Our
Small Town History & Heritage section highlights
the integral role that small town America plays in
the fabric of our culture. Our national identity owes
a great deal of its character to the rural community.
The history of the small town is a tangible thing,
filled with everyday occurances at once familiar,
yet unique. Our small town histories provide an overview
of a few of the interesting communities we have come
across in our travels. Building our research around
the existing, often obscure sources of native histories,
we place the story of these communities within the
larger persepective of regional and national events,
training our focus on the formative eras and events
that have helped to shape the unique character of
a unique place ~
Originally
Published in the Summer 2002 . . .
Introduction
.
"What
ya’re looking for is the Hos’ma book."
This was the first bit of advice I received in searching
out the history of Deer Isle, Maine. Located "down
east" along the eastern edge of Penobscot Bay,
Deer "Isle" is actually a few dozen. Louise
Dickinson Rich referred to it as "a whole mess
of islands" in her popular guide, the Coast
of Maine. Large and small, the Deer "Isles"
are still only a fraction of the jumble of thousands
along Maine’s intimidating coast. Called a
"sunken" coast, its rocky appearance was
created by the glacial impacting of an ancient mountain
range at the ocean’s edge during the last Ice
Age … a factoid pulled from a 1936 WPA Guide
to Maine I found in a used bookstore in Sargentville
on the mainland, just over the bridge from Little
Deer Isle … And it is this unique rugged
coastline and its coastal villages that stick in
the memory of the curious. Rural, unbroken routes
still separate these villages — five, ten mile
stretches. Some contain no more than a crossroads
diner, which more often than not features a world-class
"melt," and a simple, but always present
memorial to its war veterans — features as
prolific as the islands that ring Penobscot Bay.
You start thinking about what these villages have
seen, what they’ve been through. Many date
back to the 1700s. All but the most modern share
a common lineage: roots as forts or outposts of
trade, colonial upheaval, raids and privateers,
the legendary bounty of clams, fish, and later,
lobster, the world famous granite quarries and above
all else a spiritual link to the sea. "Sta’t
with Hos’ma," was the advice of Deer Isle
historian Paul Stubing, his demeanor direct yet
neighborly, cut of the grounded nature that visitors
come to rely on here as much as the mysterious fog
and the haddock chowder. Deciphering the rhythmic
dialect, so often flatly stereotyped, I began to
search out the "Hosmer" book. It didn’t
take long to find this 19th century historical
"sketch," a search for sources that led
me to much more.
George
Hosmer was a leader politically and socially, as
well as the 19th century chronicler of
Deer Isle. His descriptions of the exploration and
settlement of Deer Isle laid the groundwork for
this journal. But following the early days of settlement,
and excepting his record of municipal abstracts,
Hosmer sets his work on a more genealogical path.
The story of this "whole mess" of islands
is more complete in the recent work of Edith Spofford-Watts,
a resident descendent of original settlers …
But it was still another find that struck me …
Deer Isle was featured as a far-removed, but nonetheless
hard hit village in Ken Burns’ famed documentary
on the Civil War. Burns’ stark shots of the
cocked weatherworn headstones of Deer Isle’s
Civil War dead etched the place into my head as
somewhere I must see. My search for existing historical
sources soon led me to Vernal Hutchinson’s
A Maine Town in the Civil War, a small simply-written
piece that is one of the best local narratives about
the war I’ve ever read. Apparently Ken Burns
thought so too, for this obscure volume, I would
soon learn, was what had brought him here just a
decade earlier. Hutchinson’s book completed
a full circle that had brought me to Deer Isle in
the first place — without my even knowing it.
For I, like Burns, was now convinced to write of
the place.
Print: 1786 Map of Deer Isle ~
Proceed to Chapter One:
The Isles and Early Exploration
