Day 122, Monday August 5, 2024: Presque Isle, Maine to Oakland, Maine
- Mark Carl Rom
- 3 days ago
- 11 min read
Carnegie libraries visited: Fort Fairfield, Houlton, Old Towne, Pittsfield, Madison, Waterville, and Oakland, Maine
Days sober: 410
My loins are girded with coffee and Grape Nuts. After ten days off the trail, I plan to make up for lost time today. Rather than dropping destinations from the itinerary – which would have been the wise choice – I just plan to drive faster, longer, and farther. My plan is to drive some ~500 miles, visit seven Carnegie libraries, and have a picnic in Bar Harbor. Goldfinger and I were on the road by 6.15, after grabbing two cups of coffee to go from the Hampton Inn. My route would take me almost entirely through rural Maine, first due south hugging the New Brunswick border and then southwest through Bar Harbor and, if the creek don’t rise, the town of Camden. Ditch lilies were no longer the dominant wildflower lining the country roads: Spotted Knapweed, Alfalfa, Common Burdock, and Bee Balm proliferated.
I’m listening to Spying on the South, the account of Tony Horwitz who recreated the southern travels of Frederick Law Olmstead, the not-yet landscape architect most famous for designing New York’s Central Park. The book alternates between presenting documentary evidence of Olmstead’s travels – he wrote three books about his southern sojourns in the decades before the Civil War – and his own experiences along the route. You know: a travelogue with a purpose. The book is rich with stories of Olmstead’s adventures through the slave-based South and Horwitz’s experiences of today. Horowitz is a keen observer, and what he mainly observes are the conversations with those he meets. He talks to everyone, and his honest curiosity leads them to talk back.
One of Horwitz's stories involved a three-day mule trip in Texas with Buck, his guide with the attitude of “The customer is definitely not always right. In fact, my customer (Horwitz) is an idiot.” Buck pitches Horwitz on the idea of a reality show with Buck riding a mule from Texas to the Pacific, with the name “Three Miles an Hour.” Horwitz was skeptical: Who will ride with you? Buck insists he would travel alone. Horwitz reminds Buck that most reality shows are conversation based, with the dramatic tension and humor based on the participants’ conversations. Buck’s reply? “Words are overrated.”
I give words – at least the good ones – a five-star rating. I realize how infrequently they come from my own mouth on this trip. Here is a transcript of my conversations today, in their entirety:
Me: “$60 on pump 3, please.”
Her: “Ok.”
Me: “Thanks. You’re the best.”
That’s all, folks. My observations are mainly based on what I see, read, and think, not on what I hear or say.
6.28 a.m. Fort Fairfield: Today’s early bird Carnegie library. A Docker’s khaki slacks of a Carnegie, except for the two bright banners flanking the front entrance: “Spark a love of learning” and “Experience the beauty of books.
6.54 a.m. Mars Hill: The W.T.A. Hansen Memorial Library. Dedicated to a local business leader who donated the money to build it, the small library, with a staff of two in 2024, has served the community since 1938.
7.30 a.m. Holton: The Carey (Carnegie) Library. It looks like the Carnegie in Rumford which I saw on July 24. This grant – in fact, most grants – involved a good bit of back and forth. When writing Carnegie, town officials noted that Dr. George Carey had given the town $10,000 to support a library, so long as the town provided a building. Bertram’s view was that, if Houlton already had $10,000 for a library, why did it need Carnegie’s cash? The wishes of the deceased Carey and the quite-alive Carnegie were both finally granted. Carnegie’s funds would be used for construction, Carey’s for books and maintenance, with the town still on the hook for $1000/annually in taxpayer support.
8.12 a.m. Danforth: A village of 587 on the edge of Grand Lake, which separates the US from Canada, has two car chargers and one library more than it has restaurants. During the winter, it’s open from 10 to 2 on Saturdays, so clear your calendar.
8.55 a.m. Princeton, Maine: This village has fewer residents – 745 – than at any time since the 1870 census. If I had planned my day better, I could have enjoyed breakfast at the Old School Restaurant and, if the pictures I’ve seen can be believed, I should have. (It’s open from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday.) The library doesn’t open until its director, Heidi Potter, unlocks it. Should she be dining at the Old School, the walk to her office would take all of two minutes.
10.23 a.m. Calais: The Calais Free Library is only one of many lovely and historic buildings in this friendly border town. All fifteen of its Google reviews are five stars, including this one from Lucas “My favorite library. I helped save it in 2002.” Fair enough. That year the library’s budget was cut by 50 percent until community members rallied to restore the funding (unverified AI statement).
