A tiny cottage on Pitcher Pond figures in Anne Rossbach Lep’s childhood memories. The little girl called it “The Three Bears” and today remembers “it was small and cozy and slept three people. The tiny rooms upstairs had old rope beds with mattresses full of straw providing houses for mice, which I kept as pets. In one corner I remember a bat hanging. The one room downstairs had a Franklin wood stove and neat old things including a large turtle shell on the wall. The kitchen, a small lean-to at the back, had an iron sink, stuff on shelves for endless rearranging and cleaning. I swept and played house. It even had a little boat house which sloped to the water’s edge. Needless to say it was very charming and beautiful to me!”

         The little house that charmed Anne had fascinated her father as well. George Rossbach wrote of it: “. . . Freddy Timm, a cobbler and shoe salesman from Germany built the last of the old cottages using his shoe-boxes for much of the building. Timm never forgot being German and praised Kaiser Wilhelm during World War One, and got beaten up for it.” The Three Bears was connected by a woods path to the large cottage, 78 Rocky Point Road, that George’s father, Adolph, a Belfast minister bought in 1920. Now called Rocky Point, it was formerly known as Sheep Ledge, for farmers used to wash and comb their sheep on the spot.

         The summer place of fifty years ago had much to enchant both children and adults. For one thing it had smells—musty, piney smells of a place long closed up; a summer camp is opened up to the fresh air only a few weeks of the year. Animal parts did end up on the walls and the shelves like Anne’s old turtle shell—a pair of moose antlers was prized, but so was a stuffed fish or a shell collection or the claw of a giant lobster. It may have had a history as well, for the oldtimers in the neighborhood were happy to spin a tale for the city folks—of a previous eccentric owner, of a mountain lion seen in the area or of a tragic drowning.

         A camp or cottage on one of Lincolnville’s ponds—Pitcher, Norton, Coleman, Megunticook, Levensellar—was probably in the woods at the end of a rutted, poor road. In place of a grassy lawn the camp sat on the forest floor, a tangle of roots and rocks with a layer of pine needles over all; the water was only a few steps away. The pond’s bottom was rocky or muddy, only rarely sandy, but children didn’t mind either way.

         A seaside place had a different ambiance; instead of tracking in pine needles, the kids brought with them a faint odor of clam flats and seaweed, along with drifts of sand which got into everything. The bathroom facilities were nothing like the substantial fixtures with hot and cold running water enjoyed back home. Anne Lep recalls “an old outhouse with jokes pinned up all over the walls. Our well, a spring-fed barrel in the ground . . . had blind crickets living in it, and we fetched water in a galvanized pail which stood on a cupboard on the porch.”

         Since it rained at least half the time (or so it seemed at a summer place) a cottage came equipped with jigsaw puzzles, board games, and cards, along with books best suited to an earlier generation of children. The adults were there to talk. Whole days were spent rocking on the porch or in old metal lawn chairs under the trees, drinking tea or lemonade and talking. Families reunited at the summer place; brothers and sisters came with their children, the old folks might come down for a night or two along with somebody’s maiden aunt. Meanwhile, the children ran wild, swimming, rowing, fishing, exploring the nooks and crannies of woods or seashore until dinnertime or dark. They fell asleep under damp sheets, mosquitoes buzzing in their ears, in cots standing chockablock to fit in more cousins.

         The summer folks relied on the locals for all sorts of things—fresh produce, eggs and milk, wood to burn in their rustic fireplaces. During the winter those same “locals” made repairs and kept watch over their cottages. In the spring they opened up the camps, sweeping out spiders and mouse nests and pine needles, washing windows, freshening up the outhouse. The relationships between the year-rounders and the summer “rusticators”  ranged from the formal employer-employee, to cordial to that of close friends. But all were complicated by the money that passed between them. One side had it to spend, and the other needed it.

         Invariably summer places spawned summer romances, and invariably teen-agers on both sides were ready to fall in love. Each was fascinating to the other: the locals were competent in their own realm, whether running a boat or driving a team, while the summer kids brought sophistication and the excitement of the wider world. Meanwhile, Lincolnville in the summer provided the setting—dances at the Grange and Community Hall, jobs at a summer camp or restaurant, crewing on a yacht or helping in a hay field.

Most romances fizzled out by September, cooled no doubt, by the interference of parents who saw too clearly the problems they imagined such matches would face. Yet fading photos of young lovers are still tucked into albums or hidden in a drawer, summoning up “what ifs” long after summer is over.

