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March 2012 MAINE COASTAL NEWS Page 5. RED BOUTILIER PHOTOGRAPHS GO ON-LINE


SEARSPORT – When one thinks of going to a museum they think of the exhibits. In the case of a marine museum it is the ship-models, navigational instruments, builder’s tools, fishing gear, actual boats, but one of the most important things are the photographs. Most people just look at a photograph, but never really look at them. It is kind of like looking at the cover of a book, reading the end flaps, but never reading what is on the pages. A photograph can have an immense amount of information. Museums have thousands of photographs, but unfortunately only a few large collections have been saved. Almost ten years ago the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport acquired the Red Boutilier collection. Red was a very interesting man who lived in Bremen. For those of us who had the pleasure of visiting him, it was always a good time. Red began photographing the coast, mostly between Boothbay to Camden, from the earlier 1960s right up to the early 1900s. He did an excellent job documenting many of the boatbuilders during this time. He had a large collection of photographs of boats built by Bruce Cunningham, Bruce Farrin, the Carters, Harvey Gamage, Wes Lash and also photographs of them and their workers. He also documented commercial fishing, the building of the schooner HERITAGE, the schooner fleet of Camden and Rockland, Friendship Sloop Races, Maine Maritime Museum, the lobster festival to name a few. There have been a number of people involved in getting this collection organized and scanned. Ann Bray did the sorting of the 700-plus boxes and their contents. However, one person who has been instrumental in getting this collection ready to go up on-line is Faith Garrold of Searsport. She has been associated with it almost since it arrived at the museum. Over the last six years it was Faith that has dedicated two days a week to organizing, scanning and linking this collection in their Past Perfect databases. To date they have 29,776 negatives listed and this is nearly twice the number they thought was in the collection when it arrived. She has been absolutely fascinated by


what she has found in this collection. She said that it is mostly marine oriented, but there are other photographs. She said there are photographs of the aircraft carrier JOHN F. KENNEDY when she visited Portland in 1987, cemeteries, old-school houses, family groupings, a quilting bee, canoe races, sled dog racing, automobile races on the ice up at Moosehead Lake, Bangor Raceway and weddings. She added, “There are pictures of Bimbo Carter when he graduated from high school carrying a clam hoe. When Harvey Gamage died we have pictures of the flowers at his funeral that were in the shape of his boat and another that was a big anchor. There are pictures of somebody that they took to an island and buried. Men and women all dressed up in their funeral finery getting in rowboats and taking the casket to this island and then to the cemetery. Sadly there are a lot of pictures of people that are unidentified. We have tried to identify as many as we possibly could. I am thinking a lot of them must still be alive. They were young men and women when this was happening.” Kevin Johnson, head of the photographic archives at the Museum, added, “We have been waiting to get to this point and now we can educate the public on how to use the database and how they can help us by giving us feedback. It is extremely important to get that feedback.” Red never made it into the digital age, but at the end he was doing more colour photographs. This mostly is colour transparencies, but there are also some slides.


Faith said that there is still more to do and so in the end there will be more than 30,000 photographs, most of which are marine related. She does hope to have this project completed this year.


Kevin added that the financial assistance of Linda Bean and others helped get a majority of this collection sorted out, scanned and linked to the Past Perfect databases.


For those that would like to see this collection there will be an exhibit at the Camden Public Library in April.


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