Tel Aviv home tied to Maine

When a tourist in Tel Aviv-Jaffa happened to notice the blue State of Maine flag affixed to the front of an old house under renovation, he jokingly asked if Maine had established its own embassy in Israel.

Reed Holmes chuckles when he recalls the story, but he also believes there is a great deal of truth underlying the tourist’s assessment of the building. Holmes, of Pepperell, Mass., who recently bought the building in Israel with his wife, Jean, has always considered the Maine people who constructed that house and about 20 others nearly 140 years ago to have been ambassadors of the noblest sort.

When the 50 Down East families sailed from Jonesport to Jaffa in 1866, they were convinced that theirs was a divinely inspired mission mentioned in the Old Testament to prepare the Holy Land for the eventual return of the Jews. Their ambitious social experiment ended not long after in death and despair, however, and the colony they erected outside the walled city of Jaffa stood as decaying testament to their religious gullibility. Many of the descendants of those Yankee pilgrims – people from Jonesport, Machiasport, Addison and Indian River – have grown up with little knowledge of the remarkable voyage of their ancestors. Some families have passed the story down through the generations as a humiliating footnote to their personal histories.

Holmes, a clergyman and historian who chronicled the extraordinary mission in his 1981 book “The Forerunners,” has been trying for the last 30 years to change that perception of shame to one of ancestral pride. Through his efforts, a monument commemorating the pilgrims’ point of departure was installed during a community celebration in Jonesport in 1991. A year later, he persuaded officials in Tel Aviv to erect a companion monument at the Maine ship’s landing site on the beaches of Jaffa.

“It’s been our intention from the start to be able to share this remarkable story with the people in Down East Maine, so they can be justly proud of what their ancestors did,” said Holmes, whose book has since become the basis of an Israeli film about the Maine voyage and has helped turn the colony into a popular stop among tourists visiting the city.

And the tour guides certainly do have an interesting story to relate.

By 1864, a charismatic itinerant preacher named George J. Adams had convinced many of his Down East flock of the merits of his vision to prepare the Holy Land for Jewish occupation. Two years later, 157 humble, hardworking people were committed to selling everything they owned and sailing to Jaffa. In Machiasport, the three-masted bark Nellie Chapin was loaded with supplies, including the lumber to build the pre-fabricated houses that would make up the American colony.

The families, including dozens of children, set sail from nearby Jonesport and arrived off the coast of Jaffa 42 days later. After unloading the ship in treacherous seas, the Mainers set up a crude tent city on the beach while arranging to move to land they’d purchased outside the city. But dysentery and typhus quickly swept through the ragged band of believers, killing more than two dozen in the first six months.

The remaining settlers persevered, eventually erecting 20 houses, a church, and a store on a knoll outside Jaffa. By 1868, however, the experiment had all but collapsed. Crop failure, burdensome taxes levied by local officials, grave illness and an erosion of confidence in their increasingly drunken and morose leader had broken the spirit of the Mainers. All but about 20 of the desperate wanderers went back to Maine to put their tragically misguided adventure behind them. Yet a few of those who remained in Jaffa eventually prospered. Rolla Floyd and his wife, a Surry couple who lost their infant son soon after arriving in Jaffa, established a busy stagecoach line and tourist business. The Leighton family opened Jerusalem’s first theater, the Eden.

Holmes, who has family roots Down East, first heard of this incredible journey in 1943 from a Jonesport woman who had made the trip as a child. In 1973, on the 25th anniversary of the founding of the modern state of Israel, Holmes read a letter in the Bangor Daily News from a man in Missouri who suggested that his father, one of the original Maine pilgrims, would be proud to know that his dream for the Holy Land had been fulfilled.

Holmes has been working with Israeli officials and historic preservationists ever since to restore what was left of the American colony. Although all but five of the Maine houses had been bulldozed over the decades, the one built by Capt. Ackley Norton of Jonesport was transformed into one of Tel Aviv’s finest restaurants. A few years ago, the house that belonged to Rolla Floyd was beautifully restored by a woman from Canada. She outfitted the building with antique furniture of the period, as well as a photograph and a letter as documentation of its original Maine owner.

On a trip to Israel last year, the Holmeses were delighted to see that one of the last two unrestored original houses in the colony, which had once been scheduled for demolition, was for sale.”

“Jean and I had all but given up hope of getting one of the Maine houses, considering how many had been torn down,” said Holmes, who runs an international goodwill organization called ViewPax Mondiale. “Buying this one was a dream come true.”

Holmes was able to identify the original owner of the house as Mark T. Wentworth of Surry, who had scrawled his initials on some of the timbers before the pre-cut home was loaded aboard the ship in Maine. Although the exterior of the house requires a lot more work – the siding had been covered by a stucco fa?ade that rotted much of the wood – the Holmeses have nearly completed renovating the interior. When it’s finished in a few months, the house will serve as a “Maine Friendship and Heritage Museum” that will honor the memory of those families who one day left their familiar little worlds to sail toward what they believed was their biblical destiny.

“We would really like to locate more of the Maine descendants,” Holmes said, “and to find out what they know or don’t know about that journey. They should be immensely proud of the contributions that their families made so long ago. Despite everything that went wrong at the time, it truly was a remarkable endeavor.”