon grease. 

State police cleared all of the Massachusetts men’s guns. But if not them, then who?

In the days following the murder, Cole’s investigators interviewed more than 40 residents of the Allagash region, and the lieutenant quietly amassed a list of suspects: A poacher from New Hampshire, known to frequent the area. A German immigrant suspected of subversive activity. One of Wesley Porter’s own nephews. A “woods-queer” hermit who lived on nearby Hudson Pond, famously misanthropic and known to threaten hunters and fishermen. One by one, however, Cole and his men determined that all of them checked out. 

Then, after a month of digging, a frustrated Cole got a tip from the commissioner of the state warden service. In the month leading up to the crime, about a dozen camps had been broken into in the Allagash region, and with sightings reported of a nattily bearded stranger. Wardens suspected the mystery man had been burgling the region for more than a year. Cole wondered, could this be the murderer? If so, why would he want Wesley Porter dead? 

As the hunt for Porter’s killer stretched into summer, Maine’s papers covered the guide’s funeral and the search for the killer, while wire services sent stories about the murder and the fruitless investigation all across the country. “Law officers have sought in vain a clue to the mysterious assailant,” the Waterville Morning Sentinel declared in mid-July. “The region is mysterious enough without a man-made tragedy,” the paper’s outdoors columnist chimed in. 

Six weeks in, the investigation had grown so stagnant that the state attorney general ordered Porter’s body exhumed, directing the state pathologist to look for anything that might have been missed. The new autopsy revealed another pellet in Porter’s brain, and spectrographic analysis confirmed it had come from a shotgun. Cole told reporters, “We were all convinced that the murder weapon was a 20-gauge, and by this time, we’re pretty sure that our man [is] still in the woods, hiding out.” 

Meanwhile, break-ins continued in the Allagash. Investigating one of them, at Nugent’s sporting camp, on Chamberlain Lake, state wardens Helon Taylor and Bert Duty found a 20-gauge shell matching the one seemingly used to kill Porter. The burglar had shot through a window. Soon after, the pair visited the site of another camp invasion, at Snake Pond, some six miles northeast, where someone had again blasted their way in. Taylor and Duty recovered another shell, lubricated with bacon fat and scored by the same firing pin. Following a faint trail, they also found a lean-to where someone had recently camped. 

Not long after, in late July, state trooper Mealey spied the suspect while investigating a report of stolen items at a fire tower. He lost him in pursuit but got enough of a look to provide details for a composite sketch. The phantom, Mealey said, was slight of build, no taller than 5-foot-7, with a long, dark, and red-tinged beard and a “bull neck.” He carried a pack, an ax, and a gun. The police distributed a thousand copies of the sketch to post offices, lumber crews, Customs officers, Canadian Mounties, and others.

At last, Cole and the other investigators felt like they were catching up to their killer. As July gave way to August, a Civil Air Patrol pilot spotted yet another abandoned encampment and a fire tower lookout reported his cabin shot up. Warden Duty was investigating another camp break-in when buckshot exploded through the thin walls, raking a chair he’d just vacated — again, the shooter escaped into the woods. What investigators needed, Cole decided, were bloodhounds, which Maine State Police didn’t have. In early August, the governor approved Cole’s request to obtain some, and Connecticut State Police sent a pair of dogs, with handlers, to join the dozens of men closing in on the phantom. 

On August 8, Arthur “Chub” Foster and Clinton Porter, Wesley’s boss and his 16-year-old son, were a few miles north of the searchers’ Clear Lake camp, surveilling a tote road north of Fourth Musquacook Lake, when they spied a man who looked just like the police sketch. Foster, a WWI vet, leveled his gun and called out, “Just a minute, mister!” The bearded stranger turned, dropped his ax, and made to raise his shotgun. 

“As the gun came up, I didn’t dare take a chance,” Foster later told the papers. “I felt it was one or the other of us. I pulled my rifle up and fired. The man staggered, cried out, and then collapsed on the ground.”

The much-feared Phantom of the Allagash turned out to be an emaciated shell of a man. Foster and Porter stanched the blood hemorrhaging from where he’d been hit in the thigh, then put him on an improvised litter, hauling him to where they could signal a plane. Their three shots echoed through the woods, indicating an end to the search. 

Within an hour, a floatplane delivered Lieutenant Cole and other law-enforcement officers to the scene. Speaking French, translated by a warden, the injured fugitive made his confession: His name was Alphonse Maurence. He was 35, unmarried, and had fled his home in Quebec to escape conscription into the Canadian military. For more than a year, he’d survived in the Maine woods by breaking into camps and stealing, firing into them first to make sure no one was inside. Early that summer, he’d found supplies on the shore of Webster Lake and tried to take them, but Porter had come along as he scavenged. So Maurence followed the guide back to camp, and as darkness fell, he fired shots meant to scare off the men he saw there — killing Porter, he claimed, by accident. He was hungry and desperate. He hadn’t meant to hurt anyone and had been on the run ever since. That morning, he had taken to the tote road in order to travel faster, after hearing the baying of the bloodhounds.  

Forensics would later confirm the shells containing the shot that killed Porter had come from Maurence’s shotgun. In its barrel were traces of bacon fat. From the woods, Maurence was flown to Greenville, where he succumbed to blood loss at the hospital before he could be turned over to authorities. 

The story of Porter’s murder and Maurence’s capture — what the Morning Sentinel called the “greatest manhunt ever staged in this state” — captivated not just the north woods but the nation. The Boston Globe ran updates on the search, which ultimately became fodder for the popular crime magazines of the day. Publications like True Detective and National Detective, which reached millions of readers, cast Porter’s death as a killing in one of the nation’s last, fading frontiers. “Time was when news of a murder in Maine’s vast northern woods wouldn’t reach civilization for days,” reflected the author of “Ghost Killer of the Allagash,” in Inside Detective magazine. National Detective sandwiched its story, “Strange Case of the Stalking Terror,” between the potboilers “Corpse in the Carpet” and “Murder Without Penalty.”

