Possible Right Whale Wintering Ground Found

North Atlantic right whales appear to be wintering off the coast of Maine.A large number of North Atlantic right whales have been seen in the Gulf of Maine in recent days, leading right whale researchers at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) to believe they have identified a wintering ground and potentially a breeding ground for this endangered species.The NEFSC’s aerial survey team saw 44 individual right whales on December 3 in the...

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Southern Maine Veterans' Memorial Cemetery

Work began in October on a new 88-acre veterans' cemetery in Springvale. The work should be completed by spring, 2010, with burials starting next fall. The Master Plan renderings may be viewed here.The state currently operates two veterans' cemeteries in Augusta, and a third in Carib...

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How Some Towns Got Their Names

1. MilbridgeThe name is thought to have been suggested by John Gardner of Boston, who built the first bridge across the Narraguagus River.The spelling of Milbridge has been a subject of much discussion. Some say that two "ls" should be used because the name is a blending of the two words, "mill and bridge." They further assert that the early incorporators meant it to be such. The one "l" supporters affirm that their spelling should prevail for if the town's namers did not mean it to be such, they would not have used the spelling with one "l" in...

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Rejected Town Names

Some proposed and rejected names for Maine towns:Sunbury (Bangor)Reach (Bath)North Wood (Corinna)Sharon (Durham)Sumner (Ellsworth)Russia (Greenwood)Fluvanna (Guilford)Columbia (Hebron)Winchester (Islesboro)China (Rumford)Independence (South Thomaston)Sparta (Woodstock)"Hertford, Woodstock or Lisbon," or Williamston (Hartford)New Hancock, or Gilman (Sumner)Knoxbury, or Knoxburgh (Prospe...

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Three Junks of Pork

There are at least three places in Maine called "Junk of Pork." One lies a few miles beyond Peaks Island, and was described by Samuel Drake Adams in 1891 as "a tough morsel even for old salts." A photograph taken last year confirms the following description from 1892:The rock is called the Junk of Pork, and is one of the most dangerous on the Maine coast. It rises precipitously to a height of nearly fifty feet from the surface of the sea, and is encompassed with countless bowlders and jagged reefs. [Link]A second Junk of Pork lies in Flanders Bay,...

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Pronouncing "Mount Desert"

A debate over the proper pronunciation of "Mount Desert" pitted 19th-century scholars against year-round residents of the island.The accentuation should not fall on the last, but on the first syllable of Desert, although the name is almost universally mispronounced in Maine, and notably so on the island itself. Usually it is Mount Desart, toned into Desert by the casual population, who thus give it a curious significance. [Nooks and corners of the...

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Maine Railroad Accident Reports

I've posted several hundred railroad accident reports from 1870-1889 on my Maine Genealogy website. Warning: some (including the one below) are quite gruesome.Sarah Ann Cunningham, a child eighteen months old, a daughter of Mr. Thomas Cunningham of Milford, was killed on the 25th of November, by the 5:15 down freight train, at the railroad crossing in Milford, near the bridge. The parents live within a few rods of the track; but the child had never before, as its mother says, strayed on to the road that she was aware of. It was a very dark evening,...

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Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Dictionary

A Passamaquoddy-Maliseet dictionary was released this week.The dictionary is being presented to the First Nations communities after three decades of work. The project began in the 1970s when organizers of an education program in Maine decided a dictionary was needed to keep the Maliseet language alive.Members of the First Nations communities on both side of the international border contributed words and definitions. [Link]You can get a taste of the language here, and pick up the print version at local bookstor...

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Google Launches Street View in Maine

I just received this press release from Google:Today Google Maps has expanded the coverage of its popular Street View feature to include imagery from across Maine. Street View is a free feature of Google Maps that lets internet users view and navigate 360-degree street-level imagery of cities, towns, and regions across the United States and internationally. Street View is integrated with driving directions on Google Maps to make it easier to see the view of the streets that accompany directions.Using Street View, people can check if a restaurant...

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LIFE Pictures of Maine

The LIFE Photo Archive just announced by Google includes some nice shots of Maine folks. They were taken by Bernard Hoffman for a feature called "Winter in Maine," which appeared in the March 9, 1942, issue of the magazine. Just 16 of the 67 photographs were publish...

