Regular maintenance, we hope
Making out like pirates, weather permitting
Considering that all but one member of my Hodgson family crossing the Atlantic in 1710 was decimated by French privateers, I find nothing romantic about pirates.
Even with legal sanction, as privateers were, they remained thieves and brutes of the seas. Well, though, there were apparently a number of unwritten understandings. Or else someone walks the plank. Or, in our case, died of maltreatment.
That said, one of Eastport’s two biggest events of the year comes the weekend after Labor Day, when everyone celebrates the city’s Pirate Festival. Yes, those black flags with the white skull and crossbones fly everywhere, even on seagoing fishing boats and the passenger ferry. And many folks dress the part to the hilt, even with what sometimes looks like a kilt. Some of the costumes are quite exquisite in their detailing, while others are pretty loose, like the guy in Hawaiian shirt and a pirate vest and hat.
For the record, the port was once abuzz with smuggling to and from neighboring Canada.
History aside, I can’t complain about the special events and its welcome crowd that extend the summer season, even if I had thought it would mean I’d have to keep my mouth closed.
What we have is essentially a seafaring blast, with people strolling the street in period garb and canes. Some of them cross over into steampunk, which also fits the later steamship period, I suppose, and I do love watching for the anachronisms, like the cell phones and plastic water bottles in hand.
There’s plenty of up-to-snuff music-making, street dances, magicians and Punch-and-Judy presentations, a barrel relay race, even cutlass instruction for children armed with foam noodles.
It’s like trick-or-treat nearly two months early, and the decorations can stay up till Halloween. I’ve been surprised at the light-hearted air of the celebration, one without the demonic undertow of Salem, Massachusetts, approaching November.
I do appreciate the appearance of parrots on some costumes, so much so I keep calling this our Parrot Festival.
As a footnote, last year’s attendance was curbed by the Canadian border closures due to Covid. Community here extends on both sides of the international boundary.
Just what is it about pirates that captures people’s imagination?
Confidentially Inga
if only to disagree with some passage the page opens more than we come expecting, now let us mud-wrestle and- see what we hate in the Lamb’s War (Ephesians) taken to your closet, taken to the street, this is not law but essential life drama where everyone’s unmasked in the story to embrace a more open stance than I’ve grown accustomed to greeting when some own up to privation lest they finally examine the Bible without the snobbery of Baltimore toward Indiana, :still there’s less resistance in burnished Boston amid some faithful, ahem, affectionately, then, let the red ink dry first
Voices return
We’ll be back in rehearsals starting Monday night, and it’s looking exciting.
Quoddy Voices will be preparing Henry Purcell’s “Ode to St. Cecilia’s Day” and works by Florence Price, Randall Thompson, and John Rutter, among others, for a program to be performed twice at the Eastport Arts Center before Thanksgiving.
Excuse me while I start vocalizing. Don’t want to sound rusty.
My new ebook goes live today
Yeah, yeah, yeah, everybody these days is touting a book. But my Quaking Dover really is different, starting with its contrarian take on New England history.
Let me proclaim: Quakers are NOT extinct!
Besides, there are good reasons they’re the oldest independent congregation in a future state that’s itself in a town that’s the seventh-oldest in America.
These things go WAY back but are still with us.
Look, I’ve spent two years researching, drafting, and revising this for publication.
If you’re tech-savvy, you’ll go for the ebook edition, which goes worldwide today.
Otherwise wait for a month, when the print version goes live.
Go for it! Pretty please?
Whittier in Dover didn’t reference the poet
Dover Friends have long been proud of their connection to the rock-star protest poet John Greenleaf Whittier of neighboring Amesbury Friends Meeting in Massachusetts.
His mother was from the Hussey family in today’s neighboring Rollinsford, New Hampshire, and she married in our meetinghouse.
Usually, we trace her ancestry through the Husseys of sprawling Hampton Monthly Meeting, which eventually settled down into Amesbury.
