In 1987, in her 92nd year, Belle Pitcher Miller spoke with me about her life spent at the head of the pond that carried her name:

Every summer the perennial mingling of locals and those “from away” occurs. In the tangled traffic and jammed sidewalks of Camden to the quieter dooryard renewal of old friendships, both the tourist and the summer resident encounters those who are here year-round, earning their livelihoods in small-town and rural Maine. Nowhere has this mingling been more long-lasting than on Lincolnville’s Pitcher Pond.

Dotted all around its perimeter with summer cottages of varying sizes, Pitcher Pond, at the northern end of town where it borders Northport, was part of the Waldo Patent. In the late 18th century two Pitcher brothers from Waldoboro settled near the pond that bears their name. One brother built high on the hill with a spectacular view that reaches nearly to Penobscot Bay, while the other chose a sheltered hollow farther down the slope. Both houses are still in the hands of their descendants.

It has been to the house on the hill, the home of Belle and Leigh Miller, and of Belle’s parents, Asa and Florence Pitcher before her, that generations of cottage people have come for their connection with the year-round world of rural Maine.

Belle remembered her world with a clarity only the very old can achieve. It was a close-knit neighborhood where everyone, if not actually related, was as familiar as cousins. When families gathered for a community Christmas party, each child’s presents were arranged around the tree by his or her own family. It’s easy to picture little Belle, eyes glued to the golden haired doll perched on top of the tree, perfect in every detail from the knitted lace on her petticoat to her tiny velvet shoes, hoping against hope it was for her. It was. The doll joined other homemade dolls lined up on chairs and “taught” in Belle’s pretend school.

Summer brought the beginning of a change that would one day dominate the warm months – visitors from away. The first “cottagers” on Pitcher Pond were from up the road, as wealthy Belfast families began summering in the country. Belle’s parents kept an eye on their various summer homes. Keeping an eye included delivering ice blocks, cut the previous winter on the pond, to back porch ice chests; repairing snow damage; de-mousing drawers; airing rooms ­– general “readying” for summer.

For Belle it meant evenings helping her mother in one or another of the cottage kitchens, preparing sit-down dinners for summer families and their guests. Tables were set with cloths, napkins, bone china dishes and fingerbowls. After helping wash up, the little girl would walk home alone through the dark woods. “Imagine doing that today!” laughed Belle at the memory.

Winters were full of activity, when the pond froze and snow fell deeply over the fields. “Oh, we had great days, when I was a child. We used to go skating … we’d skate way down below the Quimby Point to get out of the north wind.” The cottagers came out on week-ends to race ice boats. Skaters used hand sails to travel swiftly down the pond, while horse and sleighs carried passengers. One year the crust on the snow was so thick a team of oxen pulled a threshing machine over the fields without breaking through. Another year Jason Hills walked across the pond on May 5.

The real business was farming. “We had a garden, a cow and a horse. We raised a lot of fruit – plums, pears, cherries, currants, gooseberries, apricots. Once we raised peaches and grapes. In later years we had hens in the orchard and grapevines grew up over the trees. Oh, ‘twas loaded! And we had apples. He used to ship his apples, my father did.” The apples were sent to Boston on the boat out of Belfast in barrels made on the farm each fall.

The very north end of Lincolnville was nearly self-sufficient, but “when it was coming winter, Father would bring home a barrel of flour, a keg of molasses, maybe one of tripe, 50 pounds of sugar, salt fish.” There’d be a hog to slaughter, and sometimes a calf. For incidentals there was a store at the Grange Post Office [at the intersection of Van Cycle and Belfast Roads]. The Grange stage, a delivery wagon which traveled from Lincolnville Center to Belfast, carried mail and passengers. “It would take your blueberries to Belfast and bring back the money,” said Belle.

North Lincolnville scholars attended the Hills School, part way up Van Cycle Road. Belle remembered house and after house on Van Cycle Road, the homes of her school friends and relatives, all gone now. Today [1987] there are two houses left on that road. The Hills School was located in a “terrible, cold place” where the wind never seemed to stop blowing.

At the age of 4 Belle walked through the snow to school. Since big boys worked at home during the spring and fall, they only showed up for the winter term. The teachers were Beulah Rhodes, Louise Miller, Jessie Young, two named Heal, and her own sister, Alice. The teacher [one teacher for all eight grades; teachers often changed with each new term] would go home to dinner at the place where they boarded, and the 20 unattended children would chase one another “screeching around the schoolhouse” until the teacher returned.

