Tilbury House – serie

Eva Murray moved to Matinicus in 1987 to teach in its one-room school. She married an island man and stayed to raise their family there. Over the years she's written a number of lively columns and articles for mainland publications. But, as she says, she doesn't do lobster wars:"If you're looking for a rabid, swashbuckling tell-all account of maritime outlaws or cut-throat lobstermen, you won't be very impressed. Yes, a rough side of this community exists, but in order to live here happily, I avoid cultivating fear. The same boys who might sprinkle roofing nails in a man's driveway, if they get mad enough, will rush to the same fellow's aid when he's in real danger, and that's the truth. Likewise, if you hope to relive an idyllic summer vacation or read an escape-to-Maine fantasy with the call of the loon and long walks on the beach, you might feel a bit short-changed. Astonishing natural beauty certainly exists on Matinicus Island, but I'm not working too hard to promote this place to visitors. The rare treat of an outer-island sunrise is a privilege for the deserving, which means for those who have endured the six months of gales or the six weeks of fog or the six days of waiting for the weather to break so the airplane can fly and they can get here. In the twenty-three years I have lived here, it's true there have been bullets. One, I think, flew right over my head a few years back. There has been vandalism, drunk driving, sabotage, theft, abuse of power, and people just acting like general-purpose jerks. Those things happen everywhere. There have also been heroic rescues, valiant searches for lost mariners, hospice care, fires fought, electricity restored, boats rescued, spontaneous celebrations and heartfelt acts of support, and graves dug by hand. In those things, we may be different from most places, and here's why: It is not strictly the certified professionals who fight the fires or care for the sick or save the drowning. It's just us."These are the stories of that unique community, of an interdependence that is all too rare these days but necessary for this island's survival. Murray writes with a keen eye and sharp wit, sharing stories that are sometimes poignant, sometimes mind-boggling, and often hilarious. She lives in a place where, "You love it, absolutely love it here, 51 percent of the time. That is enough to make you stay."

This remarkable book chronicles the efforts of biologist Steven Kress to rejuvenate a once-flourishing puffin colony on Egg Rock, an island off the Maine coast, with puffin chicks from Newfoundland. With their large, colorful beaks, their upright posture, and their big, dark eyes, it's easy to see why puffins are popular all over the world. But for the past hundred years, puffins along the coast of Maine have been threatened with local extinction. Biologist Stephen Kress decided to try to bring puffins back to Maine with an experiment that had never been attempted before. Stunning color photographs on every page capture each step of this wildlife success story. As you learn about The Puffin Project, you'll also learn all about puffins how they are so wonderfully adapted to their ocean environment, how they catch fish, socialize, nest in burrows, and raise their young.

Bunting has a knack for spotting the unusual in a photograph, or some minor detail that, in fact, tells a major story about the how and why. From granite quarry operations to an itinerant cobbler in a sailing scow to hootchie-kootchie dancers at the state fair to deepwater ships, his page-long captions place these images in social and economic context--but this is not dry history. His research has uncovered a wealth of fascinating, often quirky detail (did you know that mummy wrappings were imported from Egypt for Maine papermaking?), and he makes frequent forays into the Maine storytelling tradition.

Bunting has a knack for spotting the unusual in a photograph, or some minor detail that, in fact, tells a major story about the how and why. From granite quarry operations to an itinerant cobbler in a sailing scow to hootchie-kootchie dancers at the state fair to deepwater ships, his page-long captions place these images in social and economic context--but this is not dry history. His research has uncovered a wealth of fascinating, often quirky detail (did you know that mummy wrappings were imported from Egypt for Maine papermaking?), and he makes frequent forays into the Maine storytelling tradition.