Eighty years later, the tale of the Webster Lake murder is still told around campfires in the north woods, still a topic of conversation among those from Porter’s hometown of Patten. One Patten native with a law-enforcement background, Susan Roy Morrison, curates a detailed website about the crime, collecting accounts from news archives and descendants of those involved, including of Porter himself.

Donna Porter Roach grew up in the small Penobscot County community, hearing stories about the grandfather she never got to meet. “I remember my dad telling me the story about his father’s death,” says Roach, now a nurse living in Massachusetts. “He cried telling me, all those years later.”

As a kid, she was haunted by the idea of a bogeyman in the woods. “It literally made me afraid of the dark,” Roach says. “My father loved to hunt and fish, and I thought, ‘Please, god, don’t let that happen to him.’”

The man who shot the Phantom of the Allagash, Chub Foster, ran his sporting camp on Grand Lake Matagamon until 1970 and lived on the lake until his death, in 1995, at 97. He was a quiet man but loved telling tales of the old Maine woods, remembers Tom Johnston, who got to know him while guiding at the scouting camp opened on the site of Foster’s camp. Johnston heard the story of the manhunt straight from the man who’d ended it — along with countless more swashbuckling tales of the era’s guides, hermits, and other characters. “Of course, we teenagers ate them all up,” Johnston recalls. “At the time, that country felt like an isolated backcountry. Regardless of paper-company roads and a high volume of visitors, the Maine north woods felt like one of the last great empty spaces in the world.”

“That’s not easy terrain for anybody,” agrees retired state trooper Mark Nickerson, who researched the pursuit of Porter’s killer for his 2015 book Behind the Blue Lights, which collects tales from the archives of the Maine State Police. The duration of the search alone was impressive, Nickerson says — until 2015, it was the longest manhunt in state history. For years, he says, the details of the case were taught to new recruits at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy, and he marvels at the investigators’ ingenuity. 

“They were able to put the timeline together of when these camps were broken into. They were able to figure out the direction he was traveling. They put together so many clues.” And they did it, Nickerson says, with rudimentary communication — “you know, wires hung through trees” — while coordinating multiple agencies across a vast wilderness. Is it any wonder the case transcended pulpy headlines to become a fixture in north woods lore?  

“It’s just amazing they were able to cope,” Nickerson says. “It was just dogged determination to get this guy.” 

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As the 19th century came to a close, Maine was on the cusp — or precipice, depending on perspective — of becoming Vacationland. From Kennebunkport to Moosehead Lake to Bar Harbor, rail service had opened the state to travelers to an unprecedented degree. Small, sleepy Ogunquit, however, remained largely untouched. The nearest train station was at York Beach, and from there, Ogunquit was a bumpy ride — seven miles over dirt roads, via horse-drawn carriage. Perkins Cove, a mile outside town, was especially rustic: cow pasture, fallow fields, a handful of fish shacks. When the painter Charles Herbert Woodbury first laid eyes on the cove, in 1889, he pronounced it an “artist’s paradise.”

Several years later, Woodbury bought five acres on the cove’s southern shore for $400. A highly regarded artist and art teacher in Boston, he opened the Ogunquit Summer School of Drawing and Painting in 1898. As many as a hundred students would arrive every summer, for a six-week course that cost all of $40 (not counting housing, which started at $8 a week), kicking off Ogunquit’s days as a hotbed of the arts. Under Woodbury’s tutelage, the prevailing sensibility was traditional. His students focused on landscapes, painting en plein air, in the representational mode of the great impressionists. He was wary of the avant-garde. “You can’t expect the public to understand your arbitrary symbols,” he preached.

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that the founding father of the Ogunquit colony would clash with Hamilton Easter Field, who first arrived at Perkins Cove one day in 1902, stepping from a carriage right across the road from where Woodbury’s students were working at their easels. Field, a staunch proponent of individual expressiveness and experimentalism, was an influential art critic in New York. He ran with vanguard modernists like John Marin, Marguerite and William Zorach, and Alfred Stieglitz, and he was no slouch as an artist himself. His great talent, though, was his eye for talent, and thanks to a family fortune from the manufacture of chinaware, he could support up-and-comers. On Perkins Cove, Field moved into a house in plain sight of Woodbury’s school, and, in 1911, opened the Summer School of Graphic Arts.

“All of a sudden, Hamilton Easter Field comes in, buys up all this property, and starts bringing up a bunch of Brooklynites,” Ogunquit Museum of American Art associate curator Devon Zimmerman says. “It’s such a Shakespearean thing in a funny way — these two camps of different ideologies, different dispositions, clustered around this small tidal basin.”

Woodbury’s students skewed female, many coming from well-heeled Boston families. They were known locally as the “Virginal Wayfarers,” a play on Marginal Way, the path from the cove into town. They mostly hewed to their teacher’s approach. Field’s students were livelier, louder, more willing to push artistic boundaries. They took their cues from diverse influences: American folk art, Cezanne, the Fauves, cubists. Edward Hopper, George Bellows, and Marsden Hartley paid visits. The same fissures running through the New York art world had stretched all the way to Ogunquit.

Woodbury was an apt representative of the old guard. A slight, angular man, he possessed an aura of Yankee propriety. Field was an obvious contrast. He had a high-pitched voice, he stuttered, and he was gay. They didn’t hit it off. “When you say ‘relationship,’ I don’t know if I’d say they had one,” Ogunquit Heritage Museum curator Charlotte Tragard says. “I’ve never seen anything about the two of them breaking bread and opening a bottle of wine and talking about brush strokes. They couldn’t have been more polar.”

The record is light on specifics about interactions between Woodbury and Field, although one particular provocation is recounted in a history of the Ogunquit art colony, A Century of Color: 1886–1896, by Louise Tragard (Charlotte’s sister). One summer, a nude model from Field’s school wrapped herself in a kimono, darted across a footbridge to Woodbury’s property, and sunbathed au naturel on the steps to his studio. Woodbury reportedly failed to find humor in the situation.

