Transportation in these tough times have led many in the Sprucewold community to make the hard decision not to make the trek north this year. Our own family members and close neighbors who are currently not able to travel plan to come next year. Thoughts of all the ways to travel here led me to think of the beginning of the Sprucewold summer colony and the modes of transportation available to those early residents.

In the earliest days of summer travel, people arrived by ship. Capital Island got its name because in the 1870’s the developers in Gardiner, Maine marketed the hotel and early cottages to the residents from Augusta, the capital of Maine. They journeyed down the Kennebec River by ship to the island’s steamboat landing. Squirrel Island and Mouse Island also had large hotels (1871) (1877) whose guests arrived by steamboat. There are stories about the summer guests of Mouse Island being particularly rowdy party goers during prohibition. They were said to imbibe too much “Mouse Island bug juice”, come into the harbor and cause a ruckus. In Linekin Bay, Ocean Point received vacationers by steamboat at the Pleasant View House at Landing Road in the 1890s, Forest House (now Five Gables Inn) at Murray Hill beginning in 1896, and Bayville Inn in 1907. 

With all the summer visitors and not enough improved roads in the summer colonies, a ferry boat service began to take people on excursions to town directly from landings near their cottages or hotels. By 1914 Linekin Bay had a ferry boat, according to the Rusticators in Sprucewold Preserving the Legacy (2007), that stopped at Sewell’s Landing at Blow Horn Road, the Indian Trail Tea Room, Wall Point, Bayville, Murray Hill, Paradise Point, Linekin Neck, and Ocean Point on its way to the harbor. 

In the early days of Sprucewold, getting groceries also wasn’t a simple process. Even though there had long been cabins on Crooked Pine, Nahanada was a footpath until 1927 when the town agreed to improve Crest Avenue. At the top of Crest, near Kenniston Park, was an old wagon road that went through the woods down the hill and met the sharp curve of Sunset Road. The Forbes sisters remember when Mr. DeCosta would come to Sprucewold to sell produce and eggs from his farm in Boothbay in the 1950s. For years before that Mr. Brewer, from Brewer’s Market at the corner of Bay Street and Atlantic Avenue, delivered grocery and meat orders in Sprucewold. One of the many local dairies would bring milk and butter. In more recent memory, people would sell shucked clams in mason jars door to door and fishermen would sell lobsters directly to residents from the Sprucewold dock. Because of COVID Pinkham’s Gourmet Market in Boothbay Harbor has revived that grocery delivery service for the entire area today. 

If you were a local resident, and you didn't have a boat, you traveled by shank's mare or, in other words, you walked. It was uncommon for people to travel out of town at all. My maternal grandmother, Ethel Young Trask, walked from Park Street to Nahanada in the 1930s to be the full time cook for the Davenport family while they were in residence in Sprucewold throughout the summer. My great-grandmother, Grace Lewis Trask, was the housekeeper at the Sprucewold Lodge until it burned in 1930, the year my mother was born. She walked up the hill to work at the Lodge from Lobster Cove. My paternal grandmother, Floretta “Toat '' Emerson Fossett worked as a waitress at the Lodge while she was in high school in 1926 and 1927. She walked to and from through the woods on the old wagon road, along Sunset to Atlantic Avenue, to Roads End. She often told us of how she and her friend, Thelma Rowe Jordan, would hold hands and sing to be brave while they walked through the dark woods late at night.

Prior to the time the Wiscasset bridge (1924) and the Carlton bridge (1927) in Bath were built, crossing the Sheepscot and Kennebec involved taking a ferry, then a horse and wagon, and later a car or truck. A late family friend shared their memory of arriving in East Boothbay from Boston by train, ferry, and horse drawn freight wagon at the turn of the last century. 

In the late 1930s, the Barker sisters, who had a log cabin at the end of Spruce Point, would have my paternal grandfather, Frederick Miller Fossett, drive them in their car back to their winter residence in Buffalo, New York. He would return home by train to Boston then from Boston to Wiscasset then catch a car ride back to Boothbay Harbor. The entire trip took most of a week!

Years ago during some very bad weather, the Coast Guard came to the rescue of Louis Carbone, proprietor of Carbone’s Fruit Store (now Tidepools). If they hadn’t helped him reach WIscasset to catch the train to New York, he would have missed his only trip back to Italy.

So much about travel, and our access to it, has drastically changed over the past 150 years. It is wonderful in this time, that we can easily access stories of bygone days, gleaned from our family oral histories and from the Boothbay Region and Maine Historical Societies. For more information about history specific to Sprucewold, copies of the Rusticator Preserving the Legacy edited by Mary Otto (2007) are available from Ralph Kimball.

Whether you traveled here by shank’s mare, boat or car this year, we all feel very fortunate to be here this season. We can’t thank the SA and LHA enough for restoring the fireplace and local mason Brandon Pinkham for bringing it back to life. If any Sprucewold Association or Linekin Heights member would like to have a socially responsible gathering at the picnic pavilion, please contact an LHA officer to make a reservation.