Hauling by Hand: The Life & Times of a Maine Island

by Dean Lawrence Lunt

Cover for Hauling by Hand: The Life & Times of a Maine Island
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Summary

Long Island sits eight miles off the coast, one of the state's most remote island outposts and one of only 14 Maine islands still supporting a year-round community. Only a century ago, there were some 300 such communities. Frenchboro, the island's lone village, surrounds Lunt Harbor. The island's roots were set in the 1820s by the Lunt family and a small band of pioneers who together carved an island community from the spruce and granite shores. Fueled by the shipping and fishing industries, Outer Long Island, as it was known, evolved from outpost to important offshore port before economic changes transformed the island into a hardscrabble turn-of-the-century fishing village where nearly 200 residents scratched a living from depleted fishing stocks and rocky soil. Yet through determination, perseverance and Yankee ingenuity, the island survived despite its geographic isolation, devastating shifts in the fishing economy, a decades-long depression, a dramatic population loss and a school that nearly closed. But while not always an easy place to live, the island is also blessed with a well-sheltered and deep harbor, abundant natural resources and raw physical beauty. Today, the town of Frenchboro has a population of nearly 50 people, a small one-room school, a post office and one full-time business. There is neither a general store, nor tourist hotel, nor daily ferry service. Instead there is a village, a soul and a way of life. And this is its story.

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