Last night Steven and I attended a Searsport Historical Society meeting for a presentation by Kevin Johnson the archivist at the Penobscot Marine Museum. PMM has been gifted 30,000 postcard images from the Eastern Illustration and Publishing Company of Belfast. We looked at slides that showed Searsport before electricity came to Maine’s coast. Many of the images were taken by Searsport resident Fredrick Ross Sweetser, a well known musician of his time.

The roads were dirt (more often mud) and the sidewalks were wooden planks. The children were well dressed and had bicycles and family pets.  The purpose of the presentation was to gather information from the people who grew up in town because they easily identified friends, family and buildings photographed between 1900 and 1920. My particular favorites were images of loading potatoes into a ships hull (taken from inside the ship) and a chess match between two sea captains with hands the size of black bear paws.

The museum is currently digitizing and archiving the 30,000 images so that they will be available on line to anyone who would like to see them…a monster project. If you’d like to peruse them in person, plan a visit to the museum…it’s open from 10-5 Monday through Saturday and 12-5 on Sunday…and if you decide to walk there from the campground, the shoulder of the road is wide and you can enjoy Museum in the Street explanations all along the way…this is a treat you won’t find anywhere else in the world!