         Another kind of romance went on with the city folks who were finding a quiet haven in Lincolnville. By the time World War II was over a second home in the country was becoming a possibility for more people. Myra Polan was a New Yorker, if not by birth, certainly by inclination. She worked for the United Nations when it was brand-new, and was the first woman to go overseas for them. Myra and her actor husband, Lou Polan, had followed their city friends, Betty and Irv Ives, to Lincolnville in the late 1940s. There, in the middle of the nearly abandoned Slab City neighborhood with Coleman Pond at its heart, Myra and Lou found a property for sale. The house was a very old one and had only recently been “brought back” after standing empty for some thirty-five years, when the Passmore family of Camden got it along with 100 acres of forest to lumber. “The kitchen door used to blow back and forth in the wind and rain,” a hunter told Myra the first fall after they bought it from the Passmores.

         While Lou toiled in summer stock productions all over New England, his wife set up housekeeping in the last place on a lonely road, 153 North Chester Dean Road, as far away from West 65^th Street as it was possible to be. Her only company was Tami their cat, and Pal, a black lab mix. The couple wrote each other several letters a week during their summer separations; his were full of backstage gossip, of running into this or that friend from the city and of his longing for their quiet Maine property, hers with the minutiae of her new country life.

         “Yesterday I worked in the yard, canned blueberry jam. Today is the first really sunny day we have had in a week. I’m going to take advantage of it to go down to the lake and get some water to wash some clothes. . . . I haven’t minded being here alone yet—two nights now. I don’t know how I’d feel if there was a storm. . . . I’ve pulled off some of the old paper from the walls in the attic room over the kitchen because the new roof had caused it to break loose more than ever. Anyway, the newspapers that had been used in lieu of wallpaper in some spots had the date ‘April 19, 1906’ on them.

         “Now about the junk shop. Everything you mention sounds wonderful. Buy the aluminum roasting pans by all means. I can use one in New York and one here. Any pitcher at a dollar is a buy. I like ironware especially, it is just heavy white china like the plates we have. But glass pitchers are good too. The teakettle for seventy-five cents sounds good too. We need teaspoons here, so if she has any old silver ones, get those. And baskets. I’d like a sewing basket, a basket for Tami and a basket for clothes to be ironed. I’m sure you remember that I need kitchen scales.

         “I shall have a good lunch for you on Sunday, and a thousand kisses.” In a postscript Myra added that she’d put Ridex in the septic tank and marked the calendar for the next Saturday. “Electric man was here yesterday and put a stake in the ground near the road to indicate where the line of poles will go down.” Property owners like Myra and Lou Polan generally stayed all summer and lived in real houses, (albeit usually run-down old places left behind in Lincolnville’s depopulation that had been going on since the Civil War). They made friends of their neighbors, attended the public suppers and entertainments in town, and generally were regarded as quasi-townspeople. Lou died in March 1976 in Freeport, Maine while driving up from New York for Lincolnville’s annual Town Meeting. Myra passed away in 1982 in the house on Chester Dean Road, after living there, summer and winter, for several years alone.

          Whether the summer place is a camp on a pond, a seaside cottage or a once-abandoned farm, several generations of their owners think of Lincolnville as their true home. As Anne Rossbach Lep puts it, “One never forgets the memories, the sights and smells and sounds of such a place in the natural world. Those experiences you carry with you. It’s within forever for you to draw on.”

 This piece is from Staying Put in Lincolnville, Maine 1900-1950, available at Western Auto, Schoolhouse Museum or Sleepy Hollow Rag Rugs

         It’s that time of year, when all our familiar routes to work, to home, to the grocery store are crammed with cars, most of them from out of state, when our favorite lunch places are packed and the beaches are wall to wall people. Don’t even think about strolling along the harbor. It’s August.

         I have a stock of stories I tell about “why I moved to Maine” when I was 23 years old, knowing no one, leaving behind everything I was familiar with. Here’s one of them:

         Home was a Chicago suburb, more like a small town than the sprawling ex-urbs of today, a very pleasant place to grow up. Many summers, though not all, my family traveled to Wisconsin (about from here to Boston) for a week or two. We didn’t own a camp or cottage, but stayed at a summer “resort”, a pretty rustic place where you took your meals in the lodge, and slept in your own little cottage. They rang a big bell for dinner, and people sat on the lodge porch in the evenings. My parents’ friends, the couple from across the hall when they were newly-married and living on the South Side, came the same weeks as we did.

