Issues → July/August 2007 → Feature Stories →
Here in New England: Frenchboro, Maine
The children who saved an island
by Mel Allen
Look at the photo of the children in the one-room schoolhouse in the town of Frenchboro, Maine. Frenchboro is on Long Island in Blue Hill Bay, eight miles of rough seas south of Mount Desert Island.
It's the only populated place on the island, with nearly everyone living within sight of Lunt Harbor. Look at the faces: The youngest is a preschooler, the oldest a sixth-grader. These faces tell one of the most remarkable stories I know on the Maine coast.
Once more than 300 Maine islands held year-round communities, where residents fished and lumbered, built boats, and survived together, but today there are only 15. If I were writing about Frenchboro 25 years ago, it would have been about how one more island was sliding inexorably into decline, about a population that over time had dwindled from nearly 170 to 43, with most of those growing aged. But today 68 people call Frenchboro home through winters as well as summers, and 22 of them are children under the age of 12. I don't know how much of their island's past the children understand, or of the present they're changing, or of the future that one day will depend on how deep they plant their own roots. They're just children right now, kids who call a wild and beautiful island home. But I'm guessing there are few places in America where children matter more than here.
The math is simple: Communities need new blood to stay alive, and in Frenchboro, cut off from the simple luxuries most of us take for granted -- grocery stores, movies, doctors, pharmacies, recreation -- strangers don't usually seek out what can be such a rugged, hard, and at times dangerous life. Islands are more often places where generational blood calls out to blood, where your own name is seen again and again on cemetery stones.
Then of course, there's this: Maine islanders don't have a history of welcoming newcomers. Traditional fishing grounds are protected, to each his own. So three times in the past two decades the islanders of Frenchboro saw their school reduced to one teacher and a single child. The fragility of the school's population was not for lack of trying. In the 1960s, islanders petitioned the state to give them foster children; they'd give the children families. The hope was that these children would fall in love with the land and its people and come back after high school and settle. But those were lean fishing years, and the children saw the islanders struggling. When the foster children finished school, they left; two returned for a while, and then they, too, went to the mainland.
In the early 1980s, an even more audacious plan took shape, fueled by ingenuity, tenacity, cooperation, and sheer courage to try what had never been tried. Frenchboro's people would go against the grain of nearly every island community in Maine: They would not only put up with people from away, they would seek them out and ask them to stay. Even more, the fishermen said, We'll let you fish our waters, though you've done nothing to earn our trust except ride a ferry to our shores.
To lure newcomers, they'd build seven houses on a hillside -- six for the "homesteaders," one for a teacher -- and they'd let the world know what they were up to. The houses would give newcomers a start, let them rent for half of what they'd pay on the mainland, and in a few years they could buy their houses. They'd be islanders, too. They'd have children: new blood squared. The David Rockefeller family, which owned hundreds of acres, donated a chunk of land for the house lots. Working with the then-fledgling Island Institute, the Frenchboro Future Development Corporation was born. Funding was obtained, and by 1988 the new three-bedroom homes rose on the hill. The media had done their work: Frenchboro drew inquiries from more than 3,000 people. Island leaders spent months culling the applications, and finally invited a handful of families who knew fishing. On a December day in 1988, everyone gathered at the town dock to watch the ferry unload the first families.
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