This is the second part of a two-part series about the U.S. Navy’s development and operation of the Casco Bay Fuel Depot at what is now Mitchell Field. Read the first in the August print edition or online here.
When the U.S. Navy opened the Casco Bay Fuel Depot in 1954, it turned to locals for the civilian workforce necessary to maintain and watch over the facility 24/7.
Estimates of the number of local, full-time workers for Navy contractors at the facility range from 16 to 25 between 1954 and the late 1980s, according to former workers and their families. A 2000 Cultural Resources Survey by the Naval Facilities Engineering Command says it took about 500 workers to build the facility between 1952 and 1954.
For Terri Gaudet, Mitchell Field fires up memories of tagging along while her mother, Jean Merriman, conducted security rounds at the 119-acre site, which locals called “the fuel farm.” With Mom’s blessing, Terri did a few security rounds herself.
Gaudet, now Harpswell’s deputy town administrator and town treasurer, was a teenager at the time. “Things were different back then,” she said.
Nelson Barter was a “pumper gauger guy” and all-around handyman at the fuel depot from 1979-1989. He worked for three different Navy contractors and answered to “a supervisor, an assistant supervisor, an administrator and a government quality assurance guy who was there to make sure we were behaving ourselves.”
Carol Bibber’s late husband, Phillip, worked at the depot as a guard, supervisor and mechanic for 20 years after retiring from the Navy in 1972. The Bibber family has Harpswell roots stretching back for generations.
“He had been on shore duty for that last couple of years” of his Navy career, Bibber said. “Someone called and said (Navy contractors) needed help at the depot, and did he know where Harpswell was? He said he had a pretty good idea.”
Today, photographs of the facility’s 14 fuel tanks dwarfing nearby buildings may strike some as imposing. But at the time, residents didn’t see them as an eyesore.
“They became part of the landscape,” said Barter, who has served as Harpswell Neck fire chief and assistant fire chief. “They blended in. It was the only industrial feature of this area. It wasn’t hard to overlook.”
Gaudet’s stepfather worked on, in and around those tanks.
“My mom was a guard and my stepdad, David Merriman … well, I don’t know what his job title was, but he was ‘down below,'” Gaudet said, referring to the field of tanks sloping down to the waterfront. “Everyone who worked down below were full-time people maintaining the property, the tanks. The guard shack was up at the entrance, in fact still is at the entrance.”
“He had a nickname for everybody,” Gaudet said about David Merriman. “The names weren’t always kind, but if you reminded him of somebody, that’s the nickname you got. … Even if you had a name that made you think David didn’t like you, if you asked him for anything, he would give you anything you needed.”
David Merriman, whose family had land taken by eminent domain for the depot’s construction, began his employment there in the 1970s. His first job there was part time, shoveling snow off the tanks. He became a full-time worker in the late ’70s.
The shoveling of snow off tank roofs was a job made more complicated by the fact that the roofs weren’t attached to the top rim. Snow left unattended created problems for the fuel and the pumping mechanisms inside.
“The Navy, in its infinite wisdom, bought what are referred to as tropical tanks,” Barter said. “Apparently they were in a hurry. Tropical tanks have a floating roof.” (The 2000 Navy report confirms that it expedited the construction because of Cold War tensions.)
The tanks, made of welded steel, ranged from 40 to 45 feet high and 90 to 120 feet in diameter. For a teenaged Terri Gaudet, in a small town at the end of a peninsula where everybody knows your name, they were a blast.
“I climbed the tanks millions of times. I loved to go into those tanks,” Gaudet said. “David (Merriman) would tell me which ones were empty, and I’d climb up the tanks, and he would go with me many times.”
“There was a stairwell that brought you down to where the floating disk was, and I’d go in there as a kid,” she recalled. “I would do the echoing thing. My voice echoed incredibly inside the tank, and you’d hear it going up and out of the tank — hear it, hear it, and then it would just swish off. That was always fun.”
The families of fuel farm workers were tight-knit, according to Gaudet and Barter. They were all local, and they would have cookouts with the two or three families of Navy personnel who lived and worked at the depot.
The good vibes began to fade, ironically, when global news hinted at the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s. What would happen to Brunswick Naval Air Station? What would happen to the depot?
Roberta Weil and her husband, Gordon Weil, lobbied to keep the fuel depot open after the Navy determined that trucking jet fuel from Searsport to Brunswick would be cheaper than maintaining the farm. Despite the Weils’ efforts, the Harpswell facility closed. The last fuel tank was drained in March 1992.
“My parents were devastated,” Gaudet said. “Both my parents lost their jobs. It was very hard. My parents just kept scratching their heads: ‘We can’t understand why they would close this and have to truck all that fuel.'”
Roberta Weil, meanwhile, turned her attention to securing the land for Harpswell. She smiled as she recalled the reaction of Harpswell’s selectmen in 1994, when she proposed that they ask the government to give the land to the town, five decades after forcing local farmers and cottage owners to sell. Her plan was to lobby U.S. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, a powerful politician from Maine who could persuade the Navy to give it back.
Weil, who spent her career in public policy, said the selectmen “sort of laughed and said, ‘Go ahead. Good luck,'” she recalled.
Weil wrote letters to Mitchell, the selectmen signed off, and the Senate later passed a bill — drafted by Weil — transferring the property to the town.
It was a victory of sorts, although it was bittersweet for the local families who had worked at the depot.
The Navy removed the tanks and pipelines and took steps to address environmental harm to the land, although the federal government continues to classify it as a “brownfield.” The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says brownfields are properties where redevelopment or reuse “may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant.”
“When the Navy abandoned this place and did demolition, they also flame-treated all of the soil,” Barter said. “They bulldozed it, ran it through a burner to completely incinerate any residual oil. They burned it back to mineral soil, essentially. Anything organic or flammable was destroyed.”
Looking back, George J. Mitchell Field — named after the senator via Town Meeting vote in 2004 — represents family farms, kids at play before the days of constant supervision, a world war, a government takeover, the Cold War, an industrial landmark and local pride.
Today, the town has a master plan for the property but continues to discuss how best to use it. A boat launch is on the way, while the old Navy administration building and fire station is slated for demolition.
“It’s a beautiful place,” Gaudet said. “The Navy did a lot in the community. They would open it up for tours. They would invite the public down to see these magnificent ships. It was a very pleasant relationship when it was business and residential. I believe we could continue in that way.”