         Their daughter Linda and I shared that summer place, first as little girls, then as young teens rowing to the middle of the lake, shampooing our hair, then diving into the deep cold water, walking the pine-needle carpeted paths along the shore, and later, on long summer nights, smoking our first cigarettes with the boys who took us to the county fair in town. We played endless games of Canasta with our little brothers on rainy days, sitting cross-legged on the floor of a damp and musty cottage. Linda and I lived for those two weeks.

Genealogist Ted Steele will offer a free workshop on the online research tool Ancestry.com on Wednesday, August 5 at 7 p.m. at the Lincolnville Community Library. Ted, a past president of the St. Louis Genealogical Society and the keynote speaker for the Maine Genealogical Society’s annual conference in 2012, will give an introduction to family history research and then show how one can do it using Ancestry. The popular online resource offers people access to billions of historical documents, including censuses, vital records, immigration records, family histories, legal documents, directories, photos, maps and more.  

         It’s time for the Blueberry Wingding, the Lincolnville Improvement Association’s annual summer event, this Saturday, August 8 at McLaughlin’s Lobster Shack on Ferry Road at the Beach. A delicious blueberry pancake breakfast, including bacon or sausage, juice, and coffee, will be served from 7 – 10:30 a.m. Tickets are $8 for adults, children under 10, $4. To show what a community event this is all our local restaurants are offering gift certificates for the exciting raffle to be drawn at the breakfast, including Bay Leaf - two nights + breakfast; Chez Michel -  $50.00; Copper Pine Cafe - 2 - $25.00; Cellardoor Winery - $100.00; Lobster Pound Restaurant -$50.00; Inn at Ocean Edge - 1 night + breakfast; Whales Tooth Pub and Restaurant - $50.00; Youngtown Inn and Restaurant  - $50.00. Tickets are $5 each, 6 for $25, and you have 9 chances to win! Get both breakfast and raffle tickets from an L.I.A. member or at the door. For more information call 236-0028 or 763-4644.

A Word About the L.I.A

     This community organization is just 100 years old this year; it was founded in 1916 as the Village Improvement Society. One of its first efforts was to get concrete sidewalks built at the Beach. Eventually, after nearly a decade of summer fairs, miles of “fancywork”, ice cream socials, entertainments and card parties, the group had installed a sidewalk from today’s Viking Lumber Company to the Ducktrap Bridge.

         After the Beach School closed in 1947, the group renamed itself  the Lincolnville Improvement Association, and moved into the old building at 33 Beach Road. Ever since, the members have maintained it and improved it, adding a kitchen annex in the 1960s, a bathroom – first a chemical-type toilet, then a real flush in the 1990s, painting, roofing, adding a furnace and much, much more. They provide the whole second floor to the Lincolnville Historical Society at an affordable rent, giving the L.H.S. a wonderful space for their Schoolhouse Museum.

         Just a few of the hard workers I remember were Bill Brooks who built the kitchen, Albert Mathieson who kept all the systems working for years, Mary Lou Overcash who did the charming schoolhouse stencils around the windows and added the curtains. Lena Brooks initiated the long-running and popular rummage sale held every summer that was later headed up by Julie Payne, Lee Cronin and a dedicated crew including Penny Rae, Marian Swanson, Janet
Plausse, a trio of Connecticut teaching colleagues of Lee’s, and more. This sale later morphed into the easier-on-tired-backs Blueberry Wingding, efficiently organized by Lee with much help from Vivia Andrews, Roberta Heald, volunteer waitpeople, pancake flippers, and coffee pourers. Andy Andrews, Bob Heald, Bo Rae, Robie Ames, Eddie Stephens, Bob Plausse, Brian Cronin, Brad Payne, Robert Day, Ron Moore, Wally O’Brien painted, carried boxes, moved tables, climbed ladders, changed lightbulbs, shoveled snow, mowed the grass. And I know I’m leaving out dozens of others and will think of them the minute I send this article in! You know who you are.

A Lincolnville Central School and Camden-Rockport High School graduate and long-time high school math teacher, Bill O’Brien, has been awarded the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching. Bill, who has taught in Switzerland, Taiwan, Australia, and George Stevens Academy in Blue Hill, has most recently been math teacher at Camden Hills Regional High School. The award included a trip, this past week, to Washington to meet President Obama. Pretty cool.