Fine history of landmark Maine village

PORTRAIT OF PARIS HILL, by Martin Dibner, Paris Hill Press, 213 pages, $29.50 (softbound), $44.50 (hardbound).

The last time I saw Paris Hill, I sat with a group of rockhounds in a mineral mine and searched all afternoon for tourmalines. Our efforts proved fruitless, but we went home with precious memories of a pristine village frozen in the 19th century, free of video outlets and convenience stores.

I could imagine Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, who was born in Paris Hill in 1809, and twice was married there, walking along the town common wearing his best black swallow-tailed suit.

Earle Shettleworth of the Historic Preservation Commission thinks the former Oxford County shiretown is Maine’s best-preserved community, “richly endowed in location, architecture and history.”

So, it is no surprise that historian and novelist Martin Dibner, who lives in nearby Casco, was inspired to spend five years writing this unusual town history.

In his own lively prose, and borrowing liberally from diaries, newspaper stories, and Willian Lapham and Silas Maxim’s, “History of Paris, Maine,” Dibner opens with the rough pioneer times of Indian fighting and deprivation, and moves along to the later years of abundance, when by the mid-1800s “The Hill” boasted its own newspapers, churches, hotels, even a sled factory.

Tragedy, or so people thought, struck in 1895 when a feud erupted over the siting of the Atlantic & St. Lawrence Railroad that linked Portland and Montreal. Because of the steep grade up the hill, tracks were laid through South Paris, by then the hub of commercial activity, sounding a death knell for The Hill after the county seat and most of the commerce was lost to the other town.

But rumors of the village’s demise were greatly exaggerated, Dibner writes.

“Paris Hill would rise above the ruins to become a far lovelier place, unique among the honored landmarks of Maine,” he writes.

“Portrait of Paris Hill” is a class act; well-bound and printed on high-quality paper, with many crisp photographs of townspeople at work and play. There is even a striking portrait, previously unpublished, of Hannibal Hamlin taken around 1860, the year he shared the Republican ticket with a man he had never met: Abraham Lincoln.

The book is available from Paris Hill Press, Rural Route 1, Box 173, Casco 04015.

Richard R. Shaw is the NEWS editorial page assistant.