Category: Communities

Counting Empty Houses Come Winter Affordable housing finds a foothold on Maine’s islands. BY ANNIE MURPHY Tiffany Tate knows the frustration of looking for affordable housing on an island where all real estate is expensive and rentals are hard to come by. She was raised in Washington County, but Tate’s… SEE MORE

Stonington: A Town on the Edge Contradictions abound, but resiliency abides. STORY AND PHOTOS BY TOM GROENING If anyone has a finger on the pulse of a community, it’s the guy who runs the town’s weekly newspaper. And what does Ben Barrows, general manager of the Island Ad-Vantages, think about… SEE MORE

Island Fellows: A ‘Peace Corps for the Islands’ Fellows reverse Maine ‘brain drain,’ provide extra hands BY ABIGAIL CURTIS The board funded the Fellows program in 1998, and the following year the first two hardy souls were placed on Monhegan and in Casco Bay. It was the kind of blustery… SEE MORE

The ledges path leads from my back field in a southeasterly direction toward the sea. On a small island in Maine, all paths lead ultimately to the sea. This one cuts through a spruce forest where deep mosses fill in the spaces between old trees that are falling away; it… SEE MORE

The water pipes on Vinalhaven have frozen. Well, they may have frozen. No one really seems to know what happened, but an early January bitter cold stretch—daytime highs in single digits—has put some kind of hurt on the municipal water system. One explanation is that so many homeowners’ pipes have… SEE MORE

On Halloween morning, as the Margaret Chase Smith crossed the silvery reach of Penobscot Bay between Islesboro and the mainland, the passenger compartment was abuzz with the sounds of giggling children putting the final touches on their costumes. The quieter, Carhartt-clad workmen who also rode the ferry for the three-mile-long… SEE MORE

There’s a joke on Monhegan that the name of the island can be loosely translated as “island of many waitresses.” Like the hundreds of 20-something women that have preceded me, I showed up on this rock to wait tables after finishing college. In between polishing glassware and reciting the daily… SEE MORE