First arsenic poisonings, now the Berlin Wall

Just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse than the arsenic poisonings that took place here last spring, we are now faced with another menacing threat to Maine’s Historic Swedish Colony. Last week a crowd of residents from throughout the Colony packed into the New Sweden School to hear more horrendous news, this time from a Department of Transportation representative in Augusta.

There are plans to run a four-lane, I-95 style highway right through the heart of New Sweden and the full length of Maine’s Historic Swedish Colony. It would supplant our existing Route 161. To say that we are devastated would be the understatement of the decade. This is a quiet, peaceful community dotted with homes and museums listed on the National Historic Register. What’s more, we pride ourselves and our community on the Swedish traditions still practiced here which include ethnic dance, language, song and cuisine.

But the four-lane highway planned for our community will divide our historic colony right down the middle, filling it instead with the roaring of tractor trailer trucks and creating a barrier for neighbor to visit neighbor, for children from “East” New Sweden to play with kids from “West” New Sweden or for a church member who lives near the Lars Noak Blacksmith Shop to get to their church in the Aroostook Valley Railway section of town. We might as well have the Berlin Wall constructed the full length of the Colony.

This plan was unveiled, not with the usual promises of relief from traffic congestion (there hasn’t been a traffic jam on route 161 in its 51-year history) but with the promise of economic development as the incentive. We listened politely to all of the arguments about how this super highway would bring economic benefits to towns north of us: Frenchville, Madawaska and Fort Kent while providing ease of access to Caribou, Presque Isle and Houlton. It would run from Houlton to Madawaska, overlapping Route 1 for most of the way. Then during question time when a member of the audience asked if the price tag of $500 million would really bring enough economic development to justify the cost, the DOT representative admitted that the benefits were justifiable in the forecasts the DOT had done, but just barely.

If we are to be the sacrificial lamb, it would be nice to think that our demise would be of sure and considerable benefit to neighboring cities. But it’s difficult to believe these theories that four lane highway access is a ticket to prosperity when towns along I-95 between Medway and Houlton hardly seem to be booming. If anything they have lost population and they’ve had 25 years to develop their economies by having proximity to a four-lane highway. It also seems extraordinary to us that of the $500 million required to build this highway, the largest project of its kind east of the Mississippi, there aren’t enough dollars available to spare Maine’s Historic Swedish Colony by diverting the road around us.

And it seems incomprehensible to us that some of the funds being raised for this project in Washington have been raised by our local girl made good, Sen. Susan Collins, who knows the historical significance of this place. She grew up in nearby Caribou (her godfather was a Swede from the Colony) and she regularly travels Route 161 to her family’s camp at Madawaska Lake passing beautiful old Swedish farms en route, farms that face demolition if this plan goes through.

We are not averse to progress. We understand a high-speed north-south highway from Houlton to the St. John Valley would provide convenience and cost savings to travelers and truckers who become frustrated with slowing down through the small towns along Route 1, but we object to a plan that touts economic benefit for others but which would rob us of the one asset we have the potential for ethnic tourism.

With our history, traditions and heritage there are several families throughout Maine’s Swedish Colony who have been exploring opening up bed and breakfast facilities for developing tourism. New Sweden alone boasts five museums and there’s Lagerstrom House in Woodland and the Historical Society Museum in Stockholm. We also have the very popular Eureka Hall Restaurant in Stockholm and across the street at Anderson’s store the owner is constructing a coffee shop, bakery and delicatessen which will offer Swedish speciality foods. As well as this, the cross country skiing here, introduced into Maine by the local Swedes, is excellent.

Next year we have 45 dancers and musicians coming from old Sweden to perform here at Midsommar, as well as busloads of visitors from Massachusetts and Monson. The arsenic poisonings may have put us on the map in a way we never had hoped to get there, but tourists have not been discouraged from coming here. Our Swedish Midsommar Festival in June this year had more visitors than ever.

It would be a double tragedy, after all we have been through, if the plans for this new four-lane highway were to leave another scar the full length our community so ugly and so divisive that it blots out both our chances for economic development and our very existence.

I would ask anyone inside or outside Maine’s Historic Swedish Colony who would like to help preserve this unique settlement to contact members of Maine’s congressional delegation with your views.

Brenda Nasberg Jepson is a documentary filmmaker who lives in Stockholm. She is in post production on a Swedish language film made for Maine Public Television called “Life on the Old Maine Swedish Farm” and shot in Maine’s Historic Swedish Colony.