In due course Belle left the farm for high school in Belfast, working her board with a family in town. Graduating in the class of ’13, she remembered her class trip to Washington DC. The eight members of the class left from Belfast on the Boston boat, transferred to a sidewheel steamer in Providence, then to New York where they boarded a train to complete the trip to DC.

This is the first part of a newspaper article I wrote that appeared in the Camden Herald, an article I’d forgotten until it showed up in a folder labeled “Miller” in the file drawer of Lincolnville families at the Schoolhouse Museum. Those drawers are so packed with similar folders we can hardly fit in another piece of paper. Since last summer Pat Shannon has been volunteering, looking through every folder, organizing the material, throwing out duplicates, and having a pretty good time at it.

While she works in the little front room that once served as the students’ coat room, I might be hanging tools or installing shelves or re-arranging a display and hear her chuckling or tsk tsking at something she’s found. Here’s something else that was in that Miller folder, a poem that George Rossbach wrote in 1931 on meeting Grover Drinkwater, the farmer who lived a mile up Van Cycle Road. George was one of the Pond cottagers that Belle mentions.

Creaking Cold

Below the cross-roads came toward me a horse,

Envapored, hauling through the snow a plow.

Upon the sliding triangle a man

Flung out his arms and wrapped them to his side.

         The runner tracks along the road were smooth

And frozen dry so one would slip each stride.

The white-pine trees, all sadly weighted down,

Were one by one with every passing breeze

Returning to their way of standing, slow

Like old and useless rubber when the snow

Would slough and slide. And there the cold-gray leaves

On weakened angles hung along the shoot.

         “Morning! Where you headin’ for today?

That’s quite ‘ways. You been ‘round these parts

More’n I minded. W’-ell, you want to go

Down b’low Ernest Drinkwater’s old place,

You know where’tis, I wouldn’t wonder.

Deer, you say? Just what I w’s go’n tell you ‘bout.

Must be they find better winterin’ there;

Apple trees, ‘n’ popple growth, no one thereabouts.

Seem’ so I never saw so many deer tracks.

Where? You say? Oh they been right up by

The window sill a-lookin’ in……..E-eya”

         The waiting horse lay back an ear, and wagged

The icicle that hung upon his lip.

         The snow triangle strained its boards, and budged.

I watched it slide and swerve around the bend.

         “Come ‘round sometime!” And Grover’s flapping arm

That beat around his waist was soon eclipsed

By fir boughs lumped together by the snow.

The snow and boughs penned up the dying creaks,

And he went home to be received by creaking…

         Dry-cold creaking of the dooryard elm,

And creaking of the barnyard gate, and then

Of stanchions that the waiting cattle turn

When on the floor they hear the thudding hoofs. 

Two pieces of paper saved and filed, and now seeing the light of day, to give us a glimpse into our ancestors’ lives. Grover Drinkwater riding home behind his horse on a creaking cold afternoon, George Rossbach, stopping to ask where the deer are yarding, a very old woman remembering winter as something wonderous – “Oh, we had great days when I was a child!”

No, they’re not my ancestors, and probably not yours, though plenty of their descendants may be reading this. But whether you’re from here or from someplace else, there’s a pretty good chance that when you travel back along your family tree eventually you’ll find farmers, rural people, one room schools or no school at all. Men who knew where the animals hung out, how to drive a rickety wagon or pung or sleigh over rutted roads. Women who gave birth in their own beds or no bed at all, who knew how to turn milk into butter and cheese, how to make soap, how to scrub clothes on a washboard.

Our Schoolhouse Museum has many interesting old things on display, almost all of them from here. I love playing house down there, decorating, arranging the stuff – so much more satisfying that doing the same things at home where someone will come along and dirty the dishes or leave their clothes on the floor. But the real treasures to be found in the three rooms that comprise the Historical Society’s museum are just pieces of paper.

Some are photos, some handwritten accounts. The accounts are fascinating. Merchants kept account books, ledgers with the names of their customers, what they bought, what they owed, how they paid. Accounts of daily life, who visited, who died, who has taken sick or taken leave of home. Letters that sometimes are wrenchingly personal, though in the style of earlier days, much is left to the imagination – “today Mrs. So and So came by, the first female I’ve seen in three weeks.” Accounts of the work done, little daybooks men often kept in their pockets to keep track of the hours spent breaking rock in the quarry, cords of wood cut, loads of hay brought into the barn.

