About East Bay, Maine

A Short History of East Bay

East Bay began the way most of this coast did:a scatter of farms strung along the shore with no real center, a cove deep enough to keep a boat, and a ledge that took more than its share of them. The first families here fished, cut wood, and worked the salt marsh through the seasons. They built a small yard in the cove and turned out boats one at a time, each one a little different from the last, the way every cove up and down this coast had its own hand and its own lines.

There was a church, eventually, and a one-room school that served the town for longer than anyone planned. A general store opened on what is now Main Street around 1840 and changed hands four times before the building burned in 1887. The store that replaced it is still there. It sells different things now, but the porch is the same porch.

Fishing held the town together for most of its life. By the early part of the last century, the bay ran on it. The boats going out before light and the catch coming back to a smoking and canning operation on the water that took on men, women, and children through the season. The plant drew workers from three towns over. It ran its own schedule, kept its own channel, and for about forty years it was the reason East Bay showed up on maps at all.

When the deep-water fishery fell off and the markets moved, things got quieter. The cannery closed in stages, the way those things do, one line at a time, until there was nothing left to close. The families that stayed learned to make a small town do. A few turned to lobstering. A few opened shops. One family started a boatyard that is still in business, mostly doing repair work now, though they’ll build you something if you ask and you’re not in a hurry.

The town never grew large. That’s not an accident. East Bay sits at the end of a road that doesn’t go anywhere else, which kept it from becoming the kind of place that gets discovered and then argued about. The people here are aware of how lucky that is, even if they don’t say so.

One building stands from the town’s first century. The rest of East Bay is newer, or rebuilt, or gone the way frame buildings go in a climate that doesn’t forgive much. The Observatory on the hill is the exception. It is the oldest thing in town, and on a clear day in summer, you can see why someone thought to build it there.