Take a close look at this photo of Ducktrap, taken around 1903, and all that it reveals to us in 2015.  In the foreground a board fence suggests that animals were kept here, and in fact, other views similar to this one show sheep penned on this hillside. We’re looking downstream; the two levels of the river are divided by a dam. The water appears impounded behind the dam indicating the low water of late summer. The building next to the dam is a mill, a sawmill apparently from the flotsam of floating boards; see the rowboat tied up amongst them? A narrow road leads out from the mill to the main road – Atlantic Highway.

Three small buildings are clustered there. Other views show piles of barrels, indicating they’re cooper shops. Across the road is a large, shed-roofed structure on the edge of the Trap, the nearly land-locked cove fed by the Ducktrap Stream. This is Mr. Coleman’s lime kiln; an odd structure on the roof is the terminus of the four-mile lime railway, where the limerock was dumped.

The bridge is a low-slung affair crossing the Ducktrap. Besides the scattering of buildings near the horizon that make up the village of Ducktrap, there are a couple of other notable, but nearly insignificant things. One is the triangular white sail on the schooner tied up at the lime kiln wharf, its masts barely visible. The other is the tiny wheel-like shape showing just above the horizon of the distant hills. This is the windmill, sitting atop the barn on Howe Point Road, that powered a corn-grinding mill in the barn.

Austin Wade of Lynn, Mass., on summer vacation from his city job, took this photo only a short distance from his boyhood home, the last house in Lincolnville before the Northport town line. Along with his good friend, Will Davis, also with a Lincolnville connection — his mother was a Ducktrap Carver — Austin tramped around the ruins and remnants of Ducktrap’s industrial past, photographing all that they found.

Carrying bulky box cameras, complete with tripod and black-out cloth, the two hiked up the stream to get views such as this one. Some, looking down on the Trap, could only have been taken from the roof of the lime kiln. They took pictures of their friends and families, both their frolicking city guests, horsing around for the camera, and their hard-working Ducktrap cousins, feeding the chickens and setting out their salmon nets.

Their work made possible the book that Peggy Bochkay and I produced in 1994, Ducktrap: Chronicles of a Maine Village. The photos and their story were preserved by Austin’s daughter, Connie Wade Gregg, at the Wade homestead at Ducktrap, where Connie and her siblings spent every summer of their long lives.

     The two men were most active from about 1900 to 1910, the years of their twenties; once Austin married and began raising a family, he concentrated on photos of his and neighboring children. Will, who took care of his mother until she died, was 60 when he finally married. An artist who trained at Boston’s Fine Arts Museum school, Will published a book about Lincolnville in the 1940’s, A Village Downeast. The book contains 90 pencil drawings of local characters, professions, and institutions, each with an anecdote told in dialect. He published it under a pseudonym – John Wallace, since the whole town was supposedly angry because they thought he was making fun of them. Read it for yourself; it’s at the Lincolnville Library. 

      Far from making fun of them, Will Davis left a record of the people, their speech, and their foibles that compliments the photographic record he and Austin compiled. And that brings me to the present.

     From the beginning, Jackie Watts, founder of the Lincolnville Historical Society , emphasized that we need to collect the events of today, for they are tomorrow’s history. And so we have. Town reports, newspaper articles, information on local businesses, photo albums of festivals and parades and benefits, from the 1990’s through today, are all archived at the Schoolhouse Museum.

      The town and era we live in will change; surely the folks who built and worked at Ducktrap assumed there would always be a sawmill, a working limekiln, sail-powered vessels, horse-drawn vehicles, sheep in a pasture overlooking a cove. Well, they’re all gone. Just as surely the familiar sights we see every day – the inside of Viking lumber, the busy summer parking lots at the Beach restaurants, school children riding yellow buses, Mike Eugley working under a car up on a lift, snowplows going by in the night, the mailman stopping at each house – will either be gone or so altered we won’t recognize them.

A new board of directors has recently been installed at the LHS, five new members (Sandy Delano, Cecil Dennison, Harbour Mitchell, Alan Thomas and Dwight Wass) joining the five already in place (Rosey Gerry, Randy Harvey, Isabel Maresh, Diane O’Brien and Connie Parker), and with this “new” blood lots of ideas are being proposed. Realizing that not everyone gets excited about old documents, vintage photographs or even old stories, we know that some might be interested in documenting the town today. One way, Austin Wade’s and Will Davis’ way, is with photos.

This is no longer the expensive proposition it once was, with film and developing costs. Most people have a digital camera or a phone/camera. While we welcome any Lincolnville photos — scenics, family events, school or sports — we’d like other categories as well, such as the everyday scenes mentioned above. We’d like to find a few photographers willing to take on this mission, to choose a specific area of local life and set about documenting it. We’ll also need a dedicated photo editor/compiler to handle all the images coming in. If this interests you, let me know. In the next month or two we’ll arrange a meeting of those interested and talk more about it.

If you haven’t seen Ducktrap: Chronicles of a Maine Village, the Library has a copy, or get it at Western Auto or Sleepy Hollow Rag Rugs 

A free workshop on researching your deed will be held at the Library on Wednesday, March 25 at 10 a.m. Several people have already signed up via the Lincolnville Bulletin Board; if you have a Lincolnville property to research you’re welcome to join. Contact Diane at 789-5987 or by email. 

