On July 16, a beautiful sunny island day, over 100 family members and guests assembled at the edge of Lunt Harbor, Frenchboro, to celebrate the life of an island patriarch, David Lunt (1938-2025).
The state ferry brought many of the guests from the mainland, the Maine Seacoast Mission’s Sunbeam brought additional guests, while Lunt family lobster boats transported those members of the family now living ashore.
I arrived by outboard from Burnt Coat Harbor on Swan’s Island where Peter Ralston and I had been detained the previous evening by a diesel engine failure.
Over 100 guests assembled on the steep-sided western shore of the harbor overlooking the Frenchboro Church, schoolhouse, and library, the community institutions that anchor this small island in the sea. David Lunt’s sons and grandchildren seated around the gravesite brought to mind Peter Ralson’s stirring photograph of David’s father, Dick Lunt with his hand on Dick’s great grandson, Nate, who had his hands solidly around a large codfish.
David was really the engineer driving the selection process to identify the new islanders and new neighbors.
Dean Lunt, David’s youngest son, presided over the solemn event, with spiritual comfort provided by the Maine Seacoast Mission pastor who arrived on the Sunbeam. Following the committal in the small cemetery that the Lunt family had donated to the town, guests boarded a solemn procession of lobster boats out of the harbor into a lifting fog to assemble off the western shores of Frenchboro to scatter the remainder of David’s ashes, fittingly in the sea.
I served on the Board of the Frenchboro Future Development Committee chaired by David, which successfully applied for and received funding from the Maine State Housing Commission for a large grant to construct the first seven new houses, including one for the island school teacher, and also repair deteriorated and decrepit docks along the waterfront and patch the roofs of community buildings including the church and school.
The 50-acre parcel for the new houses on the east side of the harbor had been donated by the Rockefeller family as an area where the year-round fishing community could expand.
David Lunt, never one to mince words, explained that the community wanted to attract young families “We need young breeders,” was how he put it.
The Frenchboro community building plan was such a compelling story it got picked up in the press and soon became national news, including a front-page story in the National Enquirer, “Come Live With Us on Fantasy Island!” Within the three-month application period, there were over 3,000 applications that flooded in from all over the country.
David was really the engineer driving the selection process to identify the new islanders and new neighbors. He had a keen eye for those families who could make it in the fishing industry, which was and is the economic backbone of the year-round community.
Rather suddenly, Frenchboro’s one-room schoolhouse would go from one student to about a dozen and with David’s exceptional leadership, a new chapter in Frenchboro’s long and tenacious history had begun.
This moment, in 1998, was captured by Peter Ralston’s memorable photograph of a dozen young school children on the Frenchboro schoolhouse porch.
Next school year, Frenchboro’s schoolhouse will be closed, as most of the island’s children will be going to school on Mount Desert Island, where they benefit from a larger number of school friends and activities—including sports. Nevertheless, there are a number of younger children on the way, including from one of David Lunt’s grandsons, Joe, who is now Frenchboro’s head selectman.
The tides on Maine islands do not just go out, they also return. Looking out over Lunt Harbor on this momentous occasion, I am struck by the sight of over a dozen lobster boats with Frenchboro as a hailing port, bigger, better-rigged and more prosperous than I can remember seeing their fleet in years. As long as the Gulf of Maine continues to produce marine life, island communities such as Frenchboro will have a future.
Philip Conkling is the founder of Island Institute, along with Peter Ralston.
