Voices from the past

 

“Look at the old Pier pilings! I wonder what was here?” Lisa said as we walked onto the beach.

Today we stopped at a small beach we have driven by dozens of times over the years. It’s only a couple of miles from the main road but our past journeys have always led us by without a thought of what we might be missing.

On this day we had time to kill as we needed to arrive at our hotel in Lubec no earlier than 3 pm.

This late check-in had me searching for places to stop that we had never been to before.

Our stop was Sandy Point beach in Stockton springs Maine.

I was
expecting a nice sandy beach with rocks and shells. The typical Maine beach.

I wasn’t wrong. Those things were all there just as expected.

What I didn’t expect was to see old pier pilings sticking out of the sand and the sea.

They were eroded by time and desperately trying to continue to tell the story they were placed there to tell.

“I don’t know” I said “but let’s go take a look.”

The more I looked it over, the more evident it was that it was not simply one structure, but several, built over a span of hundreds of years.

Some were close to the end of their story with rot and decay taking its toll, nature was reclaiming them.

Others much younger were still holding strong to their place in time.

The youngest even looked like an old concrete structure of some kind, barely visible protruding above the sand.

But what? A look around the beach and the surrounding shoreline gave no clue as to why this was constructed or how long it had been there.

As we walked along the beach, I continued looking at the structure, my imagination running wild trying to figure out what I was looking at.

Lisa on the other hand had a more important task, find Sea Glass.

Could we find any of the small treasures given up by the sea on this beach? Not sure but she was up to the challenge.

We left 30 minutes later with sea glass in hand, and a mystery that wasn’t leaving me anytime soon.

The more I drove the more I thought about the weathered and eroded sentinels standing tall in the sand yet appearing to serve no purpose but to ensure the past hasn’t completely faded away.

When I got home and I started looking at the pictures from our trip, the pier once again grabbed my imagination and the speculation began, What? Why? How? More importantly WHEN?

So, I started researching to try to tame the questions that were nagging at me.

Here is what I found. What is now just a few echoes from the past, was once a bustling and historic location throughout the late 1700’s right into the 1800’s and beyond.

This is a copy from an article about the history of Sandy point.

“Sandy Point was a mail route drop off site as early as 1793, During the 1800’s this beach was lined with shipyards that built three-mastered schooners.

During World War 1 the government also built four vessels for the war effort here. You can still see the parallel timbers embedded in the sand used to launch these massive ships into the bay.

Also visible during low tide is the wharf that once welcomed summer visitors by steamboat to Maine by way of the Boston-to-Bangor Packet.

The more prominent pilings are reminders that this beach was also the location of a fertilizer plant that operated from the mid-twentieth century until the 1970s.”

WOW !

My imagination could never have crafted such a story for this small patch of land and yet there it was!

You would never know standing on that beach looking at those old decaying pilings rising out of the sand, that this area was once so important!

I often wish I had the power to make the lifeless speak. What stories those pieces of wood could tell.

The hundreds of years they have been there silently watching the hands of time slowly ticking by.

The stories of the men working to build the three masted Schooners, or of the Mail delivered in the late 1700’s that came from where? and went to whom ?

Mighty Steamboats pulling up to her magnificent dock to unload those folks fortunate enough to be able to travel to Bangor from Boston in those early days for a vacation.

I’m sure it was the only way to get there at the time.

And what of the warships built along the shore and launched across the once mighty dock system? A dock that now stands as a mere skeleton of what it once was.

Where did they go? What battles were they in?

Yes, the stories we would hear about this very important beach over the past 250 years if only the ghosts of years gone by could spin their tales.

I can’t imagine all that took place on this small little beach over the past 250 years!

A beach that now sits silent, with only a few echoes of the past standing tall, echoes tempting us to listen closely to their story.

A story they so desperately want to tell so that we may not forget the remarkable things that took place on this quiet little beach.

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