Over time, across the country, Field’s cohort proved the ascendant one, and many of his students — Niles Spencer, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Bernard Karfiol, among others — played important parts in the modernist movement. Another student, Lloyd Goodrich, went on to direct the Whitney Museum, in New York. But in Ogunquit, the art colony peaked and faded. Woodbury died in 1940, and his school closed. Field died in 1922, and his heir, the sculptor Robert Laurent, kept the school going until 1962. By then, artists were getting priced out of Ogunquit. Nowadays, the legacy of the art colony is well represented in the collection of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art. Fittingly, the museum, perched over the mouth of Perkins Cove, was founded by Henry Strater, a student of Hamilton Easter Field’s, on land that had belonged to Charles Woodbury.

HAMILTON EASTER FIELD (UNITED STATES, 1873–1922), SELF-PORTRAIT, CIRCA 1898, OIL ON PANEL, 24 X 18 INCHES. PORTLAND MUSEUM OF ART, MAINE. HAMILTON EASTER FIELD ART FOUNDATION COLLECTION, GIFT OF BARN GALLERY ASSOCIATES, INC., OGUNQUIT, MAINE, 1979.13.15.; HERMANN MURPHY, PORTRAIT OF CHARLES WOODBURY, 1906, OIL ON CANVAS, GIFT OF THE ROWE COLLECTION, 2021.6.1

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The long drive to Castine from Portland puts me in a headspace where the present collides with the past. The sun is warm and bright; the car hums with the prospect of adventure. Beautifully maintained Federal and Georgian buildings line the cape where the Bagaduce River meets Penobscot Bay. As I round a corner onto Sea Street, along Castine’s harbor, it’s easy to juxtapose 18th-century life with the present day, as if the beautiful setting — the tidal shores, the pristine waters reflecting blue sky, the streets lined with majestic elms — has enticed my ancestors to join me on this trip. 

I’m here to see Esther and Emanuel, two newly renamed islands in the Bagaduce, and to uncover what I can about the people for whom they were named. Wherever the actual Esther and Emanuel came from, they wouldn’t have arrived here by land, as I did, but by sea — effectively the only means of reaching Castine in the 1700s. Fitting that their names have come to rest on a place inaccessible by roads: the Bagaduce River islands formerly known as Upper Negro and Lower Negro. 

Last November, after 18 months of committee meetings, listening sessions, and historical research, voters in Castine chose “Esther” and “Emanuel” from among two pairings of names in a binding town-wide survey (and “Meguntic Islands” as a collective term, an Anglicized Abenaki word associated with waves). The names now await final approval from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. A mile and a half upstream from Castine Harbor, the islands are small, wooded, and linked by a sandbar. The upper island is privately owned, while the lower is a preserve of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust. They’ve been known as the Negro Islands since at least 1790, and their owners have all been white. The reason behind the name has been lost — or, depending on who recounts the mystery, unacknowledged or even erased. As a Black person and descendant of American chattel slavery, I can’t help focusing on the latter two explanations.

The renaming process in Castine was instigated by a complaint, in 2020, to the federal Board on Geographic Names, which the BGN relayed to the town. Earlier that year, a story in the Portland Press Herald reported that the Maine Coastal Island Registry still included three islands with the N-word in their names, plus two that incorporated a slur against Native American women. For decades, both words have been banned from place names under Maine state law. “Negro” is not, but shortly after the Press Herald story, summer-property owners on a Negro Island in Boothbay voted to become Oak Island instead. In Castine, in May of 2021, attendees at a town meeting also approved a name change, by a vote of 44 to 33.

At the time, one argument raised against changing the names was that the islands had a tie to the Underground Railroad — that renaming them would nullify a connection to the historic trail to freedom. But this was nothing more than local legend, as Lisa Simpson Lutts, executive director of the Castine Historical Society, explained in public meetings, producing a deed mentioning Negro Island from 1790 — 20 years before the Underground Railroad network formed. Lutts’s research, she told me more recently, suggests that when Maine place names had “Negro” as the descriptor, these places were historically considered uninhabitable fringes, not for the general public. Islands bearing the name were segregated directly by water and indirectly by the presence of Black bodies — places of marginalization and displacement rather than refuge. 

As Karen Francoeur, proprietor of Castine Kayak Adventures, guides me over the waters of the Bagaduce towards Esther and Emanuel, she tells me it’s long been said around town that early Castine’s wealthy slave owners put enslaved servants on the island. Francoeur and I glide across the water, the shoreline of Castine behind us, the silhouettes of Esther and Emanuel ahead. Labor needed to be nearby, but Black labor needed to live outside of the view of the townspeople. 

Esther and Emanuel appear in the account book of one Colonel Gabriel Johonnot, with entries dated 1785 to 1790. Johonnot notes his dealings with a merchant named Matthias Rich and his “girl Esther,” as well as “Richard Hunnewell, trader, and negro man Emanuel.” Both were likely enslaved. What is now Maine was then part of Massachusetts, which had effectively abolished slavery, in 1783, but release from slavery was gradual. Free people, in documents from the time, have last names; Esther and Emanuel do not. A last name signifies that an individual belongs to a group, a family, and therefore society. It acknowledges someone is human, has a history worth remembering, is worthy of leaving a bread crumb along the trail of life — an opportunity to be remembered, identified, and acknowledged.

In the last year, I’ve been involved with an effort called the Place Justice Project, an initiative of the state’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous & Tribal Populations. The project considers Maine place names and whether and how racialized and Native people are remembered, identified, and acknowledged. I’ve often heard it said at Place Justice events that the reaction of the “general public” must be cautiously considered when new place names are proposed, that the “general public” must be gently exposed to new ideas. The phrase often seems like code for “white people” — much as “urban” has become a white cultural code for “Black people,” regardless of where they live. In the 18th century — at a time when the new U.S. Constitution defined a Black person, for the purposes of taxation and representation, as three-fifths of a person — the code for “Black people” was withholding last names.

