Tag: Eastport

Signs that the Summer People are about to descend

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment
  1. First boat on a trailer bouncing down the street. Usually soon followed by another.
  2. Lights on in a seasonal second-home.
  3. Double the number of cars at the IGA from what’s been normal.
  4. Rain rather than snow.
  5. More than one vehicle parked overnight at the motel. And then international flags flying from its deck.
  6. Out-of-state licenses plates from other than a random New Hampshire or Massachusetts or Virginia vehicle. Beginning with Iowa, Wisconsin, Tennessee, but soon followed by Oregon, California, Texas, New York, New Jersey, Ohio. Somehow, Florida doesn’t flood in initially.
  7. A change in the quality of daylight, from bright crisp to buttery.
  8. The first Mercedes in town since October. Or BMW, Audi, or Volvo.
  9. Green grass and dandelions.
  10. Somebody actually moving within one of the seasonally closed stores or galleries downtown.

Deer are everywhere in this city

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Eastport is a city, after all, and many of the homes are packed in close together. Not that it matters to our local wildlife.

Here’s one in our driveway.
And crossing over to our neighbors.
They frequent a large lawn overlooking Shackford Cove and the sea.
This yard’s only a few blocks from downtown.
And these critters are just a block from the Breakwater.

They’re so much a part of the place they even have their own Facebook page, Deer Eastport, and it is very active.

No matter how cute, though, they’re a gardening challenge. As are the raccoons.

 

Looking today, it’s hard to envision this as a center of shipbuilding

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment
This cove is where Caleb Stetson Huston became Eastport’s most noted shipbuilder and marine architect. Here he created more than one hundred vessels from 1840 to 1870, surpassing the number of his father, Robert Huston, had built. He was no doubt responsible for repairing many more.

A third-generation shipbuilder, C.S. Huston at one point owned four shipyards on Shackford Cove – his father’s, on the south side of the water, and the William H. Hall and Jacob Shackford yards on its north side, as well as Aymar’s spar shop at the South End bridge, which has long since been filled in.

And how it can look six hours later.

As an innovative entrepreneur, he early on erected a steam capstan to haul boats out of the water, along with a 600-foot marine railway made of thick beams set up as interlocking boxes filled with stones.

Huston lived in a Second Empire style house overlooking the yards, which he purchased from Hall in the late 1850s.

Part of the C.S. Huston house on Third Street incorporates a section of the “Red Store” that John Shackford erected in 1787 at the foot of Shackford Street.

The shift to ships built of steel rather than wood changed everything. Maine had seemingly endless lumber at hand, but not steel. That also allowed for bigger vessels, meaning fewer could suffice for shipping. Finally, with the advent of the automobile, passengers stopped relying on steamships and that, too, ceased at the corner of this cove. But not before the world’s largest sardine cannery extended from its shore – a building 250 feet long.

At high tide it can appear to be quite scenic.

It seems so quiet today.