Machiasport helps family who lost home

MACHIASPORT – A town passed the hat Saturday evening for a family that lost everything in a house fire two weeks ago.

More than 250 people were seated at a benefit supper for Dawn and Kenny Link, a Machiasport couple whose Bucks Harbor home burned to the ground Jan. 5.

“It’s a hard time of year for everyone,” Scott Verburgt, a Machiasport volunteer firefighter, said at the supper. “But we all want to help this family especially.”

It was the biggest benefit dinner for the fishing town in years that anyone can recall.

The community turned out to the tune of $5,700 total in contributions. Of that, $3,300 was raised at the door. The rest came from an auction of 90 items donated by the area’s business community.

Several hundred-dollar bills were placed in the donation basket as people arrived for the supper at the Fort O’Brien School.

“We stepped up,” said Patty Schenks, a lifelong Machiasport resident who helped organize the benefit along with Joleen Nicely. “The community stepped up.”

Dawn, 26, and Kenny Link, 28, had been living at the Machias Motor Inn since the fire. Hours before Saturday’s supper, the couple and their two young daughters moved into a rental house near Bucks Harbor.

“We just bought our first groceries in weeks,” Dawn said.

They also took in two kittens to replace the three cats lost in the fire. That was comforting to 4-year-old Haylee.

Nothing of the family’s previous house, valued at more than $150,000, could be saved, except for a free-standing garage. The Links have just made a decision to rebuild on the site with a three-bedroom modular home.

The St. Stephen, New Brunswick., company they chose told them the house could go up as soon as the first week of March.

Kenny Link works as a lobsterman, but hasn’t been back to work yet. That means a temporary loss of the family’s income in addition to the loss of all their belongings.

The state fire marshal’s office determined that a furnace explosion caused the fire. It broke out around 9 a.m., minutes after Dawn had left with 1-year-old Caitlyn to help Kenny get his lobster traps back home. She returned 30 minutes later to a smoke-filled house she couldn’t enter.

Haylee was at school while the fire raged. The Down East Correctional Facility, just up the road from the Links’ burning home, opened its doors for the family to gather.

As soon as other school parents learned about the fire, plans went in place to hold a benefit supper for the Links.

Fort O’Brien’s parent-teacher organization, the School Improvement League, holds a fund-raiser each month to bring more money to school coffers. But Schenks and Nicely quickly shaped the January event to benefit the Links.

“We’ve all grown up together here,” she said. “We all went to school at Fort O’Brien, and now our children have the same teachers.”

One of Saturday evening’s touches was the replacement gift of Haylee’s and Caitlyn’s school photos taken just last fall by Maineline Studio. Family members’ photos could be taken at the school alongside the pupils’ photos. The Calais company provided the prints at no cost.

The Links were overwhelmed Saturday by the community’s response to their tragedy.

“It’s been unreal,” Dawn said. “We didn’t know just how much people cared.”