Mary and Leslie Ames: 1914

The sun coming through the curtainless windows made long streaks of light on the newly-washed floor. Mary Ames, her arms full of clothes, stopped in the doorway of the kitchen where she’d spent so much time. Aubrey, Harold, Lena and Allison were already gone, riding into Camden on top of the wagonload of furniture with their father. Leslie wouldn’t be back for her for another hour or more in a borrowed automobile. Meanwhile, the plan was for the older boys, Aubrey and Harold, to move the furniture into the various rooms of their new house. Lena would see that things got put in the right place and that Allison behaved himself. Thank goodness, she’d had one daughter to help her with the household! At seventeen Lena was more than a help, she was another woman Mary could count on.

The kitchen was always the heart of a house, she thought. This was the room where the family gathered for meals, sitting around the table that now was probably standing expectantly in the kitchen at 16 Sea Street, the table that she and Leslie had used all through their marriage. She tried to remember where it had come from, not that it mattered.  With the one good overhead light, a big kerosene lamp hanging from the ceiling over it, the children sat at night practicing their reading or learning their sums and times tables. Stormy days they did puzzles or drew pictures.

The rolltop desk had dominated that corner over there, next to the window with its wide view of the Ducktrap Stream. It had taken all of them to get that out the door and onto the wagon, even with all the drawers removed. Leslie had been at her for a week to clean out the desk, but there had been just too much to do. At the last moment, this morning, she just put everything—her school records, his town business, the store accounts—into two boxes, one for him and one for her.

Come to think of it, what were they going to need all those old records for, anyway? Suddenly overcome with the finality of what they were doing, Mary backed into the hall and sat down on the stairs, the clothes tumbling from her arms. One by one these past few years, they had given up the several jobs they’d dutifully carried out for so long.

The store was the first to go, or at any rate, Leslie let it go, turning it over to his brother, Robie. In recent years he had watched his trade slip away. It had happened imperceptibly, with just a single family moving away, then another. She couldn’t even remember who had been first, perhaps Oliver and Waitie Keene. They had moved closer to the sawmills, up near Slab City. Once the lime kiln at the bridge had shut for good, no one came all the way down to the Trap for barrels anymore. Now that she thought of it, all the other coopers were gone as well, Jeremiah Luce, Edgar Clark and his family of five, and Joseph and Mary Marriner. William Barton, whose cooper shop had been a fixture at the end of the bridge, had died two winters ago. Still, neither of his boys had taken up their father’s trade, and Agnes had moved to Camden with little Hazel. [I told Hazel Barton’s story a few weeks ago in this column]

Henry and Lizzie Duncan and their five children were gone, too; he was a harbor pilot and could live almost anywhere on the coast. Sophia and Dennis Carver had only two of their six still at home; if the parents didn’t pick up and leave, it seemed the young people did as soon as they could. Besides their own four, Mary thought, the only other large family still living at the Trap was Jasper and Bessie Drinkwater’s. He was a steam pilot now, and bringing home a regular paycheck, and Bessie seemed to have a baby every year, seven so far!

With all these families moving away, houses were standing empty up and down the Atlantic Highway. Mary walked over to the window and looked out across the river. She hadn’t grown accustomed to the blank windows of Agnes Barton’s place, or her cold chimney; the house had a lonely feel.

Still, some of the houses came alive in the summer. Even Leslie had to admit that the summer trade was as brisk as he could wish. Helen Porter, who came all the way from Chicago to the old farm at 2813 Atlantic Highway], made up for many a quiet winter day. She brought her friends with her, paying guests, and one by one they found their way across the road to L.D. Ames’ general store. Mary lost track of who all these summer people were and where they came from.

Oh, not the locals; she knew them well enough. Austin Wade, who lived in Massachusetts, came every summer to stay in his grandmother’s house, as did his friend Will Davis, whose mother was a Carver. Come to think of it, Carvers and Wades and Crehores, they all came back to Ducktrap in the summer, to the houses they left standing empty and cold most of the year. 

As soon as school let out in June, the women and their children started arriving, coming into Camden on the Boston boat with trunks and boxes and bags. For the next two months there was almost too much work. Since their husbands were back in the city for all but a few weeks of vacation in Maine, the women needed help with everything it seemed—opening up their musty houses, hanging screens, cleaning chimneys, splitting stove wood—and just at a time when the locals, all the folks who’d weathered the winter here, were busy tending their own gardens and salmon weirs.

Inevitably, as Ducktrap shrank, losing over half its people in ten years, their school was closed; the Trap school’s last term was the spring of 1910. The next fall twenty children were transported to the Beach School. Two teachers were hired and the lower room fixed up for a classroom. Mary taught upstairs and Harriet Brown had the downstairs class. Leslie had the contract to convey the Trap children the mile or so to school.

It hadn’t taken them long to decide. It had been hard enough getting Aubrey and Lena to high school in Camden, and now Harold, and soon Allison would be going as well. The store was foundering; the Trap was dying. Both Mary and Leslie wanted more for their future than a tiny general store, and one room schools that paid less than three hundred dollars a year.  When just a few months ago, at March town meeting, Leslie had turned over the town books to the new treasurer, Miller Ross, Mary wondered if he’d had any misgivings after ten years of keeping track of the town’s finances. But by then Lincolnville wasn’t their town anymore. They were committed to their new life.