10.23 a.m. Pembroke, Maine: Like you, I don’t understand how I could have been in two different towns at the same time. The pictures of the Calais Free Library and the Pembroke Library both have that date stamp, though, and who am I to argue with my iPhone? There’s no need to argue, I see, as I am guessing that while in Calais my phone was connecting to New Brunswick, Canada time, which is one hour ahead of Pembroke’s Eastern time. Still, I don’t remember giving Canada permission to impose its temporal terms on me.
11.10 a.m. Machias: The Porter Memorial Library is named in honor of the town’s first (named) library host: in the 1840s, its collection was held in Rufus King Porter’s law office. His son, Henry Homes Porter, donated $10,000 to Machias so that a library could be built in his father’s name. The library’s website does highlight two townswomen: Ursula Penniman (1809? - 1893), President of the Machias Library Association for 17 years in the late 1800s, and Luella A. Pendergast, President of the Ursula Penniman Federated Women’s Club.
By 2025, Ursula has almost entirely vanished from the record. The lone artifact I could find from Penniman’s life comes only from her death. Dorothy Foster Vachon posted a picture of Penniman’s gravestone on the Find A Grave website. It’s a simple portrait of the weathered stone, with Ursula’s name, death date, age at death (as she died in March 1893, she could have been born in 1809 or 1810), and an almost erased line from Henry Francis Lyte’s most commonly sung hymn “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.” The 1880 Census lists her occupation as “keeping houses” and as having a 14-year old niece, Julia, living with her. Her obituary in the Portland Daily Press, in its entirety, reads "Ursula Penniman died this noon. She was highly respected, widely known, and connected with the O’Brion family of Revolutionary fame.”
Why did Dorothy take and post this picture of Ursula’s headstone? Well, that’s just what Dorothy does. She grew up in Machias – her family had a long presence in the area – and her “obsession” (her word) with caring for and documenting gravestones has led her to becoming a lifetime member of the Maine Old Cemetery Association. As of October 30 in 2025, Dorothy had posted 25,6700 pictures on Find A Grave while adding almost 4000 memorials. I’ll hazard a guess that she’ll be spending time in a cemetery on Halloween.
I wish I had put odds on my guess. Dorothy – Dottie – immediately answered my email; I wrote her merely to thank her for work in documenting cemeteries. When she was a waitress in high school, she worked at the restaurant that hosted the “collection of retired school teachers [who] gathered for a monthly meeting of the Ursula Penniman club. I'm not sure if the organization still exists or what the group actually did.” She suggested I reach out to the local historical society. She gently corrected my misspelling of her last name, closing with “And yes, I do hope to spend a bit of time somewhere peaceful tomorrow! Most likely In a graveyard! Dottie”
11.47 a.m. Harrington: The Martha Washington Society organized the first, subscription, library in Harrington. When it came time to build a building, Harrington native Alice (Stout) Gallison opened her purse in honor of her late husband, Forest. The Gallison Memorial Library looks like Carnegie, only smaller and stripped of most of the exterior ornamentation. Chimneys adorn both ends, so it’s easy for me to imagine librarians reading Thanksgiving stories to children as they sat by the fire after the library was opened in the 1920s.
12.02 p.m. Millbridge: The Town Office and Public Library, and its parking lot, form a set of white-on-gray lines with gray-on-white clouds wafting above.
12.28 p.m. Sullivan: The Frenchman’s Bay Library is a study in red (truck), white (walls), and blue (door).
1.27 p.m. Bar Harbor: The traffic slowed down a few miles before I arrived at the Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor. I drove out of the way to this famous resort town for the reason that I knew it was on the edge of Acadia National Park. Earlier in the summer I had booked a “timed-entry” slot to visit Acadia which I wasn’t able to use (or rebook) due to my covid-induced visit to Bethesda. As close as I would be to it, I knew that I would have to visit Acadia some other time.
I might have made a similar decision regarding Bar Harbor. The problem with resort towns, you know, is that they can be overrun with tourists during high season and, on August 5, it is definitely high season on the coast of Maine. The Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors were no longer there, I don’t think, and I doubted that Martha Stewart or Roxanne Quimby, the co-founder of Burt’s Bees, would invite me over. The library was closed – indeed, all but one of the 21 libraries I visited on this Monday were closed for the day – and there was no parking anywhere. For good reason. The weather was perfect, low 70s and sunny, with a calming no need to stress out breeze. I’m a skilled urban driver, and usually able to suss out a spot too tight for others to use. Not today, so with the gentle breeze now at my back I retraced my steps. A few miles out of town, I pulled into a small park on the edge of the water, and I ate my lunch in solitude.