Esther and Emanuel appear in no other town records or documents. And although they may have been excluded from town life, they weren’t the only Black people living in Castine around the turn of the 19th century. By 1840, according to Lutts, the town had several Black and biracial families, accounting for nearly one percent of the population — a percentage nearly three times greater, at the time, than in Maine overall. A prosperous port, Castine flourished during the 19th century, and Black families there presumably sustained themselves as sailors and domestic help. Sailing was one of the only occupations offering equal pay across races — ironically so, as Black men were considered worthy of equal pay only when they were helping perpetuate the slavery economy. Slavery in the 19th century remained an international business, with trade cycles that brought ships from Castine to southern ports as far as New Orleans and the Caribbean, carrying cargoes of salt cod that fed enslaved plantation workers. Ships were then packed with raw cotton produced by enslaved workers and sailed to textile mills in England, where they were emptied and filled with salt, which was then delivered to Castine, so that fishermen might salt and preserve their cod. The formerly enslaved and free Black people of Castine were still involved in the institution of slavery, just like everyone else in the seafaring community. 

Who were some of the Black people living in Castine as a result of this trade? The records are faint, but as Lutts, from the historical society, explained to me, traces remain. Jabin and Judy Niles were early Black residents of Castine, with records dating back to 1803. Their names were also considered for the islands. Unusual for the time, they were not recorded as living with a white family. In the 1820 census, they are the first African-descended family recorded as living independently in Castine. We know the Nileses were poor, as they’re listed in the Castine pauper records, and they lived in a house on a wharf, which Lutts says wouldn’t have been well insulated, hard to keep warm during a Maine coastal winter. The wharf and the islands: both places to keep a Black labor force marginalized, at the outskirts of town. Most of the Niles children didn’t stay in Castine. One son, who moved to Portland, helped to found the city’s landmark Abyssinian Church, now the country’s third-oldest African American meeting house, then a hub of abolitionism and Black cultural life — and an actual Underground Railroad site. 

In early Castine, only one Black resident owned land and voted. He was a sailor named William Defleet, and the town renaming committee also considered his name for the islands. Unlike most Black residents, Lutts says, Defleet left a bread-crumb trail, paying poll and real-estate taxes. He has a first name and a surname, and we know he owned land in both Maine and California — he was, judging from this, successful. Thinking of Defleet’s name passed over in favor of Esther and Emanuel makes me wonder, is it more important to shine light on the least recognized? To acknowledge unpaid labor over the successes of the formerly enslaved, and their descendants, who were not domestic servants? The stories of Black people blessed with success during that time, success that the enslaved could only dream of, are seldom told, a different sort of erasure.

The Black presence in Castine declined in the late 19th century, after the Civil War, when Castine’s importance as a shipping center waned. In a nation growing more industrialized, new jobs outside of Castine may have simply beckoned people away, changing migration patterns. Did Castine become more hostile to Black residents, these newly five-fifths people, as white residents felt the losses of family members and profits after the war? The details of what changed will remain a mystery, because like so much of Black history, they went unrecorded. Today, fewer than two percent of Castine’s 1,000 or so residents are Black, a slightly lower percentage than statewide. 

Once the U.S. Board on Geographic Names approves Esther and Emanuel, one Negro Island will remain in Maine, off Biddeford Pool and privately owned. The Place Justice Project has tracked 14 other sites with “Negro” in the name, including Negro Brook, in Somerset County, and Negro Hill, in Penobscot County. 

After Francoeur and I pull our kayaks ashore, I walk Emanuel’s perimeter trail, which is lined with dried sea urchins and pine needles. I examine the remnants of an old cistern, gaze across the Bagaduce River, and see the now-submerged sandbar that connects this island with Esther at low tide. I have just as many questions as before I stood on the island, stuck in the 21st century with only limited access to the marginalized past. I hope future visitors leave here understanding that it’s okay to have questions, that more will be uncovered about this parcel of land. Are Esther and Emanuel going to offer the same undeniable, visible history of Black-people’s experience and presence here that Upper and Lower Negro Island did? Visitors, and even those just looking at a map, will need to actively uncover the history to know that Esther and Emanuel Islands are named after the enslaved. Maine Coast Heritage Trust, which owns and stewards Emanuel Island, plans to install a plaque sharing the island’s history. I’m thankful that the people of Castine stepped into their truth, that history is being uncovered and shared, that Black heritage in Maine is being acknowledged. The islands belong to Maine’s expansive and rugged coast, so its historical inhabitants had to be full of the grit that it takes to be a Mainer. It’ll take our grit to get from here to there, from the 18th century to the future, from Underground Railroad folklore to recognition of real Black people’s lives and labor.

Listen to a companion episode of the podcast In the Pocket: Conversations with BIPOC Mainers, expanding on this essay’s topic and reporting.

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Crow Island is a scrap of an island, three acres tucked into the farthest reaches of Middle Bay, not a half mile off the Brunswick peninsula called Simpson’s Point. To the swimmers who gather at the point at high tide, it is simply “the island,” and the more intrepid among us will swim out to it.

If there were ever structures on Crow Island, no sign of them remains. What it does have is a handful of 100-year-old oaks, many smaller evergreens, and, in season, a mighty patch of lady slippers. Also, it has a legend: that General Joshua L. Chamberlain’s favorite horse is buried there.

Charlemagne wasn’t just some pet horse. The Civil War hero’s beloved mount was a chestnut Morgan that Chamberlain credited with saving his life in multiple battles. The steed was shot more than once. Chamberlain rode him during the Confederates’ formal surrender at Appomattox, in 1865, and afterwards, he arranged for the equine hero to be brought home to Maine, where Chamberlain was summarily elected governor.

For years, I swam close to shore at Simpson’s Point, working up the courage to swim out to Crow. I learned about Charlemagne’s rumored grave while scanning the website of the Harpswell Heritage Land Trust, which acquired the island in 2002. Crow Island once belonged to Chamberlain, it explains, and “is said by some to be the final resting place of his favorite horse . . . a mighty undertaking indeed, if true.” 

The story intrigued me enough that I contacted Rich Knox, who knows Crow Island as well as anyone. As a longtime volunteer steward for the trust, he visits in every season to keep the island free of trash and floating jetsam and maintain a small campsite. One morning last fall, he and I launched a canoe at Simpson’s Point and paddled across the glassy water. Knox knew the legend and had, at least, a theory about how it originated.

