Book Description

Robert R. Pyle Our sense of place and community is made up of memories—personal memories of first-hand experience; oral memories that recount our ancestors’ experiences; and f- mal, codified civic memories set down in laws, ceremonies, and rituals. Together they are vital building blocks of citizenship. In a vivid and meaningful way this book p- serves memories relevant to understanding the roots of communities on Mount Desert Island, Maine. The surnames of many of Mount Desert’s earliest settlers are still found in today’s telephone directories. In these families many oral traditions are passed down from generation to generation, building outward from a historical core like the rings of a tree. “Dad used to farm this field,” Fred L. Savage’s great-nephew Don Phillips told me once, gesturing toward an alder growth. “His father grew vegetables for the hotel, and my great-grandfather grew grains. This road used to go right on up over the hill, and they used it to move the cemetery up there from where the hotel is now. ” Describing the field, Don ignores the alders and the towering evergreens beyond them, for in his mind’s eye he sees yellow, waving wheat and rye, bare ground, and a narrow cart track leading up the hill into the distance, on which his ancestors tra- ported the remains of their own forebears to a new resting place. Oral traditions, living memory, set the stage for him, and he accepts the reality of things he has never seen.