In June of 1881, on the very night of their wedding in Searsport, Maine, Captain Lincoln Alden Colcord and his new wife, Jane Sweetser Colcord, departed for sea to begin a two-year voyage on the bark Charlotte A. Littlefield. The voyage would take them around the world and witness the birth of their daughter Joanna amid the South Sea Islands and young Lincoln's arrival during a treacherous winter storm off Cape Horn.Fifth generation seafarers, Joanna and Lincoln Colcord spent their youth at sea aboard their fathers' ships. Years later, looking back at his seafaring childhood Lincoln wrote, "I know no other home than a ship's deck, except the distant home in Maine that we visited for a few weeks every year or two. My countryside was the ocean floor, where I could roam only with the spyglass; my skyline was the horizon, broken by the ghostly silhouettes of passing vessels, or at intervals by the coasts of many continents, as we sailed the world."The Colcords' richly detailed "journal letters" to family members ashore, their logbooks, photographs, and later correspondence all give us a splendid window into the life of a seafaring family. We share their exhilaration in catching the trades under fair skies yet are ever conscious of the uncertainties of sea life: illness, the threat of typhoons and dismastings, wrecks and financial disaster. Life's tasks emerge as the family forges a home aboard ship, raises and educates the children, and seeks companionship in foreign ports, all while trying to eke out a living under sail.

Wilderness is central to the image of Maine most of us carry in our minds. In this extraordinary collection nearly forty writers, poets, artists, and photographers bear witness to the central role it plays in Maine, its importance to our understanding of nature, to our sense of who we are in the world, to our very souls. And some of them devote practical thinking to how we might recover and nurture wilderness in the future.At this time of major changes in land ownership in the North Woods and of development pressures and sprawl threatening the rural landscape of southern and central Maine, these voices for wilderness could not be more relevant.

Bob, living in a farmhouse near the pond, buys a dilapidated camp at the water's edge and finds his way down there almost daily, to swim or ski, depending on the season. His friends discover the allure of the pond, too--summer afternoons of swimming with Bob, his wife Rita, and an assortment of canine dog-paddlers, or companionable conversations over a beer, enjoying the beauty of a quiet pond beyond the porch. Bob tells the McNairs about a neighboring camp up for sale, a perfect little camp, compact as a ship in all its details, and they buy it. Roorbach feels drawn to the pond so strongly that he and his wife sometimes bushwack through underbrush so as not to intrude, but the pond is a place where this trio of friendships flourishes. Told with humor and affection, the stories in this small book will appeal to anyone who feels drawn to spend time near water.

Sea Struck brings alive the final decades of square-rigged sail through the accounts of voyages made on three ships by three young men from Massachusetts. There is plenty of adventure here— storms, men overboard, discipline that bordered on brutality, and exotic ports. There is also a fascinating immersion in the lore of the sea and sail and the global web of connections in the New England maritime community.

Maine is a rural backwater? Meet Hiram Abrams, born in Portland in 1878 the son of a Russian immigrant real estate broker, attended public schools, left school at age sixteen, sold newspapers, bought a cow and started a dairy -- and eventually became the founder and president of United Artists. Or Aurelia Gay Mace, born in 1835 in Strong, a Shaker from an early age, credited with the invention of the wire coat hanger. Aurelia achieved national fame in 1890 when she mistook Charles Lewis Tiffany for a tramp, gave him lemonade, brushed his clothes, insisted that he sit down for the noon meal, and sent him off with a box lunch. Tiffany responded by sending her a set of engraved silver. Meet Milton Bradley who was born in Vienna (Maine) in 1836, educated at Harvard, worked as a mechanical engineer and patent solicitor, became interested in lithography, developed a board game, The Checkered Game of Life, and founded the Milton Bradley Company. Or Louise Bogan, who was born in Livermore Falls in 1897, moved to Greenwich Village as a young woman, took up the bohemian life,occasionally drove the get away car for a fur thief, and ended up as the poetry critic for the New Yorker Magazine. And many more...

In 1884 Republican James G. Blaine came within 1,047 votes of becoming the President of the United States. This was the margin by which he lost New York State--and thus the election--to Grover Cleveland in what has been called the dirtiest campaign in American history. Yet his career--arguably the most sensational of any American politician of the so-called Gilded Age--did not end there. He was twice U.S. secretary of state, credited with having started our country on the path to acting like a world power, a powerful speaker of the house in Congress, and a United States senator from his adopted State of Maine. He was also, in the eyes of his opponents, "The Continental Liar From the State of Maine" or "Slippery Jim"--a sort of amiable "Tricky Dick Nixon," as he's been later called. He was hated by certain members of his own party, yet loved by millions of others, including some of his enemies in the Democratic Party. The press called him The Magnetic Man, due to his charisma. This is the fascinating biography of a man who dominated the American political stage, starting just before the Civil War and continuing until the twentieth century.

