The sound of commerce clashing with nature rang out over Sears Island last fall when state officials said they were considering leasing the largely undeveloped Penobscot Bay property for use as a liquefied natural gas terminal.

It was not the first time the 941-acre island has figured in somebody’s big scheme.

In the past 35 years, Sears Island has been eyed for everything from a nuclear power plant to an aluminum smelter.

In 1880, some 75 sheep and about 30 head of cattle grazed on it. Later, a real estate company considered establishing a kind of amusement park there.

Central Maine Power Co. proposed a coal-fired power plant in the 1970s.

“I feel the island is a survivor,” said Jim Freeman, an environmental activist who lives in nearby Verona.

Some who think the island’s greatest value is in its current state – woods and meadows, divided by a few old roads and one relatively new one – want to end the debate permanently. If they have their way, the island will be preserved forever.

If there is one constant in the 200-year recorded history of Sears Island – called Wassumkeag by the native Penobscots, and Brigadier’s Island by 18th century settlers – it is the conflict between those who see economic development potential in the island’s proximity to a deep-water shipping channel and those who want to save it as the largest unspoiled island on the East Coast.

After the Revolutionary War, the island was owned by Gen. Henry Knox, George Washington’s first secretary of war, who once owned much of what today is Waldo and Knox counties.

In those years, Brigadier’s Island was used for farming and fishing. In 1798, a William Staples reported catching 148 salmon in weirs along the shore during May. Clearings provided good grazing for cattle and sheep.

In the early 19th century, Knox was strapped for cash and wanted to sell Brigadier’s Island. In a July 1804 letter, he extolled its virtues to a potential buyer, Israel Thorndike of Beverly, Mass., by writing:

“[With] an estimated 800 to 1,000 acres, [it is] one of the most valuable Islands on the seacoast of the U.S. … the goodness of the harbor … the beautiful formation of the Island … the vicinity of the penobscot river, all combine to render it the future capital of Penobscot Bay and River.”

Thorndike purchased the island from Knox in 1806 for $10,572. David Sears, a Boston lawyer who was Thorndike’s business partner, was the next owner.

“Sears, like Henry Knox before him, took a fancy to Brigadier’s Island,” according to a book about the island by historian Joel Eastman. On Nov. 1, 1813, Sears bought it for $11,000. Two schooners, the Benjamin and Joseph, and the Belfast, might have been built on the island early that decade, Eastman said.

Baxter Cook Sr., 57, a Searsport native, said locals have always viewed the island as a kind of park. “We played there as little kids,” he said. And as long ago as 1898, in the Aug. 4 issue of Belfast’s Republican Journal, the paper’s Searsport correspondent reported that a party of some 30 men and women picnicked on the island, but when they tried to walk across the sand bar at 6 p.m., they were stranded by the high tide. It wouldn’t be the last time a visit to the island would end that way.

In 1905, the island was purchased for $55,000 from David Sears IV by the Bangor Investment Co., a real estate arm of the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad. The company built a kind of amusement park on the mainland and brought visitors by train; Eastman speculates that more such development might have been planned for the island. Today, just a rock-cellar hole or two is all that’s left of the Sears family era.

Over the last 20 years, “the goodness of the harbor” and “the beautiful formation of the island” have been the respective rallying cries of those who would develop Sears Island and those who want to preserve it.

Duke Tomlin, owner of Maine Port Towboats Inc., the Belfast-based tugboat company that handles ship and barge traffic in the area, said the natural features of the region make it ideal for shipping.

“Searsport’s as natural a harbor as you’re going to find,” Tomlin said.

At the top of the bay, the island is protected from winds and waves, yet there is ample room for ships to anchor, wait their turn to dock, then turn around and head to sea.

Sears Island is “a perfect place to put a pier of any type,” Tomlin said. At low tide, the water is 40 feet deep in most of the 400 yards between Sears Island and Mack Point in Searsport on the mainland, he said.

