We don’t talk much about our town’s split personality any more, not the way they used to. You know, there was the Beach and there was the Center, and both sides of town were suspicious of each other, a rivalry that simmered for decades. Ralph Richards, long-time rural mail carrier, boarded at the Beach in the first decade of the 1900s so as to be close to the Post Office. His home, though, was inland — “God’s country” he called it in his diary.

 Lincolnville is large in land — 39 square miles — with a population, today, of about 2,200. For much of the last century there were fewer than 1,000 people, yet two commercial villages grew up, barely five miles apart.

Do you live at the Beach or the Center? Probably neither. Most of us are on rural roads, not in the villages proper. Long ago, when the Lincolnville Telephone Company was actually in town, the phone lines were organized with two exchanges: 789 for the Beach and the rest of town, 763. Oh, and everyone south of the Beach on Atlantic Highway is 236. You can live on Slab City Road and have a 789 exchange, and a couple of miles up Beach Road, to Youngtown, and be “Beach”.

 Another way to decide whether you’re Beach or Center is to take a ride down from the Center on a blistering hot summer day. Just about where Slab City comes in you’ll feel a blessedly cool breeze. That’s where Beach starts. That’s a moment when I’m thankful our house is Beach.

 In the past couple of months Lincolnville has become aware that the Beach’s iconic business, a landmark for tourists, a place where surely nearly all of us have eaten, the Lobster Pound Restaurant, has closed for good. It feels as if it’s been there forever, on the very edge of the Bay, looking out to Islesboro and the hills way on the other side, Blue Hill and Mount Desert. And, if you consider the reach of memory, it has. I doubt anyone is still alive who remembers a time when it wasn’t.

Owner Dick McLaughlin worked there for 60 years, first as a son, then a partner with his brother, and then with his wife, Patty. Summer nights we could hear Patty calling waiting patrons in – “Johnson, party of four” – her voice, via the loudspeaker, carrying up the hill to our house a mile away. Tom Crowley remembers “we used to sit on our porch at the Yellow House and use our binoculars to watch the line and wait until close to 8 o'clock. Then, we would send the kids down to save us a table!”

 But things change. Storms and high tides have plagued the Pound; tides that covered the road and flooded the businesses on the other side, were brutal to the building perched on the sea wall. As Dick wrote in a recent post to the Bulletin Board “. . . the bottom line was that we had too many fixed costs than a 6 month operation could endure.”

 Undoubtedly, the Lobster Pound has been the largest employer in town. Many remembered, as the news of its closing spread, that the Pound was the first place local kids worked, that “one could earn enough in one summer to cover college tuition for the upcoming year”. Dick and Patty were unfailingly generous when it came to local causes: gift certificates for raffles and auctions, benefit events at the restaurant, donations to Scouts and Little League. The Pound was a favorite place for groups to hold their annual banquet.

 It’s winter now. The Pound is closed, as it always is. But come May, when it’s time to make a reservation for Mothers’ Day dinner, the place will still be shuttered. That’s when we’ll feel the loss.

The Board of Selectmen has called a Special Town Meeting for Tuesday, December 27 at 6 p.m. at the Town Office to seek voter approval to accept monetary donations totaling $245,000 from the Lincolnville Volunteer Fire Department, Inc.  See the Special Town Meeting Warrant here:These funds would be put in the following accounts: $75,000 in the Fire Truck Fund account, $150,000 in the Beach Road Building Fund, and $20,000 in the Recruitment and Retention account.

A performance this Wednesday, Dec. 28, 7 p.m.at United Christian Church, by Glen Williamson will tell “An Epic Tale of Christ’s Coming to Earth.” The tale “harmonizes the conflicting accounts of Matthew and Luke and weaves the threads of many traditions into an intimate but also cosmic drama.” See a preview of the performance here on YouTube.

Save your returnables for the eighth grade bottle drive on the week-end of January 7. Leave them at the curb no later than 9 a.m. on the 7th. The kids are raising money for their class trip to Quebec City next spring.