Buzz Caverly first joined the ranger staff at Baxter State Park in 1960, when the new park was just taking shape under the direction of Helon Taylor and the park's donor, Percival Baxter, who wished the park to be forever wild. Caverly's legendary career in the park one of the most unusual wilderness areas in the nation culminated when he became park director in 1981. Over the years he saw tremendous changes in attitude about land conservation, public access, and park management. From the Wild West days of the 1960s to the intensely managed years of the 1990s and beyond, the clash of personalities and politics is entertaining and inspiring, and reveals the minefield of people and issues Buzz had to negotiate to save the park's wilderness character.

For generations, Native American traditional artists in the Northeast have passed on their culture through beadwork, basketry, canoe making, wood carving, and quilting. Through the work and words of over thirty-five traditional artists living and working primarily in Maine and New York, North by Northeast explores these artists' connection to place, tradition, and cultural identity. A tribute to the resourcefulness and creativity of contemporary practicing artists from the Wabanaki, Akwesasne Mohawk, and Tuscarora tribes, the book is beautifully illustrated with the work of photographers Cedric Chatterley, Peggy McKenna, Jere DeWaters, and Peter Dembski. Essays by Salli Benedict, Sue Ellen Herne, Jennifer Neptune, Theresa Secord and Lynne Williamson.

Most of these short, savvy essays have appeared in The Forecaster, in Ed's Universal Notebook column (named for the spiral-bound reporter's notebooks that he buys two dozen at a time), or in the Maine Times, where he was a staff writer for a number of years. He started reporting when he was a sophomore at Westbrook High, writing for the Westbrook American, and aside from a stint as a librarian at the Portland Public Library after college, he's been scribbling for a living in Maine for his working life. Opinionated, insightful, humorous, and sometimes controversial, Ed Beem enjoys his role as a local observer, and these essays will resonate with anyone tuned in to day-to-day life in backyard Maine.

The inspiration for this book came from the tiny Pacific island of Kosrae in Micronesia, where Brewer native and Bangor Theological Seminary graduate the Reverend Galen Snow converted all of the natives to Christianity, and Portlander Harry Skillins left a record as a vicious pirate and who sired a line of descendants by native women. Others in these twenty chapters are far better known, such as poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Pulitzer Prize winner Edna St. Vincent Millay, opera singer Lillian Nordica, and Hollywood movie director John Ford. But whether it is Woolwich's Sir William Phips, the wilderness shepherd boy who went to sea and found a Spanish treasure and was knighted by the king of England, or Brunswick's Asa Simpson, the forty-niner who built a lumber and shipping empire in Oregon, or John Frank Stevens of West Bath, the noted engineer who made the Panama Canal possible, or Franklin County's Mark Walker, a 1930s' radical during the Great Depression, these stories, varied as they are, provide a continuous range of Mainers' contributions to the world at large. Told chronologically from the time of pre-history Indians in Maine, they end in the present with a look at our current connections overseas and at several Maine women who have dedicated their lives to helping the poor in Central and South America.

It is also the story of the valley's rogue river, Wild River; of a raging wildfire and the disappearance of an entire village community; of both land abuse and land stewardship; of ecological disaster and renewal; of nature's vulnerability and resiliency; and of people who experienced tragedy and good fortune. Amazingly, through the centuries a single mighty hemlock tree survived to be a living witness to it all. Dean Bennett, who has spent a lifetime exploring the natural world and its human connections, brings to life this surprising story of the power of nature to renew. Illustrated with photographs and maps and Bennett's beautiful illustrations, Nature and Renewal has a message for everyone.

The story begins with the Bean family, young Leon Leonwood Bean's love of the outdoors, his first forays into sales (soap, men's clothing), and then his development of the boot and the beginnings of an outdoors outfitting company that ran on a card file system and resisted change. The story of L.L. Bean, Inc.'s phenomenal growth under grandson Leon Gorman is replete with Preppies, MBAs, infighting, and even parodies of a company that would eventually get its own Zip Code.