We pulled ashore at a small, pebbly beach on the island’s north side. The tide had just turned, and we picked our way along the algae-slickened stones, Knox keeping his eyes peeled for garbage. Crow is fairly pristine, but the campsite is popular, clammers work the flats, and in the fall, hunters come for the sea ducks that raft on Middle Bay. Knox found a crushed beer can and tucked it into his pocket. 

We’d nearly encircled the island when we arrived at the hole. “There you go,” Knox said, gesturing at a depression that looked like a tiny dried-up pond, maybe two feet deep in the clay soil. It was just big enough around to fit a horse, especially a smallish Morgan like Charlemagne. “It’s not big enough for a home foundation,” Knox said. “Why is that there? That was dug.” 

Nearby was a rocky outcrop, the island’s highest point, and Knox and I looked from it across the water at Simpson’s Point, where Chamberlain’s summer retreat, Domhegan, once stood. Atop the outcrop was a slab with an almost equine shape, like a horse resting its head on the rock below, looking out towards Domhegan. Right then, I wanted to believe in the romantic prospect of Chamberlain, sitting on his porch or aboard his black schooner, Pinafore, gazing at the island grave of his trusty companion. 

But the vision proves hard to substantiate. I asked a few Chamberlain experts, but none had heard of Charlemagne’s island grave. Chamberlain bought the island in 1901, at which time Charlemagne, if still upright, would have to have been extraordinarily long lived. The Pejepscot Historical Society, which runs Brunswick’s Joshua Chamberlain Museum, has long operated on the understanding, based on published accounts, that Charlemagne was interred somewhere at Domhegan. According to a 1907 Lewiston Journal article, the horse was given a “Christian burial” there, on the mainland, and the paper, though it gives no year of death, describes an inscription on a rock above his grave. 

But in 1995, then-curator Julia Colvin, author of a history of Domhegan, led a group around the former Domhegan site (the home caught fire in 1940 and was razed thereafter), looking for rocks with inscriptions or other markers, and they found no trace anywhere on the five-acre property. Still, she told me, she’d never heard of Charlemagne being buried on Crow Island, and it struck her as “pretty implausible.” After all, how to get a 1,000-pound body out there? 

A third possible location for Charlemagne’s grave comes from the late writer Catherine T. Smith, who was Chamberlain’s last personal secretary. In 1977, when she was 86, Smith wrote a lengthy recollection of Chamberlain for Brunswick’s Times Record. In it, she claimed that Chamberlain had three different war horses named Charlemagne. The last of them, Smith said, was a family saddle horse in Brunswick for “nearly 18 years” before being put out to pasture. She was insistent, if vague, on the location of his grave. “A large, hilly pasture overlooking the Bay is his final resting place,” she wrote, and not “at Simpson Point, as legend has it.” According to Smith, a horse buried at Simpson’s was one purchased later, for the Chamberlain grandchildren. Maybe it too was named Charlemagne.

During 23 years working for the Chamberlain Museum, site manager Troy Ancona has fielded plenty of questions about Charlemagne. He too has searched the Domhegan site for a grave, to no avail, but his gut tells him the horse is buried nearby — say, on a neighboring farmer’s land. “I can’t picture him sending Charlemagne too far away,” he told me. 

Ancona has also been out to Crow Island, on a beautiful June day a few years back, in a kayak with his wife. “I had to laugh when we got to that sink hole,” he said. “It is weird. It is a pretty big hole. I’m not a land expert, but to me, it looked like it collapsed.” He’s toyed with the idea of bringing a metal detector out to Crow, seeking horseshoes. 

What Ancona is very sure of, though, is that Joshua Chamberlain was devoted to a horse named Charlemagne. In the historical society’s archives, he found a short biography of the horse, written by the general. It’s on stationery from the U.S. Custom House in Portland, where Chamberlain was surveyor from 1900 until his death in 1914. In it, the former governor recalls buying Charlemagne in 1863. The horse, then about four, had been captured from the Confederates in the Shenandoah Valley and bore scars from the war. But he was “of perfect symmetry of body and limb,” Chamberlain wrote. His mane and tail caught “sunlight with wonderful effect of light and shade.” Chamberlain paid $150 for him (he later paid $100 for Crow Island).

Charlemagne greeted Chamberlain at his tent door and rubbed noses with him. The horse, his master wrote, seemed to delight in leading a charge, “sometimes taking me into situations which were not perfectly conformable to my own will and judgment; and so conferring on me credit really due him.” In dreary bivouacs or on lonely midnight marches, Chamberlain “would whisper confidences to him shared by no other.” The general went on: “It will not be surprising that this attachment on my part came to be almost mystical.” The last two words had been crossed out, Ancona says, but were still legible. 

Maybe the story of Charlemagne on Crow emerged because islands, their own tiny worlds, are themselves almost mystical. Or maybe someone who knew Chamberlain well enough to know his romantic tendencies was out on Crow Island a century ago, hunting birds. Maybe they noticed a round depression and a rock shaped like a horse’s head. Maybe they speculated to a companion, who took it as truth. Maybe, in this case, all there is to know about the unprovable is that it could be truth. Because the love, after all, was real. 

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The Art Colony Walking Tour brochure they hand out at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art explains things succinctly. “Since the 1890s,” it reads, “Ogunquit has been a destination for artists who sought the camaraderie of fellow artists and relief from the summer heat of the big city.” Camaraderie and relief: a couple of time-honored reasons that an artist — anyone, really — might spend a summer or a lifetime in Maine. Follow the self-guided tour around Ogunquit’s Perkins Cove and you’ll stroll past the seaside studio that Massachusetts painter Charles Woodbury built in 1898, a fledgling art school in the midst of what had been, until then, a scatter of fishing shacks. You’ll cross the footbridge to the shingled T-shirt shop that used to be Brooklyn painter and critic Hamilton Easter Field’s art school, established 13 years after Woodbury’s. You’ll walk past the icehouse that Field built for local fishermen, which became a summer rental in the 1940s, a hotspot for mid-century Ogunquit artists that hosted, as the brochure says, “infamous summer parties and artists’ balls.” Today, it’s a gift shop selling pottery and cobble-rock knickknacks and coasters that say things like, “The answer may not be at the beach, but at least we should check.”