But Greenleaf’s uncle Obediah thickens the plot.
Quite simply, Dover’s Whittier Street and Whittier Falls in the Cochecho River are not named for the famed poet, but rather his uncle and cousin.
And the alternative Whitchers spelling and pronunciation is most tempting, though I won’t go there.
Obediah Whittier (1758-1814) moved from Haverhill, Massachusetts, to Dover and married Sarah Austin of Rochester in 1786. He owned a fulling mill, gristmill, and building for dressing cloth on the eastern side of the upper falls of the Cochecho River that were destroyed in January 1817 by a fire that broke out in the carding mill. Son Moses Whittier (1789-1857), however, at once erected new machinery and resumed the carding, fulling, and clothing business the following month. The falls, now known as Whittier Falls, were also called Whitcher’s (a variant on Whittier), Tolend, or the Upper Falls, though there were more cascades upstream.
Obediah and Sarah’s daughter Anna wed Isaac Wendell of Dover in 1809. Daughter Sarah married George D. Varney of Somersworth in 1813. Daughter Mary wed Gideon C. Smith of Somersworth in 1827. (Isaac Wendell was a cofounder of the Dover Cotton Factory, which was the origin of the big mills downtown.)
Son Moses (1789-1857) married Sarah Hacker Jones (1793-1837) of Brunswick, Maine, in Durham, Maine, in 1821, probably at the Friends Meeting. The Jones cemetery in Brunswick has stones for several Dover surnames, including Cartlands, who were also related to the poet – and many of these use Quaker dating.
It’s possible that Greenleaf’s father, John Whittier, met Abigail Hussey through visits to his brother in turn, or that Obediah, likewise, met his wife through other family visits. Opportunities either way would have strengthened any fascination and eventual courtship.
John Greenleaf Whittier’s brother, Matthew Franklin Whittier, even moved to Dover at one point but died in Boston.
You’d never guess any of this walking today’s Community Trail along the river.
~*~
Check out my new book, Quaking Dover, available in your choice of ebook platforms at Smashwords.com.
Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400th anniversary.
Please respect the sign
It’s a joke, really
Just in case you’re creating bumper stickers
Pardon me for getting political, but an important national election is coming up. Not that all of them aren’t important, but democracy is being threatened.
So here’s my chance to vent. See if any of these stick.
- Liberty is Liberal in Practice.
- 99% from the 1% (they’ll still be getting ahead).
- If you can’t be civil, just shut up.
- Democracy’s for consenting adults.
- Wipe and then flush the toilet after you’re done. We’re tired of cleaning up your messes.
- Don’t Bully My Free Speech.
- Today’s Lincoln Republican votes a straight Democratic ticket.
- Real taxpayer waste? Let’s start with Pentagon contracts.
- Just drink the Kool-Aid.
- Stop calling me slurs unless you want me to return the favor.
Do I sound embittered? Really!
Honoring the earlier place names
A revival of Indigenous languages, which were long suppressed by federal policy, is gaining momentum where I live in Way Downeast Maine.
For one thing, the Passamaquoddy are now teaching it in their schools.
For another, their words are pronounced in ways that transcriptions into Latin-based letters don’t quite capture. There are simply sounds that my ears miss entirely and my tongue and lips will never manage to enunciate properly. How humbling!
“Passamaquoddy,” for instance, is pronounced more like “peskotomuhkati,” meaning “people who spear pollock,” reflecting their ocean hunting skills.
Linguistically, the Passamaquoddy language works differently than do European languages with their subject-verb-object constructions, and reflects an alternative way of comprehending the land, waters, and skies where we dwell.
The latest edition of the Tides Institute’s Artsipelago map of communities and sites around the tidal waters of our corner of Maine and neighboring New Brunswick, Canada, now includes Passamaquoddy names in addition to the more familiar English, Anglicized, and French ones.
To my eyes, this adds another dimension to our awareness of the landscape and its legacy.
How do you see it?
Jnana's Red Barn 