Even on remote stretches, the roads in Maine were often lined with American flags that are attached to telephone poles. I’m inspired by the symbolism of the object, yet even more so by the fact that groups of people – sometimes, the local government; other times, organizations such as the American Legion – come together and agree to buy the flags and work to install them. They remind me of how fortunate I am to be an American, even if part of my fortune is the privilege of not being racially-profiled and having enough time and money to enjoy the open road.
Not all flag projects are beloved. Plans to raise the world’s tallest flagpole (1141 feet) to honor our nation’s veterans in a park near Columbia Falls, Maine were scuttled for pretty much all the reasons that big projects often are. I won’t lose any sleep over that. A modestly-sized stars and stripes, saluting at a 45 degree angle from a telephone pole, on a patch of road that might see one pickup pass by every so often, seems a more heartfelt tribute to those who have served.
2.58 p.m. Ellsworth: The fine public library resides in the home built in 1817 for Colonel Meltiah Jordan, where it’s been a library since 1897. I wish I could move in as the library’s caretaker or fireplace-stoker.
3.48 p.m. Old Town: As a Boy Scout, I believed that Old Town canoes were the finest in the universe, so when I arrived in Old Town I was more eager to find the company than the library. I didn’t know much about canoes and I didn’t need to, as Old Town “is one of the few Maine businesses to have achieved legendary status nationally.” Legendary and invisible. Plugging “canoe” into my GPS when I arrived in Old Town produced KANU, an upscale restaurant; Gould’s Landing, a place to launch canoes into Pushaw Lake; and Old Town Trading Post, “great live bait selection for ice fishing!”; and no Old Town Canoe Company. The company, it seems, is still making canoes and kayaks somewhere in the area, and if this is true then mum’s the word, as I couldn’t discover where. OTCC has been sold a couple of times over the years, and its original plant has been demolished.
Old Town Canoes was incorporated in 1901, two years before the community received its Carnegie grant. In its application, the Library Board noted that the city’s residents were “mainly mill hands and working people, with no wealthy men.” Times have changed. Old Town’s biggest employers in the 2020s were the University of Maine and the Eastern Maine Medical Center.
4.42 p.m. Corinth: The sign outside the faded Atkins Memorial Library says that it’s open on Thursday afternoons. The sign taped to the window indicates it did not reopen after Covid closed its doors.
Until 2025, when it announced that it would be open on Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, with a new director, Josie Swoboda. Kudos, Corinth.
5.06 p.m. Corinna: I hope the Stewart Free Library hosts a haunted house on Halloween, as the clock has stopped on the face of its towering belfry.
5.31 p.m. Pittsfield: With its center dome and two rectangular wings holding stacks angled toward the middle, the librarian could sit at her desk in the center of it all and survey her entire domain.
6.16 p.m. Madison: I visited the Carnegie library here for the second time on this trip, as I had simply forgotten that I had been here before.The library is almost a photoreverse of the Pittsfield library, as its wings fold back rather than point forward. My photograph is, without forethought, from the same spot. My view differed little from the one that could have been seen when the “Boys in Blue” statue, erected in 1907, commemorating Madison’s soldiers who served during the Civil War.
6.46 p.m. Waterville: When the school superintendent wrote Carnegie in 1902 to seek funding, he confided that the town was not rich, that the town was providing an incipient library $500 year, and that the library had been $400 in debt until “it was recently cleared through the efforts of the Waterville Women’s Literary Club, the members of which made a personal canvass of the city for the sum raised.”
Writing checks and canvassing personally are each important, although they represent different kinds of contributions. These days, I mainly write checks, contributing small amounts (in the range of a few dollars to a few thousand) to social and political causes I deem worthwhile. My sister Cristine also does this, I’m sure, yet she expends much more time and effort in canvassing. Going door-to-door. Talking to people in person and on the phone. Standing outside buildings collecting signatures. Money is sometimes seen as all-important in politics – and I don’t want to understate how influential (in ways both helpful and destructive) a $100 million check can be – yet this is only to the extent money can be used to buy the things that humans can do. Carnegie’s fortune allowed him to build libraries all over the world. The Waterville Women’s Literary Club, by knocking on doors to raise the money to pay off the library’s debts, helped ensure that the town would get one of them.
7.05 p.m. Oakland: Alice Benjamin donated the land for the Carnegie library built here in 1915. I’m hoping that the library can tell me something – anything – more about her. A 1912 letter to Carnegie states that “a suitable lot will be given, centrally located, near schools, churches, Post Office, and an electric car line.” Nothing is said about the donor. In subsequent correspondence, Alice is recognized as the donor of land given for the “express purpose” of being the site for a free public library. Whatever your reasons, Alice, your gift continues to benefit the readers of Oakland.
I’ve been visiting libraries for more than twelve hours today, and I’m ready to call it a night. I am excited about tomorrow’s adventures, ferry ride included. I just need some tofu firstl
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