Maritime Communities

The Maine State Seal, painted wood carving. The carving depicts a mariner and a farmer around a picture of the Maine State tree, the White Pine. Above these is the Maine State motto, "Dirigo," which means "I lead" in Latin.

Jane French Sweetser Colcord was the photographer's sister, and this picture was taken at the family house in Searsport. The children are Lincoln Ross Colcord and Joanna Carver Colcord, both born at sea on board the bark Charlotte A. Littlefield.

Granite was king on Penoboscot Bay islands in the last quarter of the 1800s. After granite was quarried, it was often carved with decorations or carved into statues such as eagles. The work attracted skilled stone cutters from Italy and other European nations to carve figures in the granite for public buildings and churches.

American Seamen's Friend Society Loan Library box with books, Library No. 3931. The Society loaned these boxes of books to ships, so that the seamen could have the opportunity to read encouraging literature about life and faith.

Launched in Phippsburg in 1893, the Bath owned Aryan was the last wooden full-rigged ship to be built in America. The ship's first captain was Capt. Wylie R. Dickinson, seated on the left in this carefully posed photograph. To his left are his wife and daughter.

The steamer Sedgwick was built at the Barbour Yard in Brewer in 1892, to carry passengers from Bangor to towns on the Eggemoggin Reach. Barbour was one of few Penobscot Bay area shipbuilders to build steam vessels in the nineteenth century.

Tourists aboard the passenger schooner Mercantile assist in raising the anchor by working the windlass. Passenger labor is always welcome in working the windjammer schooners.

Mercantile was launched as a small coasting schooner in 1916 by the Billings family on Deer Isle. After she fished for mackerel for a few years in the 1940s, she was bought by Captain Frank Swift who had started the passenger schooner business in Maine in 1936, sailing out of Camden.

Eastern New England in 1730 shows Sagahadoc and Nova Scotia as Crown Colonies.

From book, The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier by Colin Woodard, published by Viking in 2004. Map drawn by Jojo Gragasin. Map used by permission of the author.