Features

It ain't easy being a clammer. The soft-shell clam fishery — the second-most-valuable fishery in the state last year — is facing increasing pressures from climate change and is being picked apart by the invasive green crab.

Esther Root was a child of the 1920s, coming of age in that decade when women were abandoning 19th-century values and embracing experience in often controversial ways.

Mount Washington, which one can see on a clear day from high points in Harpswell, looms large in Clint Cunningham's childhood memories.

The Cundy's Harbor Volunteer Fire Department needs more emergency responders. Several members have recently resigned or retired from the service, and new recruits are scarce. "We're holding on by the skin of our teeth," says Fire and Rescue Chief Benjamin Wallace Jr.

Ron Webber was working for the town of Brunswick in 1962, trying to support his wife and children on $38 a week in take-home pay. At the suggestion of a friend, he decided to try making some extra money pumping septic tanks.

If it's possible for a place to be in a person's DNA, Harpswell and the surrounding area are in jeweler Keith Field's. With four generations of Mainers behind him, he has a sense of place and time rooted in community, and that sense informs his art.

When Jane Covey began volunteering and growing at the Harpswell Community Garden around 2012, the garden saw persistent problems with drainage, water access and soil quality.

A great oyster is like a fine wine. It is a creation of the place where it was cultivated. With this in mind, a group of small, independent oyster farms decided two years ago to band together and promote their oysters as the manifestation of a special kind of place: the New Meadows River.

He was born around 1730, in County Wexford, Ireland, to a once-prominent Anglo-Catholic family. He received basic English schooling and, at age 14, was apprenticed to a glove-maker, from whom he learned to cut, shape and stitch the gloves so much in fashion among the country's elite.

What began as a ladies' golfing trip to North Carolina in April 2021 turned into a journey of discovery for a Bailey Island man with deep Harpswell roots and a distinguished ancestor who made the ultimate sacrifice during the Civil War.