Consolidation is impractical, a daily commute is usually impossible, island families are determined to keep their communities viable, and all agree that a school is a central part of a stable, year-round community.You might think that these tiny schools are an anachronism, offering an old-fashioned approach to education. You'd be wrong. They are among the most technologically savvy schools in the state and offer a culturally rich educational experience. Author Eva Murray moved to Matinicus in 1987 to teach in the one-room school, married and raised a family on the island, and has served on the school board and volunteered in the school. She has traveled from island to island, collecting the stories that tell how these small communities promise their handful of children a modern education within the context of a specialized and sometimes extreme offshore lifestyle. The hows and whys will fascinate educators, and the details of island life will interest everyone.

By the 1880s, some of the more affluent visitors decided to build their own cottages. From 1885 to 1905, Scientific American Building Monthly published floor plans, photographs, and descriptions of hun­dreds of homes, to inspire architects, builders, and clients. A tour of 52 lovely, distinctive homes designed and built in Maine more than a century ago are shared with a contemporary audience by the state's foremost architectural experts.Together with photographs of the homes taken by David Clough, Shettleworth, Hanson and Glass provide expert commentary on both the home and its times. A book not to be missed by anyone who loves Maine, architecture, or the grand homes of a grander time. Highlights the Shingle Style summer cottages and town houses that flourished in Bar Harbor, Portland, the Casco Bay islands, Prouts Neck, Kennebunkport, and elsewhere on the Maine coast around the turn of the last century. Features floor plans and photographs from the pages of the Scientific American Building Monthly. Also features gorgeous exterior and interior color photography of 32 homes.

Joe's photos capture moments of ephemeral grace and beauty in places that are forgotten or hiding in plain sight. Smelt Brook in Castine is not on any standard itinerary. Neither are South Addison, Merrymeeting Bay, the Scarborough Marsh, and many other places Joe has explored over the years. Even places that are familiar to many--West Quoddy Head, Old Orchard Beach, Monhegan Island, Pemaquid Point, Portland Harbor, Acadia National Park, and others--are revealed by Joe's camera in moments of other-worldly allure. There are surprises on every page, just as there are surprises around any bend of a Maine coastal road. Every photo in this book was taken from a public vantage point you can reach by car or ferry. An appendix offers directions to each place. Ken Textor's essays reveal hidden nuggets on every page: why the shade on a Castine street has a strange, nostalgic feel; what to think of a mauve lobster boat or a seemingly abandoned dory in the weeds; how a lighthouse surrounded by granite quarries came to be built of brick; which is the front and which is the back of a house built between Main Street and the harbor; how to enumerate the many services provided by a salt marsh; why the lobstering isn't better in upper Blue Hill Bay; why sea air makes us hungry; and how a wormdigger turns a mudflat into money. The great naturalist Louis Agassiz believed that the only way to discover the truth of a thing is through sustained attention. In THE HIDDEN COAST OF MAINE, Joe Devenney and Ken Textor share the results of three-and-a-half decades of attention to an amazing place.

Born in a paper mill town in Maine's western foothills, Muskie was one of six children of a Polish immigrant and a Polish-American mother whose English was worse than her husband's. His arc through his formative years was singular and unpredictable, an American story that looks plausible only in hindsight.Commemorating the centenary of his birth, this biography of Ed Muskie through his two terms as Maine's governor tells how the son of an immigrant tailor grew up to become one of the most consequential politicians in American history.

How better to celebrate the milestones in a Maine year than with food,whether prepared at home or enjoyed in a restaurant? And who better to guide you than the creators of Maine's most popular food blog? Jillian and Malcolm Bedell are the pied pipers of great Maine dining, seeking out and celebrating the best traditional fare as well as the most irresistible international cuisine in Maine today. From fried clams to lobster fra diavolo, from Maine Italian sandwiches to Fat Boy Diner to Fore Street, EATING IN MAINE will guide you through the seasons on a Maine food adventure. The Bedells' food blog, fromaway.com, hosts more than 150,000 unique visitors monthly. From the creators of the award-winning food blog fromaway.com, winners of the NBC “Today” show Super Bowl Buffalo Wing Cook-Off. More than 100 recipes, 50 restaurant reviews, and 10 food-themed road trips plus scores of menu suggestions for the holiday celebrations through a Maine year.

