Quoddy Village is almost an island of its own

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Most of Eastport’s small population resides in a semicircle around the Breakwater downtown. Quoddy Village stands apart, separated by a narrow neck around Carrying Place Cove. It also fronts Half Moon Cove, with a dead-end road to the former toll-bridge to the mainland. The place feels like an island of its own and is easily overlooked when you drive into town. The highway skirts it, and what you see is mostly former industrial, rusty, and all that.

A former factory looking for new uses gives no clue to passers-by of the residential neighborhood behind it.
Chimneys are all that remain of the administrative headquarters and even a school that supported a federal project in the 1930s.

Until 1935, this was farmland, but then an ambitious but ecologically disastrous public works project took off, one to dam up most of Passamaquoddy and Cobscook bays to transform their vast tidal energy into electricity. A large but confusing working model of the engineering proposal can be viewed at the historical society’s gift shop in downtown Eastport. (The room-size three-dimensional map is water in and water out, mostly. If you don’t already know the area, it’s baffling – and the presentation is aimed at today’s tourists. I still think it would make for a really interesting model railroad layout.) The short-lived boondoggle’s most lasting contribution, apparently, was the causeway connecting Eastport to the mainland by filling in a former railroad line. No more toll bridge and longer loop. Oh, yes, and it also had a noticeable negative impact on the Old Sow, the world’s second-largest whirlpool, perhaps even pushing it more into Canada.

Significantly, the project needed housing for its estimated 5,000 workers, and that led to the construction of Quoddy Village.

Even though the plug was pulled a year later on what would have been the world’s largest tidal dam – it did require Canadian cooperation, among other things – 128 single-family, two-family, and four-family houses had been constructed, along with three large dormitories with dining rooms for single workers, plus a fire station, a hospital, a heating plant, a school, a large mess hall, and a large administration building that included a theatre, library, and sub post office. In other words, a small city unto itself. Even though the homes had been designed as temporary, many of them are still occupied today. Still, for a brief time, the village was home to a thousand people.

More evidence of abandoned projects, also seen from the state highway.

From 1938 to 1943 the National Youth Administration used Quoddy to train 800 city youth a year in vocational trades. It was also a Navy Sea Bee base named Camp Lee-Stephenson during World War II.

And then? It morphed into a residential neighborhood.

Its best-known attraction today is David Oja’s colorful and eccentric Bazaar, a gift shop that includes what’s arguably the best gourmet wine and cheese selection in Washington County. Think of it as a blast of Puerto Rico, Brooklyn, and Provincetown rolled into one. Who knows what the original function of the building was, we can be sure it was not nearly anything like this.

The one-of-a-kind Bazaar, seemingly out in the middle of nowhere.
Today it’s mostly residential. I think of it as a small suburb.
Anyone else see potential here?
Yes, there’s a mix of housing, some of it from the ’30s.
Much of it is also a working neighborhood. I’m all in favor of working from home, when you can.

Is this funky? Or what?

Rossport is not your average retreat by the sea

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

To one side of Eastport’s Quoddy Village is Rossport by the Sea, a remarkable – and reasonably priced – 80-plus acre family-friendly retreat created in 1987 by Ross Furman when he purchased the dilapidated and vacant 1790 Captain Jacob Lincoln farmhouse.

This is your greeting from the old Toll Bridge Road.

It’s definitely not your average motel, hotel, or cabins and campground, either.

The resort’s 32 bedrooms in 12 private sites have access to more than a mile and a half of shoreline and seemingly endless views. There’s also an organic farm working part of the grounds.

If you’re thinking of a visit to Eastport, I’d suggest booking there first, May through October. Not that there aren’t some other good options. Or maybe I’m just being envious.

Still, just walking around the grounds is delightful.

This lane leads into the grounds.
Here’s what you’ll find in one of the barns.
Here’s one of the cabins available for rent. The lawn leads down to the ocean.
A whale vertebra sits on the deck of one of the cabins.
I love the quirkiness of sculpture like this puffin.
How about a decorated canoe? Go ahead, click on it for the inside view. I hope.

That said, you may want to put it on your list of vacation destinations to consider for next year and then make your reservations early, should you desire.

What distinct accommodations would you suggest for a traveler?

Making out like pirates, weather permitting

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

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.

It really does start to feel like a step back in time.

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.

The big small-town parade includes a raft of family ATVs decked out for the occasion.
And an ambulance with its own sense of gallows humor.
And my own favorite, a float with a Jamaican steel drum band.

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.

Of special note are the flaming dance performances by Ravenbane’s Firecraft and the Saturday night fireworks at the Fish Pier.
There are decorations everywhere.

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

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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!

Check it out at Smashwords and its associated digital ebook retailers.

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

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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.

Abigail Hussey, mother of poet John Greenleaf Whittier

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.

Whittier Falls in the Cochecho River.

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.

Dover’s Whittier family is buried in Pine Hill Cemetery abutting the meetinghouse.

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.