This is the first in a two-part series about the U.S. Navy’s development and operation of the Casco Bay Fuel Depot at what is now George J. Mitchell Field.
There are a few people in town who walk on Mitchell Field and see things nobody else sees.
While everyone sees the meadows and trails, the beach and the bandstand, a few self-described “old folks” see their childhoods in a time before the U.S. Navy built the Casco Bay Fuel Depot on the site. They see slivers of their lives before adolescence, when they were free to play, before their farming and fishing families expected them to work first and play later.
As a group, they were born shortly before, during and after the Second World War, so they remember the jet fuel pipeline that stretched from the depot to the Brunswick Naval Air Station. They can see the construction and removal of 14 fuel tanks, the departure of the Navy three decades ago, and the transfer of the land to the town in the early 2000s.
“When I’m walking out here, I feel like I’m walking on my homestead,” said Sharon Kirker. When she was a girl and her name was Sharon Marden, she saw the Navy use dynamite in a quarry on her family’s property and haul rocks “the size of refrigerators” to build its fuel depot.
Jim Knight, whose family owned property on the other side of Route 123 long before there was a Route 123, said, “In those days, families owned land from shore to shore,” meaning from Harpswell Sound to Middle Bay. Property was divided “like cutting a loaf of French bread.”
A 2000 Cultural Resources Survey by the Naval Facilities Engineering Command reports, “A large colony of summer homes … was established early in the (20th) century on land immediately abutting that which became the Fuel Depot property in the early 1950s; indeed, newspaper accounts of the construction of the facility seem to indicate that two or three cottages were removed to make way for the facility.”
Firsthand accounts create more vivid images than the removal of a few cottages: the blasting of the 24-acre Marden property, 1-2 miles from the depot. The trucking of gravel to the construction site. The construction of a pipeline to deliver jet fuel up the peninsula. Sirens warning residents to shelter during blasting.
“I was 6 years old when they started the quarry, so that must have been 1952 or ’53,” Kirker said. “They took the land by eminent domain. They may have paid a little bit, I don’t know. Peanuts. Didn’t make us rich. It was pretty much in my memory that the attitude was, ‘Well, the military is going to do it anyway, so suck it up.'”
Harpswell Neck resident Sam Alexander remembers his father selling trees and land for the construction of the pipeline. He sold 70 spruce trees to a contractor for $75. The Navy itself bought the land, but it wasn’t worth as much.
“My parents got 25 bucks for a parcel of land 50 feet wide and a half-mile long,” Alexander said.
Kirker recalls family stories about the blasting once knocking out power “in most of Brunswick and all of Harpswell.” That was around 1953.
After the blasting began, she said, “There was a whistle system where you knew if they blew the whistle we’d have to go back into the house and wait for the all-clear. I think one whistle meant they would stop traffic on Route 123 and nobody could have their radios on in their cars.” (Radio transmissions and other sources of “extraneous electricity” carry a risk of inducing accidental discharge of blasting caps, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.)
“There were fun things about it,” Kirker said. “The dynamite came in these big wooden boxes. We built so many things out of those boxes. You know how kids are.”
The contractors also left behind multicolored blasting wire. “Right up to when my mother’s house was torn down, there was blasting wire still around, because it got used for everything,” Kirker said. “The Navy never cleaned up stuff anyway.”
“It gave us (children) a great place after they were all done. We explored,” Kirker said. “When they were gone for the day, we were all over those rocks looking for diamonds and gold. And it was nothing but rusty shale.”
“When they were all done, they had hit veins of water on the hillside, so it filled up in puddles deep enough so that in the winter we had a good skating area,” Kirker added. “We had to skate through some grass to get to the next frozen puddle, but that was OK.”
In the early stages of the depot’s development, gas was delivered not only by pipeline but also by tanker trucks from Searsport.
“There was a pretty large amount of truck traffic down the road,” said Alexander, referring to Harpswell Neck Road. “People didn’t like that.”
But the Navy did allow the local fire department to run a water line from a well on the fuel depot property. “It was a pretty high-output well to fill those fire trucks,” Alexander said.
Residents of the neighborhood around the depot “complained about the noise when they were pumping fuel to the base through the pipeline,” Alexander said. “There was a huge noise and vibration that came with that. … They pumped maybe twice a week for two or three hours at a time.”
A response to global threats
Naval Air Station Brunswick had been commissioned on April 15, 1943, one of more than 50 naval air stations built between 1941 and 1944 as part of the war effort.
Brunswick Naval Air Station, as it came to be known, was demobilized after World War II. The Navy leased the airfield to the town of Brunswick, which sublet it to a private contractor. But by February 1951, the Cold War was in high gear, so the Navy terminated Brunswick’s lease and recommissioned the station for reconnaissance and antisubmarine aircraft, according to the Navy’s 2000 report.
As the 1950s began, the Navy proposed construction of an underwater pipeline from an existing facility on Long Island in order to supply the Brunswick base with jet fuel. But “as the world political situation continued to deteriorate and the prospects of further overseas conflicts loomed,” the Navy decided it had a severe shortage of petroleum storage facilities.
In October of 1951, Congress approved $3.5 million to build a fuel depot in Harpswell with a pipeline to Brunswick. There was little communication with the community.
“Because the hearings were closed and many of the details were deleted for security reasons, Harpswell residents were unaware of unfolding events that would affect their future,” the Navy survey states. “Word of the report reached the residents of the Neck and rumors quickly spread, speculating as to whose property might be involved.”
The next month, a seismologist was in town to determine the depth of bedrock in the area. “This work required the detonation of small charges of dynamite, which again stirred up the area’s residents,” the report states.
In January 1952, the Navy announced that another $7 million had been appropriated for construction of 14 fuel storage tanks — eight 80,000-barrel tanks and six 50,000-barrel tanks — along with earthen berms, an administration building and fire station, a generator building, two warehouses, and the 10.8-mile underground pipeline. A portion of those funds went toward expansion of the Navy’s facility on Long Island.
The Verrier Co., based in Portland, won the primary construction contract for the Harpswell project in September with a low bid of $5.2 million. Verrier said there would be 30 subcontractors.
Construction was underway by mid-November. The same month, dredging of the shoreline for construction of a pier and causeway began. Verrier set up a field office in one of the cottages near the shore.
On Nov. 16, 1954, about 400 local residents and officials attended ceremonies as the Navy commissioned the completed fuel depot. Just four days later, the first fuel delivery arrived on board a 130,000-barrel tanker in Middle Bay. Eight tankers of the same size were needed to fill the 14 storage tanks and the pipeline.
Click here to read the second part of this two-part series, which shares the memories of local people who worked as civilian contractors on what they called the “fuel farm.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to add Sharon Kirker’s maiden name and the last name of her family, Marden. The Marden family owned the property taken for a quarry.