Ogunquit is one of two Maine locales instantly associated with the epithet “art colony.” The other is the island of Monhegan, which, like Ogunquit, began receiving a trickle of itinerant artists in the later 19th century, mostly from the metros of the East, which by the 1920s had become a flood. Both hosted, at one point or another, Robert Henri, George Bellows, Margaret Jordan Patterson, Edward Hopper, and other bigwigs. In both places, the archetype of the plein air painter, seated at an easel overlooking the sea, is baked into the local DNA (and is still a common sight). But Monhegan and Ogunquit are far from the only Maine towns to have hosted robust communities of from-away artists looking for camaraderie and relief: In the first few decades of the 20th century, the Commonwealth Art Colony attracted budding artists, musicians, and teachers to Boothbay Harbor. Around the same time, a coterie of American modernists gathered at the tips of Georgetown and Phippsburg, a spot branded “Seguinland” by turn-of-the-century tourism flacks. Lincolnville in the 1950s enticed a clutch of post-war figurative artists away from New York. Eastport in the 1970s welcomed a wave of bohemian creatives drawn by the promise of cooperative studios in an old sardine cannery. 

All these places and more have, at one time or another, been characterized as carrying on Maine’s tradition of art colonies. But today, among artists, scholars, and others, the phrase itself is ambiguous at best — and contentious at worst.

“The term ‘art colony’ has become a descriptive but somewhat vague notion in the American language,” art historian Steve Shipp writes in a 1996 survey of historical American artist communities. The concept emerged from Europe in the 19th century, mostly France, where young artists, romanticizing pastoral landscapes and peasant life, fled the increasingly crowded cities in summer, posting up in tribes in unsuspecting villages, where locals tolerated them enough to pocket their francs. American artists who’d studied on the Continent — like Woodbury, Field, and early Monhegan booster Henri — adapted the model. 

Charles Woodbury, father of Ogunquit’s art colony, in 1891; costumed for a “masquerade” at Boothbay Harbor’s Commonwealth Art Colony, in 1915; a Commonwealth class portrait. Top of page: Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture cofounder Sidney Simon critiquing student work in 1946. Courtesy of the Monhegan Museum of Art and the Boothbay Region Historical Society.

“The idea of Maine as a place for creatives is a very modern one, and art colonies in general are a response to the conditions of modernity,” explains Thomas Denenberg, former chief curator at the Portland Museum of Art, now the director of Vermont’s Shelburne Museum. “You get them when all of a sudden you have cities and people start fleeing for the country. And Maine is kind of the perfect geography.”

Not least, Denenberg says, because so many young American painters idolized 19th-century heavyweights like Frederic Edwin Church and Winslow Homer, who’d made their reputations painting the rugged Maine coast. “Maine is where artists go to test themselves,” Denenberg says. “You know, if you’re gonna be a macho painter, you go stick your easel right on the littoral.”

Places like Ogunquit and Monhegan played a key role in what Denenberg calls “the construction of the mythic New England, of New England as a therapeutic environment.” Maine became known as “a place where artists retreat to solitude and communion with the natural world,” says former PMA curator Diana Greenwold, now at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. “That was the way of selling Maine to rusticators, as a place where you go to get away.”

Susan Danly — then with the Portland Museum of Art, now an independent curator — worked with Denenberg on a 2009 PMA exhibition exploring this idea: The Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England focused on Ogunquit, Monhegan, and Old Lyme and Cos Cob, Connecticut. She has since curated exhibits on the “Maine moderns” of Seguinland — including Marsden Hartley and William and Marguerite Zorach — and on the “Slab City” artists of the 1950s and ’60s — Lois Dodd, Yvonne Jacquette, Alex Katz, Neil Welliver, Bernard Langlais, and others — who converged in Lincolnville, near a road with that name. But while all these artists answered the call of the coast, Danly is among those hesitant to characterize the latter two as art colonies. To her, the phrase implies generations of artists coming and going, whereas Seguinland and Slab City, she says, “were moments that were not sustained, formed by deep personal relationships among the artists,” many of whom put down permanent roots in Maine. 

For independent curator and arts writer Carl Little, “art colony” is a tricky label, insufficient even for Monhegan. “Both an art colony and an art community, I would call it,” he says. “Ogunquit was a place you went for a couple of weeks or months in the summer to paint or go to a school. But on Monhegan, artists like Rockwell Kent, Andrew Winter, Jay Connaway, and others all ended up buying places and living there year-round — it’s where you have some of the first great paintings of Maine in winter.”

Of course, it’s harder to buy a place on Monhegan these days, particularly on most artists’ incomes. Or, for that matter, to find a cheap seasonal rental within an easel’s swing of Ogunquit. Or to buy a midcoast farmhouse for $1,200 — the equivalent of $18,000 today — which is what Lois Dodd, Alex Katz, and Jean Cohen paid for their place on Slab City Road, in 1954. The rising cost of rusticating was one reason that artists in the later 20th century started to answer the call of the coast differently. 

“In the 1850s, in France, it really was a bunch of guys getting out to the woods of Fontainebleau or to Brittany — more ad hoc,” Denenberg says. “But that whole 1890s ‘we’re off to the country to study with a charismatic guy’ model becomes something else by the 1950s, something more institutionalized.” 

Enter the contemporary arts residency — for which the term “art colony” was once used more or less interchangeably. Pianist Marian MacDowell and her husband, composer Edward MacDowell, founded what’s considered to be the country’s first such program, then known as the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, in 1907. Unlike in Ogunquit and Monhegan, where artists showed up uninvited, stayed in boarding houses, and commingled with fishermen, MacDowell was intended as a set-apart sanctuary for small, select groups (admitted, at first, by invitation and, later, by application). “Apart from being founded in a spirit of back-to-nature idealism,” art historian Michael Jacobs writes, “places such as . . . the MacDowell Colony, with their institutional and monastic character, had virtually nothing in common with” the 19th-century French model.