Mary wandered aimlessly through the empty rooms of her house, looking out the windows, fixing each scene in her memory. The Stream and its dam, breached ever since Bill Howe’s death in his sawmill, her big square neighbor across the lane, [3 South Cobbtown Road] once the grand home of General George Ulmer, and the Trap itself across the road were as much a part of home as her furniture. How long, she wondered, would it be before Camden’s Sea Street felt like home?

These stories from the past are from my book Staying Put in Lincolnville, Maine  1900-1950. It’s available at Sleepy Hollow Rag Rugs, Beyond the Sea,  Lincolnville Fine Art Gallery and Western Auto. It makes a great Christmas present!

At June’s Town Meeting voters approved contracting with EcoMaine for our solid waste disposal, while the other three towns in Mid-coast Solid Waste (MCSW), Camden, Rockport and Hope, voted for Fiberight, a different option. In spite of June’s split vote, MCSW Board of Directors continues to recommend EcoMaine, and at the Nov. 8 election the voters of the four towns will be asked to approve a more limited, five-year contract instead of the longer one on the ballot last June. Representatives of both MCSW and EcoMaine will be at Selectmen meetings in each of the towns this month for public information sessions; tonight, Monday Oct. 24 they’ll be at Lincolnville’s town office at 6 p.m.

Connections invites boys in grades 3, 4 and 5, along with their dads, step dads, uncles or other significant men in their lives, to the PenBay YMCA for three Thursdays (3rd, 10th, 17th) in November, 6 p.m., for Boys Night Out -- Food, Fun and Facts. Sign up with John Sommo ; questions about Connections contact Hank Lunn, 236-8463.

Fall Festival

Once again, Community Crossroads Baptist Church invites the public to their Free Family Fall Harvest Festival on Monday, Oct. 31, 5-7 p.m. in Lynx Gymnasium at Lincolnville Central School. There’ll be a Bounce House, games, candy, refreshments and prizes – something for children and adults alike. This always-popular event draws families from all over the Midcoast. For more information contact Eileen McDermott, 850-499-5294.

Halloween in the Center

Briar Lyons writes: “Since the general store is under such significant construction we will be hosting our annual Halloween party in Walsh Common at the Lincolnville Central School on Monday October 31, from 5-8. We encourage community members to come dressed in their finest costumes, as there will be a costume contest again, and the winner will receive $100. The pictures will be posted on the Lincolnville General Store Facebook page and the photo with the most likes wins. The pumpkin lanterns will lead from the school down and around to the Library and Boat Club. The party is a potluck, and we are hoping the 8th grade will be able help run concessions and offer burgers, hot dogs, snacks and cider.

 “We will also host a carving party at the school on October 28 from 3:15-4:00. We have about 450 pumpkins that need to be carved, so we would love volunteers to come to the carving party at the school.

This past week-end William “Bill” Delano was neatly tucked in for the winter; a small crew of Cemetery Trustees, a cemetery preservationist, and one passionate advocate for Willie Delano reset his badly leaning gravestone, leaving it firmly set into fresh pea stone, erect and straight. The Delano grave, marking the 1826 burial of a young man, the lone grave in a tiny cemetery near Pitcher Pond, has long fascinated Corelyn Senn. Undoubtedly she was the most excited at the completion of the project she’d brought into being, but the crew that accomplished it – Trustees Cecil Dennison, Everett Fizer, and Dwight Patten, under the direction of Maine Old Cemeteries Association (MOCA) President Jessica Couture also walked away quite pleased at their day’s work. The best moment for Corelyn came when deciding where to locate the footstone – who knew how tall Bill Delano was? “5’8”!” she cried, information she’d discovered during her years-long search for the elusive Mr. D.

This time of year we start getting all sorts of appeals in the mail, asking for our support of various causes. I’ve always liked the phrase “think globally, act locally”. In the next weeks, leading up to the holiday season, I’d like to mention various ways we can help out the folks we live amongst. That word — “help” — can have many connotations. Help in the charitable sense, as in providing for people unable to provide for themselves in one way or another. It can also mean spending our money locally on goods and services, rather than turning to faceless, faraway corporations. Keeping it local, or even regional, has always felt like good business for everyone.

I’ll mention the local causes and businesses, etc. that you tell me about, here in this column each week. Here’s a couple to start off with: Grace Street Ministry, started by Mair Honan, formerly of Lincolnville, but now serving as a street pastor for the homeless of Portland. Partners for Enrichment, 721 Camden Road, Hope, Maine 04847, is a non-profit that brings artists, writers, and other programs to Lincolnville, Hope and Appleton schools.

And here’s a way to help a small business raise the money to finish their new tofu-making facility in Rockport. Lincolnville’s Jeff Wolovitz and Maho Hisakawa, owners of Heiwa Tofu, have set up a crowdfunding campaign that explains it all.