Put their words together with their photos, usually stiff and somber they were, only occasionally playful, though those seem more often to be the summer folk. Look at their houses, usually without a scrap of paint on them, though their barns straight and true.

The Schoolhouse Museum is on the second floor of the old Beach School building, otherwise known today as the Lincolnville Improvement Association or simply, the LIA. The building, which is owned by the town, is about 120 years old, and showing its age. A recent assessment of its condition came up with some pretty significant issues. A couple of weeks ago the architect who oversaw this assessment led a site tour for Selectmen and others to point out what they found, followed by a meeting to discuss the findings.

1. The stone foundation should be replaced; this entails lifting the building, digging out an adequate crawl space and installing a concrete foundation.
2. The siding and windows should be replaced to make the building more energy efficient.
3. The roof is shot; it needs to be replaced.
4. The bathroom, entrances and doors are not ADA-compliant.
5. The furnace is near the end of its life.

Doing all this work adds up to some $650,000, give or take, though there is some wiggle room – vinyl or wooden siding? a slab vs. the foundation? replace some, not all the windows? But no matter how you parse it, it’s going to be expensive. The Selectmen are still mulling this one over, rightly wanting to get a sense of how the town feels about investing in this building.

This is where the Historical Society comes in. We’ve scheduled a series of Saturday afternoon by invitation Open Houses for this winter and spring to show townspeople the Museum – the displays of life in the old days, the photos, the files of family information, and so much more. We’re randomly picking 15 households per Saturday and sending out an invitation by snail mail. Watch for yours; bring your kids if you have them, spouses, visiting relatives, etc. We’ll have refreshments too. Our goal is to show our collection to as many people as possible so when the town decides to start the repairs, i.e. appropriate money, townspeople will know what’s at stake.

By the way, the LHS has a nine-person Board: Sandy Delano, Cecil Dennison, Rosey Gerry, Jane Hardy, Randy Harvey, Diane O’Brien, Connie Parker, Allan Thomas, and Dwight Wass.

School

Last week’s middle school concert – chorus, stage band and concert band – was wonderful. The music teacher, Susan Iltis, new to LCS this year, obviously inspired the students – congratulations to all! This from a jaded grandma who has been going to LCS concerts since 1970. It was a cold out, the fire was blazing, and I had to have a serious talk with myself to get out of my chair and brave the night. And was sooo glad I did!

Next Monday night the School Committee meets at 6 p.m. Many of us are aware that Revision Energy has brought a proposal to the five town school system for a solar option that will provide all the schools’ electricity for the next 20 years. The Lincolnville Energy Team figures a savings over those 20 years of $150-220,000 on the LCS electric bill. The S.C. has not chosen to act one way or another on the proposal, which may run out at the end of February. If you support using a renewable, sustainable energy source when possible, and/or find the savings attractive, come to Monday’s meeting to express that at the public comment time which is usually early on the agenda.

Library

Librarian Elizabeth Eudy writes: “Tuesday, Jan. 28, 4-6 p.m. the needlework group will meet. Bring your beautiful handiwork and share a of couple hours with a fun, friendly, extremely talented group of knitters and needle crafters. 

“Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2-5 p.m. A representative from the U.S. Census Bureau will be at the library to talk about the part-time, temporary jobs available this census year through late fall. The representative can get you started on the application process and answer questions about he process, the jobs, expectations, and wages. Even if you have already completed the application on-line, this is a great opportunity to talk with someone and get more information.”

Cooking Class

This Thursday, Jan. 30 5-7 p.m. the Coastal Healthcare Alliance will be teaching a class on “Cozy Curries” at the Community Building, 18 Searsmont Road. The cost is $10; registrate at 301-3950.

Condolences

Charlie Eaton, long-time resident of Slab City Road, passed away last week. Sympathy to his wife, Cathy and family.

Pickleball

Pickleball players gather every Saturday morning, 9-11:30 a.m. at the Lynx gym at the school. From 9-10 new players can learn the game; all others play 9-11:30. Two Saturdays this month, Feb. 15 and 22 the gym will be tied up with basketball playoffs, so no pickleball those days.