Giving them a voice Recollected history of South Bristol a model of presenting the stories of Maine

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Maine’s farmhouses are so spruced up these days, with canning jars sitting like trophies atop polished granite counters, that it’s hard to imagine what used to go on in the kitchen, the baking biscuits before dawn and long days of canning over blazing wood stoves even on the hottest of summer days. Just getting the mail delivered – summer or winter – was often an act of intense courage. Stories such as these are within the memories of those who are with us now, but fading by the day, lost within the silence of nursing homes and hospitals across the state.

That’s why “Down on the Island, Up on the Main: A Recollected History of South Bristol, Maine” (Tilbury House, 2003) is such a seminal book. It’s a work of oral history that’s rich with the details of life as it was, and as inviting to read as any picture book. The book is a model of presenting the stories of Maine, the tales of hard labor, hard pranks and odd characters that are present in any town, though in this case, the stories are limited to South Bristol.

But they’re not limited to any particular time, for the very story of this book, how the words and photos compiled and annotated by Ellen Vincent came to be, is also a wonderfully compelling tale. Vincent came to Maine not as a writer, nor as an oral historian, but as an artist. An art professor at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in Wisconsin, she visited Maine some 10 years ago as a resident at the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Damariscotta. Vincent is a photographer, not a ceramicist, but, as she explained during a recent phone conversation, she wanted to be in Maine, so she convinced the center that they needed some diversity in their residencies, that a photographer would offer the other artists some perspective.

Little did she know that the diversity she would provide would be more for herself than for the arts center. Instead of creating photographic installations, as she was beginning to do, she conducted 80 hours of oral history interviews, gathered hundreds of photos and created this 250-page portrait of South Bristol. The ramifications keep going. Her oral history interviews are now archived at the Northeast Archives of Folklore in Orono. Meanwhile, an exhibit of the book’s stories and images so excited people in South Bristol that it became the catalyst the town needed to form a historical society. Now that the book’s profits are going to the historical society, that group has enough money to begin to think of helping other small societies across the state.

It’s a good story, this tale of a photographer following her eye for things old and familial, and it begins at antique stores and flea markets such as the Liberty Tool Co. in Liberty.

“I’d be poking around on the top floor,” says Vincent, “and there would be cheese boxes filled with photographs. It was heartbreaking. The people in these photos were obviously part of someone’s family, but there was no one around to give them a voice.” As Vincent started collecting these images, she began to realize

that she was, as she says, “paying 10 cents apiece for people’s great-grandmothers.”

At first, Vincent’s art antenna led her to think of creating a sculptural installation involving a fictional family tree, incorporating artifacts such as old kitchen choppers and outdated lobster gauges. As the grandchild of immigrants who didn’t talk about their past, she didn’t have her own family tree, and had always envied others their long genealogies, with heirlooms handed down for generations.

“I was thinking about this,” she says, “and it struck me, doing this fictional history was really a self-centered precious little artist thing to do when so many real stories are out there.”

So Vincent began a search for stories But stories can’t be found in antique stores. She needed to go to the people who lived them. She decided she would limit herself to one town and began looking for one that still had many long-standing families. One day, she mentioned this quest to the librarian in what had been South Bristol’s one-room, telephoneless town library. The librarian didn’t spend a moment deliberating. She sat right down and drew a map detailing houses and their phone numbers.

Vincent says, “This was just a few days before I had to go back [to Wisconsin], so I said to myself, maybe I’ll just call and make a quick visit and let them see my face and ask if I can talk when I come back. Of course,” she adds, “there are no quick visits in South Bristol.

“The first person came to the door with an envelope filled with photos in one hand and in her other hand, a yellow pad with notes for stories she wanted to tell me that her mother told her. Four hours later, I left to speak with a younger man, a fisherman in his 70s.”

She returned the following June – a time she could afford to rent a home in the region – and began again. This time, she contacted the Maine Folklife Center, which lent her a tape recorder so she could capture the cadence of the voices along with the details of their stories. Year after year, she continued her story-listening, until eventually she had the material to create a show of the photos and their stories at the Round Top Center for the Arts in Damariscotta.

It was still a work in progress. When residents of South Bristol saw the photos and read the stories, they began adding to them. They returned, and added more stories. The first exhibit had more than 500 items, says Vincent. “By the time I did a second version of that show, we had closer to 900 items. People were saying it should be a book, it was too much to look at and they wanted to keep on looking,” she recalls. Eventually, with the help of grants from several foundations, Tilbury House published the book.

Of the more than 300 pictures of people and places in “Down on the Island, Up on the Main,” not one of them is of Vincent. She stays in the background. It is the people who speak, the people and their images, evoking remarkable sturdiness and humor – and no greater piousness than we might experience today.

The evocation of the time is so strong in this book that a visitor to the region might expect to see a man rowing out to Heron Island to deliver the mail or women picking dandelions to boil up for dinner, not the well-groomed homes of Christmas Cove, BMWs parked in the driveways. The era Vincent evokes is one in which every resident knew the town by its geography, its geography by its homes and homes by their generations.

“People would visit,” says Ralph Norwood, one of Vincent’s storytellers, the people she calls “tradition bearers.” “First they’d go to your house, then you’d go to their house. So these two guys worked at the boat shop; they’d visited the other fella’s house last week so this week they went to his house. The host happened to be on his way in from the outhouse just as the neighbor drove up, and the neighbor stepped out of his automobile and said to his wife, ‘I hope they don’t have those damn peanut-butter sandwiches again this week.’ So when it came time to serve the refreshments the man said, ‘Well, I’m sorry, but we’ve got those damn peanut-butter sandwiches again this week!'”

This era of visiting without calling, of dressing up for Saturday dances, when community triumphed no matter how furious you may be at your neighbor, is changing, evolving into something else, now, but efforts such as Vincent’s mean we won’t be unaware of it. We can learn from the tales of South Bristol, as can our children and grandchildren. So, too, can the residents of South Bristol itself.

Vincent recalls that at one book talk last summer, at the 1792 Walpole Meeting House, a man drove up from South Portland to say that his mother, who was in her 90s and had been born and raised and lived in South Bristol, had told him a story that her husband had told her before his death.

This man then told the assembled crowd that his father, just a boy at the time, had been the one to start the fire of 1917, a fire that so ravaged South Bristol from one end to the other that along one side of the road not a house is standing from before 1917. “Here for first time we know who did it and how it happened,” says Vincent.

No wonder that when she shows up in town each June, the people don’t ask her how long she’s staying. They ask how long she is home for.

Donna Gold works with families and communities to preserve their stories through Personal History. Visit her Web site personalhistory.org.

Excerpted quotes from “Down on the Island, Up on the Main”

“He didn’t row a skiff, he sculled it with one oar, standing up”

Catherine Jordon Walker

“This was the link of downriver towns with the outside world.”

Doug Thompson

“It just seemed like everyone was happier then.”

Nellie McFarland Frey