Monday, November 30, 2009

St Anne’s Church on Indian Island, Old Town, Maine




This is St Anne’s Church on Indian Island, Old Town, Maine. This picture shows the Convent, which on Google Earth, appears to be gone. The church is white in the photo and also shows white snow all around. Currently the church is brown.
I attended Mass there as a child. We used to walk across the old metal bridge, sometimes, as my home was not far away. The wind always seemed to blow down the Penobscot River so we were most always chilled even with hats pulled over our ears.
My Gephyrophobia, or bridge phobia, made the walk interesting to say the least.
They had a 5pm mass on Sunday that was very short (30 minutes and no singing). At the time there were no Saturday masses so you would see the people who would sleep in on Sunday or workers from the day shift at the pulp mill still in their work clothes and smelling of black liquor (like rotten eggs). The Indian children used to raise hell in the front pews at times and the priest would give them the evil eye. After mass we would walk home and look for something for supper (this was the only meal of the week you were on your own in my mother’s house)

44°56'34.04"N
68°39'8.90"W

New information:

National Register of Historic Places
(added 1973 - Building - #73000141)

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Center & Main Street in the 1930’s






Most of my postcards are from earlier in the century, but here are two showing two views of the intersection of Main and Center St.
The first image is heading toward French Island and Milford. Note the fine steel bridge which I loathed crossing. It had a grated deck and “sang” as you crossed in a car. It still brings shivers thinking of when I walked across it because you could see the Penobscot River; it seemed like, miles below.
The second image, and much safer direction in my mind, is toward Indian Island, the woolen mills and where I grew up. When I visited Old Town last summer I sat on a bench where the drug store was and imagined all what had happen in that spot over the last few hundred years. I invite others to do the same in a location familiar to you and feel how relaxing and satisfying it can be.

44°56'5.27"N
68°38'44.63"W