In October, 1812, as the 32-gun U.S. frigate Essex ventured out against the British enemy, only one man had any idea that this cruise would turn into the longest, strangest naval adventure in American history. That man was Captain David Porter, who had decided to run off with the navy's ship and its three hundred men to fight a separate Pacific war--one of privateering, pillaging, and orgies. Drawing on Porter's own writings and the accounts of eyewitnesses, the author memorably recounts the events of a dark and fatal voyage in which David Porter crosses the line from commander to cult-leader, from improbable fantasy to disastrous reality. In a tale so amazing that it reads like fiction, Porter, impelled by his own demons and by rivalry with the ghostly British buccaneer Lord Anson, took his men and boys on a seventeen-month mystery tour that did not end until he had disrupted the Chilean revolution, captured the entire English whaling fleet (manned mainly by Americans), vanished into the enchanted Galapagos, and re-emerged in Polynesia, where he made himself the conqueror-chief of the stone-age Nukuhivans. In the end, when he sought redemption with a glorious victory over a British opponent, he failed terribly and sacrificed the lives of one-third of his crew to his personal notions of heroism. Robert Booth tells the story of the ill-fated Essex with accuracy, immediacy, and a broad vision of its meanings as an epic of war, a gripping tale of the sea, a brilliant portrait of a disturbed and disturbing American hero, and a geo-political thriller that sheds new light on the origins of U.S. imperialism, the tragedy of missed opportunities, and the disastrous and permanent impact of Porter's rampage on the peoples of the Pacific.

IMAGINE THAT THE FUTURE WELL-BEING OF YOUR STATE is handed by 38% of its voters to a governor who tells the NAACP to 'kiss my butt'; who jokes that the worst his lax policies on toxic chemicals in consumer products will do is cause women to grow 'little beards'; who falsely claims that an active wind turbine is fake and run by 'a little electric motor'; and who loudly condemns your state's public schools as the worst in the nation while a national news magazine is ranking them among the best.Maine's governor Paul LePage has said all those things and much more in his stormy tenure. As disclosed for the first time in this book, he also spent 13 hours in 2013 in private meetings with conspiracy theorists discussing what he would do if the federal government allowed Russian troops to invade North America, while at the same time claiming that he had no time to meet with legislative leaders. For the past 6 years, Maine has been a laboratory for Tea Party governance. When a movement defined by its distrust of government is handed the keys to a state, what happens next? As Maine Went examines Paul LePage's record to answer the question that matters most: Is he making Maine a better place?

Everywhere we go in rural New England, the past surrounds us. In the woods and fields and along country roads, the traces are everywhere if we know what to look for and how to interpret what we see. A patch of neglected daylilies marks a long-abandoned homestead. A grown-over cellar hole with nearby stumps and remnants of stone wall and orchard shows us where a farm has been reclaimed by forest. And a piece of a stone dam and wooden sluice mark the site of a long-gone mill. Although slumping back into the landscape, these features speak to us if we can hear them and they can guide us to ancestral homesteads and famous sites. Lavishly illustrated with drawings and color photos.Provides the keys to interpret human artifacts in fields, woods, and roadsides and to reconstruct the past from surviving clues.Perfect to carry in a backpack or glove box.A unique and valuable resource for road trips, genealogical research, naturalists, and historians.

How did she navigate the world of venture capitalists and investment bankers to engineer the sale of her company and reap a personal fortune? And what does her subsequent odyssey to buy and donate a new national park in Maine's north woods—thus repaying what she regards as the “harmonic debt to the planet” she incurred by manufacturing beauty products—tell us about America and the American dream? Queen Bee is a fascinating biography of a fascinating woman, her game-changing skin-care company, and the quest to create a national park in the north woods. A richly textured portrait of the woman who built Burt's Bees from nothing and altered the global business of skin care. A tightly woven story of the paper-industry exodus, the giant clearance sale of the north woods, the downward spiral of paper-company towns, and the battle for a new national park. A tale of the American Dream in action— what it can do for the fortunate few who are in the right place at the right time with wits and determination, and what it can do to the unfortunate many who find themselves on the wrong side of “creative destruction.”