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Maine's Bizarre Foods

Next Tuesday at 10pm on the Travel Channel, Bizarre Foods will be coming to Maine.In Maine, many residents find most of the food they eat right in their own backyards...literally. Andrew gets a taste of beaver chili, forages for some unlikely edible plants to make stinging nettles soup, and goes out to haul lobsters with a fishing legend. There's even a culinary death match featuring some bizarre recipes made only with ingredients found in Mai...

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George H. Pray, Potato Juggler

One Union soldier from Maine survived the war by juggling potatoes.During the Civil War, 12,913 inmates died from the extreme conditions in the Confederate prison in Andersonville, Ga. One Union soldier who didn't was Pvt. George H. Pray, a clever Mainer whose stage act perhaps saved his life."How he survived Andersonville was that he juggled potatoes," said Jeffrey Bolduc, Pray's great-great-grandson, recently. "After he juggled them, he kept them and ate them."After the Civil War, Pray made it his mission to strike down boredom wherever it could...

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Portland Mural Nears Completion

Elizabeth Burke and Rebecca Pease are finishing up the mural they're painting on the wall of a new parking garage on India Street in Portland. It's a sepia-toned interpretation of a 1910 photograph of Portland Harbor.A few more examples of Portland murals may be seen on this discontinued bl...

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Bigfoot Sighted Near Maine

Now comes news from Cryptomundo of a "possible Bigfoot sighting a few miles east of the Maine-Canada border near Skiff Lake, NB."What is being seen in the area is a “Black Sasquatch.” Specifically, it is described as a “pitch-black, sleek, hairy, approximately 8-and-a-half foot [tall] Sasquatc...

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Horace Wilson, Japanese Baseball Hall of Famer

A man from Gorham is credited with bringing baseball to Japan.Horace Wilson, a Gorham farm boy who returned from the Civil War only to go west to California and eventually across the Pacific, is the man the Japanese say introduced baseball to their country. He was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 2003.On a day in 1872 or a year later, depending on who's telling the story, Horace Wilson decided his students at the First Higher School of Tokyo needed to get away from their class lessons. A little physical exercise in the form of...

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No More Trash-Can Mail Delivery on Sutton Island

Residents of Sutton Island in Cranberry Isles can no longer have their mail delivered to a garbage can.Residents say that since at least the 1950s, and perhaps longer, mail has been delivered to the island by a private passenger ferry service, leaving packages, postcards, letters, bills, and whatever else had enough postage in a specially marked trash can on the float at the end of the island’s lone municipal dock.Though permitted by a succession of postmasters in Northeast Harbor, where the ferry service comes and goes from the island, the practice...

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Moose Mountain, a Maine Webcomic

Earl Hornswaggle creator Mark Ricketts kicks off a new webcomic this week, and it too is set in Maine.MOOSE MOUNTAIN revolves around Ranger Todd, a nature loving do-gooder, and the wildlife that resides at Moose Mountain National Park. There's a brooding, love-sick blackfly, a New Jersey squirrel family relocated to the park by the wildlife witness protection program, a self-centered, passive aggressive black bear, and a moose whose four husbands...

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Maine's Degree Confluences

Of the 64,442 degree confluences on Earth—spots where latitude and longitude integer degrees intersect—twelve are located in Maine, and all twelve have been visited by participants of The Degree Confluence Project. One lies in Aziscohos Lake, very near the spot where my grandparents once owned a camp.We arrived at the end of the dirt road, 100m inland from the shore, and 500m north of the confluence. We brought kayaks, and found a portage trail which...

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Swimming Holes in Maine

Here's a list of 38 swimming holes in Maine (via kottke).FRENCHMANS HOLE [FREN]: PLEASE TREAT THIS AREA GENTLY The landowners here have graciously allowed the public to access this swimming hole for a few generations. Recent abuses of this place has caused the owners to question their generosity. Please make an effort to leave no trace of your visit and to remove the traces left by others. YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE at this swimming hole and at any others that you may visit. Be brave. Be a leader. Set the example....

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No Hogs or Women Allowed on Hog Island

Hogs and women were once banned on the Isles of Shoals. Janice Brown of Cow Hampshire explains what happened when John Reynolds brought his wife and "a great stock of goats and swine" to Hog Island (now Appledore) in 1647. Only his wife was allowed to stay.Reynolds wasn't the first to bring a woman to the islands, as John Scribner Jenness notes in his The Isles of Shoals: An Historical Sketch, and the majority of islanders approved of the presence of women.[T]he married men of the Islands, when this obsolete law had been brought to notice, were...