Town Office

Dave Kinney, Town Administrator, writes: “If you ever thought about serving on the Lincolnville Board of Selectmen, the School Committee for the Lincolnville Central School, the Five Town CSD School Board or the Budget Committee now is your opportunity.  Nomination papers for openings on each of these Boards and Committees will be available at the Town Office starting on Monday, March 16^th.  All it takes to get on the ballot is 25 signatures of Lincolnville registered voters on your nomination papers.  If interested, stop in the Town Office during normal business hours to obtain your nomination papers.”

Lincolnville Central School

The grades 3-5 Winter Concert will be held Tuesday, March 17, at 6:30 p.m. Music teacher Emily Widdoes organizes wonderful concerts, starting with last week’s musical, The Cheese Stands Alone, featuring K-2 actors and chorus. See a great photo collage of the children.

Tuesday’s performance will include a third grade musical, Pebble on a Roll, fourth graders playing recorders and fifth graders on ukuleles. As if this woman isn’t busy enough, she’s directing the school play Blather, Blarney and Balderdash to be performed March 26 and 27 at 7 p.m. Call Mrs. Widdoes at 763-3366 ext. 124 to reserve tickets, which are $2 each; children under 5 get in free.

Around Town

This Wednesday, March 18, writer Robert Reilly and popular local musician David Dodson will be speaking and performing respectively, at the monthly Library Presentation & Concert series at the Lincolnville Library. The show starts promptly at 7 p.m.; tickets are $10 and should be reserved by calling Rosey Gerry, 975-5432. Hope to see many of you there!

Gene Stinson, 763-3393, writes that the Camden High School’s Annual Alumni Banquet has been scheduled for August 14 in the Islesboro Ballroom at Point Lookout. Reunion classes with reserved tables are of  ‘45, ‘50’,’55, ‘60 and ‘65. The Scholarship Committee will be choosing 3 Camden Hills Regional High School seniors to receive scholarships again this year. Anyone wishing to donate to the silent auction or to nominate a CHS alumnus for a special Recognition Award please contact David Ames or at 789-5118.

     Bayleaf Cottages & Bistro, 2372 Atlantic Highway, has an extensive schedule of potluck suppers and supper club dinners with live music. They’re also part of a special 3-session cooking class starting Monday June 29th with Welcome Lobster dinner at Bayleaf, Tuesday pasta and sauce class at Cellardoor Winery, Wednesday pastry class at Dolce Vita Farm, and Thursday seafood class at Belfast Breeze Inn.

Animals

     Our neighbor, Will Brown, sent the photo of a barred owl visitor and writes: “This beauty often sits in the hemlocks outside our window, watching for someone to come get a drink at the open water overflow on our spring.  Last week he/she sat on a close branch ~ 16’ from the house.  Napped and watched (the owl that is) and turned around to face me; it couldn’t care less that I was running around trying to get a better shot. It sat there for a couple of hours …. but no mouse volunteered to be lunch.

      And I also heard from Gary Gulezian: “… you asked about sightings of toads in and around Lincolnville. We generally have a few resident toads around our yard and gardens every summer, and, in the spring, on warm, damp nights we hear their long, drawn out mating trills in the woods. [Along with] an America Toad calling, there's a Spring Peeper calling in the background, too … Often times you'll hear choruses of tens of frogs singing together, with different sub-groups singing at different pitches. My most unusual encounter with toads in Lincolnville, however, occurred last May.

Greta and I were hiking to the top of Bald Rock Mountain and as we approached the summit we could hear the trilling of toads. Since toads prefer damper environs, this seemed an unusual place to hear them calling. As we surveyed the summit, we found a depression in the bare bedrock that was filled with rainwater. Surprisingly, in that small pool were five pairs of mating toads. The female toads were the largest that I have seen, with bodies that measured almost three inches long. The males, each clasping onto the back of a female, were about two thirds the size of the females. The toads were engaged in "amplexus", with the females laying a double strand of eggs and the males fertilizing them. I've attached three photos. The first shows the pool on top of Bald Rock. If you look carefully you can see several of the toad pairs. The second is a close-up of one of the pairs the third shows a pair in amplexus. Again, if you look carefully, you can see a strand of eggs trailing from the female. ( I hope this isn't too racy for a family newspaper) I did go back to the summit several weeks later and there were tadpoles in the pool. I don't know whether the pool retained water long enough into the summer for the tadpoles to metamorphose into adults.” 

Lincolnville Resources

Town Office: 493 Hope Road, 763-3555

Lincolnville Fire Department: 470 Camden Road, non-emergency 542-8585, 763-3898, 763-3320

Fire Permits: 763-4001 or 789-5999 

Lincolnville Community Library: 208 Main Street, 763-4343

Lincolnville Historical Society: LHS, 33 Beach Road, 789-5445 

Lincolnville Central School: LCS, 523 Hope Road, 763-3366 

Lincolnville Boat Club, 207 Main Street, 975-4916

Bayshore Baptist Church, 2636 Atlantic Highway, 789-5859, 9:30 Sunday School, 11 Worship 

Crossroads Community Baptist Church, meets at LCS, 763-3551, 11:00 Worship

United Christian Church, 763-4526, 18 Searsmont Road, 9:30 Worship

Contact person to rent for private occasions:

Community Building: 18 Searsmont Road, Diane O’Brien, 789-5987 

Lincolnville Improvement Association: LIA, 33 Beach Road, Bob Plausse, 789-5811

Tranquility Grange: 2171 Belfast Road, Rosemary Winslow, 763-3343