July 2018 MAINE COASTAL NEWS Page 5. G C I
MONSON – For more than 30 years I have known Anne Holmbom, who was working on a house with her husband Bill, next to one I owned on Highland Avenue in Bangor back in the 1980s. I learned she came from Chebeague Island and that she had held a lobster license back in the late 1940s. She also had an interesting family maritime his- tory and I wanted to capture what she knew about the island and her family’s past. So when I headed to Greenville in mid-May to visit the vessel KATAHDIN, I stopped by. Anne said about remembering Che-
beague, “At Chebeague, it was the beach, the rocks, where I learned to swim; where our refrigerator was a metal bucket that hung down in the 12 foot dug well with the bottom touching the water so that you could keep your quart of milk and your butter; and a nice outhouse with a window that faced the shore.”
The house she grew up in on the Island
was built at the end of the American Revo- lution. “My grandmother was born there,” added Anne. “Her mother and father bought it in the mid-1800s when they got married. It had belonged to some of the original set- tlers on the island. Benjamin Waite was the owner of the eastern half of the island and he built three or four houses for his children. I had always felt that my house was one of those Waite children's houses because of its position. The fact that it was near the shore on the lee side, and it was very old. They called it the Reuben Keazer house, but he came later. Last summer I discovered a contract between Benjamin Waite, Sr. and Benjamin Waite, Jr. and a captain of the schooner LIVELY to go on a cod-fi shing trip to the Banks and the names of four crewman that were going to go. It was dated 1793. That kind of proves to me that that's a Waite house.” The family has ties to the brig CAR-
RIE BERTHA, which was built by Giles Loring at Yarmouth, Maine in 1869. “My great grandfather, Samuel Bucknam Soule,” said Anne, “sailed the CARRIE BERTHA, which was named for his daughter. My grandfather Eben Ring York lived with him because his father (William Flavel York (1851-1878)) had been lost at sea when he was only 27 years old in 1878. I know she sailed to Italy and I would assume that she sailed to the Pacifi c because of the sword we have. Other than that, I don't know.” Her grandmother, Della Geneva Ham-
ilton, went to North Yarmouth Academy, “which was unusual for girls,” said Anne. “Then she became a teacher. She used to say that she taught boys that were older than she was because this was the stone sloop era. The stone sloop families would go off and only come back when the ice froze up. They would transfer the boats over to behind Little John Island, for the winter and then the boys would come back to school.” The house passed down from her grand-
mother to her mother, Beatrice York Kendell and she would leave it to Anne. She said, “I have been going there for a long time. I've been there every summer of my life since I was a baby in 1930, except for a few years. Always just the summers as there are four fi replaces, and they always closed them up in the winter, because they were afraid of fi res. We always lived in apartments in Portland during the winter. “One year, we were between apart-
ments apparently,” added Anne, “and I went to school there in the fi rst grade. I remember they were teaching us cursive writing and I knew that I was diff erent because I was left handed. They told us to write our name and I wrote mine from right to left. The teacher was very concerned and asked my grand- mother what was the matter with me. She asked me, and I said, ‘I know I am diff erent and I always do things the other way,’ ‘No, do it the same way, but I can still write my name backwards!” Anne’s grandfather took out fi shing
parties. Her father also did some fi shing. “He went smelting with Carl Grannel,” said Anne. “This was during World War II, when you could not be out after dark. They would go and hide in a cove somewhere they wanted to fi sh so that they were al- ready there and then they could put out the seines and get the fi sh, and come back after light. In World War II, Chebeague was cut off from the harbor where the Atlantic fl eet was. There was a submarine net that went across from a bar on Chebeague Island to Little John's Island and if you wanted to go to Portland, you had three, one foot signal fl ags that were yours that you had to fl y. You had to have your papers and you stopped on one side at a Coast Guard boat and told them where you were going, showed them your papers and they would open the net and then you would go through and stop at a boat on the other side and do the same thing. When you got into the harbor you had to stay so
Anne fi shing to earn her tuition for school off Chebeague Island in 1949.
many feet away from any ship that was there. There were aircraft carriers, cruisers, battle ships, the whole deal up there in the harbor. On the other end of the island, they sunk a number of boats between Long Island and Chebeague, so that was closed off . We used to hear depth chargers going off . They also
had a fort on Chebeague with about 300 men and they had a machine gun nest on either end of the submarine net and they had those huge spotlights.” After Anne graduated from high school
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