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Hauling by Hand:
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The remarkable story of Frenchboro, Long Island, one of Maine's last remaining year-round island communities, by an eighth generation native. One of the most authentic looks at life on a Maine island and the people who lived it. Called a "gem" by Maine Boats & Harbors and "the real thing" by The Courier-Gazette.
Long Island sits eight miles off the coast, one of the state's most remote island outposts and one of only 14 Maine islands still supporting a year-round community. Only a century ago, there were some 300 such communities.
Frenchboro, the island's lone village, surrounds Lunt Harbor. The island's roots were set in the 1820s by the Lunt family and a small band of pioneers who together carved an island community from the spruce and granite shores. Fueled by the shipping and fishing industries, Outer Long Island, as it was known, evolved from outpost to important offshore port before economic changes transformed the island into a hardscrabble turn-of-the-century fishing village where nearly 200 residents scratched a living from depleted fishing stocks and rocky soil. Yet through determination, perseverance and Yankee ingenuity, the island survived despite its geographic isolation, devastating shifts in the fishing economy, a decades-long depression, a dramatic population loss and a school that nearly closed. But while not always an easy place to live, the island is also blessed with a well-sheltered and deep harbor, abundant natural resources and raw physical beauty.
Today, the town of Frenchboro has a population of nearly 50 people, a small one-room school, a post office and one full-time business. There is neither a general store, nor tourist hotel, nor daily ferry service. Instead there is a village, a soul and a way of life. And this is its story.
Excerpt from Hauling by Hand"Some days as I stand in my father's lobster boat and sail past the now deserted Placentia and Black Islands and even the summer colony of Great Gott Island in Blue Hill Bay, I am enveloped by a sense of melancholy.
"On Black, I envision the railways that once carried granite from quarries to waiting vessels. I imagine old man Benjamin Dawes, an island pioneer in the early 1800s, ambling across the shore to his fishing boat. Or my great great great grandmother, Lydia Dawes, building castles as a child on the sandy beach along Black Island pool. Knowing a community once existed makes the island seem even older and more lifeless - almost like a floating cemetery. Or maybe like the once-bustling house on the corner that stands silent and empty, save for drawn curtains and dusty dishes stacked in cobwebbed cupboards. You just know that life will never return.
"I sometimes feel the same way while standing in the stillness on Long Island's Richs Head. I know a small village thrived here for about 80 years. I know houses stood strong against the winter chill, that settlers plowed this field into gardens and that wharves once stretched into the waters of Eastern Cove.
"Today, a handful of shallow, hand-dug cellars, barely discernible even at close range, and broken rock walls are all that remain. Scattered somewhere amongst the tall grass and encroaching spruce lie the unmarked graves of settlers and children, their locations long ago lost to the living world.
"With all this as a spiritual backdrop and constant warning, Long Island, and its sole village, Frenchboro, has survived.
"I was born an eighth-generation islander. I am unapologetically proud to say my family built the island community and has helped sustain it for 180 years.
"The family flourished and failed and feuded on the shores of Long Island. They were keen business operators, tireless workers, layabouts, bandits, alcoholics, church workers, community leaders, detached, mean, congenial and fun-loving along the banks of a harbor that bears the family name and on hillsides that contain the bodies of their forebears."