Richland County Baseball

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Tuesday, 29 September 2009

Salvaging Logs From the Penobscot

Posted on 21:35 by blogger
Thom Labrie and Bruce Loring of UnderWater Wood Specialists in Greene are harvesting timber at the bottom of the Penobscot River.
The wood — mostly pine — was cut by loggers and sent downriver for processing likely between the late 1700s and the 1970s. Logs that sank along the way were abandoned. Although the logs were extremely saturated, little else was wrong with them. The cold water kept them that way, preserved.

Enter Loring, the diver, and Labrie, the environmentalist with a background in the wood industry.

"I don't care if it's sitting in a building that's going to be demolished. I don't care if it's in a pallet. I don't care if it's under water. All the wood that's usable should be used before we cut down another tree," Labrie said. [Link]
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Thursday, 24 September 2009

Vincent's Beverages and Sunset Beverages, Lewiston, Maine

Posted on 18:39 by blogger
From the archives of The Soda Fizz, a 2003 article on Vincent's Beverages and Sunset Beverages—both bottled in Lewiston.
There were bad times too, when a fire did serious damage to the plant in November of 1951. But the infamous disaster was the wire-brush incident in November, 1952, when Irene Lajoie drank a bottle of Sunset Ginger Ale and claimed she became ill because there was a rusty wire brush in the bottle. She and her husband sued, and the press picked up the story.

Although Gerry Bilodeau explained convincingly that a brush in a bottle was impossible and the jury awarded the Lajoies only a fraction of what they had asked, the result was still not exactly the sort of publicity a small business wants or needs.
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Wednesday, 23 September 2009

Miss Minnie Libby, Village Photographer

Posted on 12:24 by blogger
Included in Google's new LIFE Magazine archive is a profile of Minnie Libby, portrait photographer of Norway.
In spanning half a century of Norway's life, Miss Libby's big camera has recorded most of the personal history of the town—the dude who became a Communist, the boys who became businessmen, the girl who languished over a pet pig.
Miss Libby—few call her Min or Minnie—goes around in knickers, men's shirts and a flowing bow tie. The iron-gray hair that frames her face makes her look something like John C. Calhoun. A first-class photographer all her life, she worked out her own technique as she went along.
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Saturday, 12 September 2009

Leonard Trask, the Wonderful Invalid

Posted on 21:52 by blogger
A Brief Historical Sketch of the Life and Sufferings of Leonard Trask, the Wonderful Invalid, tells the sad story of a man from Hartford and Peru who suffered a horrible injury when thrown from a horse in about 1833. Three subsequent accidents made his condition progressively worse, until Trask's spine became so deformed that his chin rested on his chest.
He has no power to move his head up or down, to the right or left, without moving his whole body; his neck, and upper part of the back, having become perfectly rigid, and the whole upper part of the spinal column, in the opinion of skillful physicians has become ossified.
In his prime he was erect, of symmetrical proportion,—standing six feet one inch in his boots, and weighing 199 pounds. To his chin he now measures three feet nine and a half inches; and to his shoulders, which are now the summit of the trunk, he measures four feet ten and a half inches, and weighs about 134 pounds.
Showhistory.com has a rare carte de visite of Trask, taken in Lewiston near the end of his life. Leonard died April 13, 1861, and was buried in the Oldham Cemetery, Peru.
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Thursday, 10 September 2009

The Isles of Shoals: A Geo-Anomoly

Posted on 18:25 by blogger
Twelve Mile Circle has a nice account of the Isles of Shoals—an archipelago Maine shares with New Hampshire.
Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Capt. John Mason received a joint land patent that included the Isles of Shoals along with a large tract on the mainland in 1622. A few years later they decided to divide the grant and each negotiated a portion of the Isles as part of the transaction. Mason retained the southern portion to form New Hampshire. Gorges retained the northern portion and associated it with land that would later become Maine. Thus the geo-anomaly exists primarily because two parties split fishing rights nearly four hundred years ago.
Those islands belonging to Maine fall within the jurisdiction of the town of Kittery.
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Wednesday, 9 September 2009

Finding L. L. Bean's Birthplace

Posted on 15:17 by blogger
I've just written up an account of my search for the birthplace of L.L. Bean on my Maine Genealogy website.
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      • Salvaging Logs From the Penobscot
      • Vincent's Beverages and Sunset Beverages, Lewiston...
      • Miss Minnie Libby, Village Photographer
      • Leonard Trask, the Wonderful Invalid
      • The Isles of Shoals: A Geo-Anomoly
      • Finding L. L. Bean's Birthplace
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