The first MacDowell-ish residencies took root in Maine mid-century and have since thrived. The Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, founded in 1946, is one of the country’s most esteemed, with more than 2,000 annual applicants vying for 65 private studios and cottage quarters on a former farm in Madison. Maine-dwelling artists introduced to the state via Skowhegan include Alex Katz and the late David Driskell, Robert Indiana, and Ashley Bryan. In 1950, a group of Maine craftspeople established Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, today on Deer Isle, which a recent PMA exhibit credited with nothing less than having “transformed art, craft, and design in the 20th century.” Artists come by the hundreds each summer for short residencies, workshops, and more.

Smaller-scale residency programs have proliferated also — including a juried one on Monhegan, founded in 1989, which houses visiting artists in an apartment and studio above a gift shop. “Everybody realized that an artist couldn’t afford to rent anything anymore,” says Danly, who sits on the program’s board. In the last few decades, she says, she’s seen a “mini explosion” of such residencies in Maine. “People want to come here, but they do need some sort of outside support that residency programs can supply. It’s really important for keeping the Maine art scene active and alive.”

“I believe that Maine has more summer-residency programs — and I think you could easily say per capita — than any other state,” says Donna McNeil, a former director of the Maine Arts Commission who now runs Rockland’s arts-focused Ellis-Beauregard Foundation. The tally, McNeil points out, includes programs for visual artists as well as writers, composers, musicians, theater artists, and others (sometimes under one roof, as at Ellis-Beauregard’s residency), and the vocabulary surrounding them can be inexact. “A colony is certainly a different thing from a residency,” she says, “and then places like Skowhegan and Haystack are more like schools. So it gets really blurry.”

Neither is every Maine residency a bucolic retreat, per se. Ellis-Beauregard is currently building a new facility for its residency smack in the middle of Rockland. Monson has hosted artists right downtown since 2018, part of an economic-development strategy for the Appalachian Trail town, supported by Maine’s charitable Libra Foundation. “The studios are all on Main Street,” says Monson Arts senior advisor Stuart Kestenbaum, who also directed the much more isolated Haystack from 1988 to 2015. “So there are logging trucks going by. The residents are around in the community, they get to know people.” Both Ellis-Beauregard and Monson’s programs are year-round — an indicator that contemporary residencies are about a lot more than escaping summer in the city. 

“A difference from when those first artists came to Maine and stayed for a couple of months is that now the residencies are almost part of a progression,” Kestenbaum says. “You get a degree, get your MFA, and then you do residencies. You find people who move from residency to residency for years. It’s kind of like going to Europe with a backpack, and I think that’s new since the ’80s.” 

“Even 20 or 40 years ago, you could get together with a bunch of friends, if you were a New Yorker, and go buy something wonderful in the hinterlands and set up shop,” says Marc Mewshaw, executive director of Lovell’s Hewnoaks residency. “In the absence of that option, another way to reproduce that sense of community is to seek out these residencies.” Hewnoaks, which brings artists in all disciplines to a set of humble cabins on Kezar Lake, was initially established in 2013 as Hewnoaks Artist Colony, but the program is one of many in the arts world to have ceased using “colony” in recent years, on account of its unsavory imperialist connotations. Among the earliest renouncers was what’s now simply called MacDowell, which made headlines when it nixed the nebulous term, in 2020. 

“Obviously when ‘colony’ was first being used as a term of art, there were two meanings,” Mewshaw says. “It can be pretty benign — a group of folks establishing a community — but it can also refer to the seizure of land and violent exploitation and subjugation.” For an organization that “believes really strongly in pluralism and uplifting voices that have traditionally been left out of the canon,” he says, abandoning “colony” simply felt consistent with core values. 

Nevertheless, he recognizes a through line from the old days of easels at Perkins Cove and Monhegan cliffs. “That sense, in the 1900s, of rusticating to the coast, of leaving the heat and clamor and noisiness of the city, I think that’s still very much valid and probably even more so now,” Mewshaw says. And the clamor, in a sense, has only gotten louder, encompassing social media, incessant news cycles, pandemic anxiety, and more. 

Hewnoaks’s original owners, artists Douglas and Marion Volk, understood their peers’ need for camaraderie and relief. They were contemporaries of Woodbury and Field and Henri, and in the early 20th century, they opened their Kezar Lake summer home to artist friends and students who also made pilgrimages to places like Ogunquit and Monhegan. So what would the Volks make of Hewnoaks today? “They would probably be perplexed by how formalized these kinds of spaces have gotten,” Mewshaw says, “but I think they’d be pretty damn satisfied to know this was their legacy.”

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BUY THIS ISSUE

By Jaed Coffin
From our January 2023 issue

This month, author Paul Harding is out with his third novel, This Other Eden. Like Harding’s most well known previous work, the 2008 Pulitzer Prize–winning Tinkers, it’s a slim, lyrical volume, full of contemplations on the nature of art, existence, and the passage of time. The story begins in the spring of 1911, in the mixed-race community of Apple Island, Maine. The residents, descended from a common ancestor of ambiguous African origin, are painters, storytellers, carpenters, and mystics. Their primary contact with the outside world is through a Christian missionary. Soon, a state-sanctioned eviction, driven by racism and greed, threatens to destroy the community. With each passing day, it’s clear the narrative arc is not bending toward justice.

The front pages of This Other Eden (Norton, $28) contain a disclaimer that the story is a “work of fiction,” most of the characters “are products of the author’s imagination,” and any resemblance to real individuals is entirely “coincidental.” But that’s followed by an epigraph pulled from the website of Maine Coast Heritage Trust about the history of one of the organization’s conserved properties, Malaga Island.