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Was Talleyrand Born In Maine?

Was French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord—popularly known as "Talleyrand"—born in Maine? Edward Robbins, a former Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, thought so.When Talleyrand was in Boston, in 1794, he was introduced to Mr. Robbins, and they became quite intimate. A few weeks subsequent to their acquaintance, Mr. Robbins was called on business to Mount Desert, in Maine, where, to his surprise, he found Talleyrand, incog., and...

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John Bunker, Pomologist

The Atlantic has an article on pomologist John Bunker of Palermo.His vocation arrived in a bushel basket, when he was managing a food cooperative in the town of Belfast. A man named Ira Proctor walked in one day to ask if the co-op would sell some of his apples on consignment. Bunker had never seen their like: apples the shape of a perfect McIntosh (a variety widely planted in Maine only after a calamitous freeze killed more than a million trees...

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Daggett Rock

An article in Saturday's Sun Journal discussed Daggett Rock in Phillips:Boston University's Wroe Wolfe called Daggett Rock "one of the largest glacial-transported boulders on the earth" and figured it was part of the Saddleback Mountain range seven miles away.At 100 feet long, 55 feet wide and 31 visible feet tall, "it's supposedly the biggest boulder, I've been told, in the eastern United States," said Dennis Atkinson, president of the Phillips...

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University of Maine Yearbooks

Fogler Library has posted online University of Maine Yearbooks from 1895 to 1997.Issues of The Prism vary in content and layout, but seniors are always highlighted. Individual photographs of seniors are arranged in alphabetical order by last name (within each college), and accompanied by information about hometown, major, and fraternity or sorority. Some books also contain photos of members of other classes. Also included are sections on the faculty and administration, campus organizations, athletic teams, Greek societies, and even...

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The Origins of Delorme

The founder of the Delorme map company was profiled this weekend in the Bangor Daily News.More than 30 years ago, upon returning from Vietnam, a young Dave Delorme soon reverted back to his Maine roots of outdoor recreation. What soon became evident to him was a major lack of dependable and detailed mapping of highways, secondary roads and woods roads. Dave learned that the state actually published a fairly comprehensive highway atlas, and that these Pine Tree road charts were in the public domain, meaning the maps were available for use by one...

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The Other Granite State

Steve Haynes and wife Juanita founded The Maine Granite Industry Historical Society and Museum six years ago.Anyone who spends more than five minutes in the museum is likely to be introduced to at least several dozen different types of Maine granite with which the curator is intimately acquainted.To date, he has documented and sampled nearly 50 quarries on Mount Desert Island and 350 quarries statewide.Generally each geographic region of Maine has its own specific and singular type of granite, but Mount Desert Island has an unusual variety of colors...

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The Trickey Bible

A 1793 Bible held by the Old York Historical Society is said to have belonged to pirate William Trickey, who lived between the towns of Kittery and York.The devil was so impressed by Trickey's misdeeds in life that he condemned him to haunt Brave Boat Harbor for eternity. He was furthermore cursed to bind and haul sand with a rope. Supposedly one can still hear the salty old pirate screaming amidst the winds of a storm, "More rope! More sand! More rope! More sand!" The looming figure of Trickey may even appear, ever growing until the storm finally...

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Group Seeks Recognition of Aroostook War Route

The 1837 Foundation of Northern Maine is mounting a campaign for "national recognition of the route the Aroostook War expeditionary militia took as it journeyed north to defend this nation’s borders against incursion from Great Britain."The group hopes to create and achieve national recognition for the route, which started at the militia’s rendezvous site in Lincoln and ended at the site of the defensive breastworks in Masardis, Aroostook County, said Roxanne J. Munksgaard, the foundation’s executive director.The group also yearns to create a battlefield...

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The World's Tallest Snowwoman

An effort to build the world's tallest snowwoman kicks off today in Bethel.At 113' 7" tall, the World's Tallest Snowman was created in Bethel, Maine in 1999. Now the community has set their sights even higher... launching the creation of the World's Tallest SNOWWOMAN at an estimated 120ft!The website has a live webcam so you can watch all the snow-piling acti...

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