Two industrial piers have been at Mack Point since the early 20th century. Tomlin said every year about 200 ships, barges and oceangoing tugs hauling oil, gasoline and road salt come into Searsport, Bucksport and Bangor, “and most of that is Searsport.”

A shipping channel nearly a half-mile wide is marked from south of Islesboro to Sears Island, making for easy and safe access, he said.

And building a new port elsewhere on the Maine coast, Tomlin said, would be “like trying to build a new airport somewhere,” generating instant opposition from neighbors.

Freeman, the activist, believes many people fail to understand the ecological value of the island.

It has 200 acres of wetlands and its shores and eelgrass beds provide a nursery for fish and lobster, he said. Before the causeway was built, linking the island to the mainland, the tidal zone was a prime clam flat area, he said.

Its shore provides for a 5-mile walk with ever-changing views of upper Penobscot Bay, and its meadows, forests and old dirt roads offer casual hikers and bicyclists opportunities to explore.

The last 35 years of the Sears Island story can be told with blueprints.

In file cabinets around the country are plans outlining bold construction proposals for the island.

In 1969 the state and Searsport planned an industrial park on the island. Tepco Inc. wanted to be a tenant with an aluminum smelter and a nuclear power plant.

In 1971, another company proposed an oil desulphurization refinery; that was rejected by permitting agencies. Later that year, Central Maine Power proposed a nuclear power plant. Searsport residents supported the plan in a 532-182 vote in 1975. CMP withdrew the plans when a fault line was discovered under the island.

CMP then proposed a coal-fired power plant in 1977.

All the plans fizzled.

In the early 1980s, the state announced its intention to build a six-berth container port.

For almost 20 years of stops and starts, the cargo port and Sears Island were synonymous. After finally winning permits to build what had become a single-berth port, then-Gov. Angus King pulled the plug on the project, citing the estimated cost, which had grown to $70 million.

Other than a communications tower built in the 1970s at the island’s southern tip, the cargo port made the most headway of any of the commercial schemes that preceded it, and it left the most tangible changes to the island.

In the late 1980s, after a court ruled work could again begin on the port, huge trucks began dumping gravel across the sandbar that connected the island with the mainland. By the early 1990s, the causeway – wide enough to accommodate two 18-wheelers, passing side by side – was complete. Another wide paved road curved toward the northwest quadrant of the island, where a rock jetty was constructed as the base for a dock.

The state also filled in wetlands – illegally, it was later revealed – and a staging area began to take shape near the jetty.

Today, the pavement on the island road is beginning to crack, tall weeds push up through the jetty, and the state has re-created wetlands, complete with old stumps and rotting organic matter.

The latest proposal, for an LNG terminal, though spare in detail, spurred creation of a broad-based opposition calling itself Friends of Sears Island. The group has formed subcommittees, sponsored forums, gotten involved in local town politics, and nudged state government to come clean on its dealings with an unidentified developer.

Some Searsport residents suspect their town has turned a corner since the cargo port bid was dropped, with the tourist-friendly Penobscot Marine Museum extending its campus to Main Street and the downtown undergoing a quiet revival, including some new retail shops.

Freeman thinks the town could lure companies like Old Town Canoe and others in the recreational equipment business, using the island as a place known for kayaking, canoeing, bicycling, hiking and snowshoeing.

Yet as Tomlin and others point out, the views from the northwest and northeast quadrants of Sears Island are hardly pristine.

On the west side of the causeway, salt and coal are sometimes piled high at Mack Point’s oil and gasoline tank farm. On the east side is the GAC plant, where chemicals used in the paper industry are made. The site has been industrial since the early 20th century.

Baxter Cook said he and most people in town supported the cargo port. But he believes most of Searsport’s 2,600 residents now do not want to see the island developed, unless it means adding hiking and bicycling trails.

The LNG proposal, Cook hopes, may have “jump-started the people of Searsport to do something” to permanently protect the island.

BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTO BY JOHN CLARKE RUSS

A product of the state’s plans to develop a cargo port on Sears Island, a causeway linking the island to the mainland draws visitors as well as this message.