Harding stumbled onto the history of Malaga Island a decade ago. Reading about 19th-century mixed-race communities, he came across an article that ran in this magazine in 1980, “The Shameful Story of Malaga Island,” by William David Barry. That story was the first known treatment of the community’s swept-under-the-rug history, chronicling the lives of residents and their eventual forced displacement. In his first reading of Barry’s article, Harding says, one detail in particular stood out: that several of the evicted islanders were subsequently committed to the Maine School for the Feeble Minded. That’s the same place a character in Tinkers, based on Harding’s grandfather, risks being institutionalized after an epilepsy diagnosis.

But Harding was careful not to get lost in the archives. “I try not to do a lot of research, because I want the imagined story to have its own critical mass, its own momentum,” he says. “The story starts to dictate its own needs.” As Harding worked through drafts and imagined new scenes, he found himself infusing his vision of Malaga with familiar motifs from Moby-Dick, the Old Testament, and Hamlet. Harding says this was his way of bringing the island’s marginalized past closer to the center of history.

Harding is not, by any means, the first artist or writer inspired by Malaga Island. The earliest contribution to the growing canon was Gary Schmidt’s young-adult novel Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, which, in 2005, was named a Newbery Honor Book. The story, since adapted into a popular children’s play, is about the friendship between a girl from Malaga and a boy from the mainland town of Phippsburg. It erroneously describes the island residents as escaped slaves, although, at the time of its publication, speculation persisted that early Malaga residents were either descended from or were themselves escaped slaves. Research has since shown that they were free people, who settled on Malaga not to avoid reenslavement but rather some of the discrimination they faced just across the water.

A lesser-known novel, Dis Place, by the late Cundy’s Harbor author Matthew Herrick, arrived in 2008, funded by a Maine Arts Commission grant and published posthumously by Will-Dale Press, in Bowdoin. Dis Place is a lean but deeply researched book, informed by conversations Herrick had with descendants and other elders in his community who had inherited stories of the island but, like most people, until then remained silent about its past. In recent years, two more novels — The Rattled Bones and Shadows in Our Bones — set their stories against the backdrop of Malaga history.

Kingfield librarian and current Maine Poet Laureate Julie Bouwmsa published a poetry collection, Midden, in 2012, reimagining the experiences of island residents in verse. Then came the visual and performing arts. Re.past.malaga, by Bates College American Studies professor Myron Beasley, was a performative meal held on Malaga, adapting the slave tradition of holding a repast to honor lives and memorialize loss. Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates’s Amalgam, shown at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, responded to the island’s history using a mix of sculpture, film, theater and dance described by one critic as “sorrowful and remorseful reflection.” Portland-based artist Daniel Minter’s series of Malaga Island paintings, first shown at the University of Southern Maine Art Galleries, integrate artifacts from the island — buttons, broken kitchenware — with silhouetted portraits. These artists all worked closely with historians and descendants to understand the lives and legacies of Malaga’s people.

In 2020, the reggae-rock band State Radio released a ballad, “The Story of Benjamin Darling,” that retells the likely apocryphal origin story of Malaga Island’s founding father.

For years, Harding worked on the manuscript of This Other Eden in creative isolation — discussing it with no one, allowing himself only limited exposure to the decades’ worth of research, by historians, archaeologists, and genealogists, that followed Barry’s original article. Eventually, Harding changed the name of Malaga Island to Apple Island and the name of Benjamin Darling to Benjamin Honey. Another family on the island, perhaps inspired by the real-life Marks, is the Larks. The McKenneys seem to have morphed into McDermotts.

Harding’s novel is, after all, a novel — following in the tradition of historical fiction, even if names are changed. An odd aspect, though, is that some of the book’s fictions were once held up as fact. In the early 20th century, state officials, local landowners, and yellow journalists pushed false narratives of squalor and incest to justify removing Malaga residents. In the novel, histories of incest haunt the Honeys and the Larks, cursing them with emotional traumas and physical maladies. The Apple Islanders live in sordid conditions — one man wears rags and a gingham dress; children sleep among their dogs; a girl’s diet comprises robin eggs, raw starfish, and tree bark.

“The documentary and archaeological evidence refutes all of these myths,” says state archivist Kate McBrien, who curated Fragmented Lives, a past exhibition about Malaga at the Maine State Museum. “The people of Malaga Island lived just like their neighbors on the mainland.”

Copies still exist in archives around the state of a black-and-white postcard of an old woman on Malaga Island, sitting in a rocking chair with a child in her lap. They’re outside, surrounded by a wooden fence. The photograph was staged, McBrien says. The subjects had been positioned behind the fence to appear as if they lived among their livestock. In the years leading up to the eviction of island residents, these postcards and other racist ephemera were circulated to sensationalize and demonize the island’s residents.

During the early phases of drafting This Other Eden, Harding found himself contemplating the photograph. The child is Pearl Darling, according to McBrien, and the woman holding her may well be her grandmother, Elizabeth Darling. The woman reminded Harding, in some ways, of his own grandmother. Something about the way she seemed to stare back at the invisible photographer with suspicion and defiance captured his imagination. It was, he felt, as if she were asking, “What are you taking my picture for?”

Read the 1980 Down East story that brought the obscured history of Malaga Island back into the light.

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Today, the lives and the cruel 1912 expulsion of the Black and mixed-race residents of Phippsburg’s Malaga Island are topics of study for Maine historians and others — and, as writer Jaed Coffin explains in our January 2023 issue, increasingly the source material for novels, poetry, art installations, and more. But in 1980, when historian William David Barry wrote about Malaga Island for Down East, the story of the Malagans was largely forgotten or misunderstood. Click here to read the 43-year-old article that helped bring this dark chapter into the light.

Read more: “Malaga Island Has Gone From Dark Secret to Source Material“

Even by present standards, Route 1 traffic in southern Maine was unbearable by the late 1930s. The drive from Kittery to Portland could take several hours, especially in summer, thanks to the state’s burgeoning reputation as Vacationland. Then, on December 13, 1947, a ribbon-cutting ceremony opened the brand-new Maine Turnpike to streams of Chevy Fleetmasters, DeSotos, and Lincoln Continentals. All of a sudden, that same drive to Portland reliably took less than an hour — and that’s not the only impressive stat the turnpike has racked up over the past 75 years.