Where in Maine?
March 2016
Each month, Down East editors select our favorite response to “Where in Maine?” Here is our favorite letter from the March photo of the Sparhawk Mill on the Royal River, Yarmouth.
As a former history teacher, I like to sit by this river at lunchtime and take in the 19th century. I imagine the sounds of nature are the same these days, with the falls upstream, the gurgling river, and the seabirds reaching up from the delta. But the sounds of human existence have all changed. I grew up in a New England town with an active mill in the ’60s. As a boy, the clacking of the mill machines through rows of open windows was all one could hear on the way by. I imagine this was similar. The whirring of leather drive belts, the gears demanding grease, the drive shafts spinning, and the ever-present clacking of the looms. Alas, nature wins out again.
Peter Gilmore
Cape Neddick, Maine
Photographed by Benjamin Williamson
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