By Paul Sylvain

Station 1898 — the old repurposed railroad station near the dike and Lee/Pellon Event Center — has served as home to the Machias Bay Area Chamber of Commerce since the chamber signed a 100-year lease with the town for one dollar. In return, the Chamber agreed to maintain the building and allow its use for community events several times a year.

By Paul Sylvain

Town meetings — even the monthly selectboard meetings, which are separate from voting by the general public — in Machiasport have a reputation for being unpredictable. Sometimes quiet, often fiery, they seldom disappoint anyone who attends them regularly.

The town’s 49-article warrant for its June 23 annual town meeting certainly appeared benign on the surface. Ultimately, voters dispensed with the 2025-‘26 spending package, without any fireworks, in less than an hour.

By Paul Sylvain

The gun smoke has cleared from last month’s Margaretta Days skirmish reenactments, but one of that week’s events that might have been overlooked by visitors enthralled by reenactments, vendors, music, and food involved the digging up and opening of a time capsule buried in an old cemetery behind Rev. James Lyons house on Lower Court Street, across from American Legion Post 9.

By Will Tuell

It was an up-and-down week for fans of Machias Area Little League softball as the area’s 12U squad won three straight games to earn a berth in the Downeast-Acadia district championship this week. While Happy Gardner award winner Sarah Hennesey and her teammates found themselves in an enviable position to qualify for the state tournament, things were not quite so rosy for Machias’s 10U softball squad, who were bounced from their double-elimination tournament with losses to Sunrise Little League of Western Washington County and Coastal of Blue Hill. 

By Paul Sylvain

Machias set a high bar on Friday for next year’s Semiquincentennial Independence Day parade. One visitor to the area from Bangor was overheard saying as the last vehicle passed by, “Wow, what a parade! It’s even better than Bangor’s.” 

Selectmen Approve Feasibility Study

By Nancy Beal

Jared Farn-Guillette of the Maine Department of Transportation has been visiting Jonesport for two years. He periodically makes the rounds of the town’s roads with the selectmen, soliciting suggestions about what the town might want for improvements. 

By Will Tuell

Residents of Whiting will have a rare opportunity to celebrate a two-hundredth birthday this weekend as town officials prepare for the town’s bicentennial July 11-13.

While the actual two-hundredth birthday of Whiting was Feb. 15, 2025, organizer Mary Alice Look said in a recent interview that locals have been planning a summer celebration for over a year now.

By Jayna Smith

After decades of planning and years of construction, a new six-mile stretch of highway connecting I-395 to Route 9 officially opened to traffic Friday, June 27, 2025, marking the completion of one of Maine’s most significant recent transportation infrastructure projects.

The $107 million project — formally known as the I-395/Route 9 Connector — extends east from Brewer to Eddington, creating a more direct route for travelers and commercial vehicles between the Bangor-Brewer area and eastern Maine, including access to Atlantic Canada.

Review by Paul Sylvain

In my Sept. 4, 2024, review of Pitch Black Ribbons’ Aug. 29 show at Bad Little Falls Park, I wrote, “As for me, I hope it's not another year before I see them again. Their show … was a genuine late summer treat.”

Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy, but fortunately, I didn’t have to wait a year and managed to catch brothers Clint and Cody Phipps on July 3, in the third of this summer’s Kitchen Concerts at Bad Little Falls Park. 

Holmes, Pelivanis Smash Grand Slams in Offensive Outbursts

By Will Tuell

The Machias Area Little League 12U baseball team has clinched a berth in the state Little League championship playoffs, set to begin later this week at Beal Field in Machias. Despite outscoring opponents 56-7, the squad, coached by Michael Fergerson and Ryan Harmon, still had to play their way into the tourney, where many of them grew up playing ball. 

By Doss Dennison

The Jacksonville Campground in East Machias is gearing up for its 160th year of hosting its annual week-long Christian camp meeting July 20-25. But before detailing the camp meeting’s schedule of events, I want to share some of the campground’s fascinating history, including events that led up to its beginning.

It doesn’t seem possible that the United States of America could be so divided that it would draw a line, choose sides, and fight the bloodiest war in our history amongst ourselves. Or, does it? 

Down East Community Hospital recently added a new GE state-of-the-art Revolution Ascend CT scanner to its arsenal of state-of-the-art diagnostic tools.

This project started in December of 2024 by researching different brands of scanners that would best fit the hospital’s Imaging Department’s needs and which brand would provide the high-quality imaging DECH has grown to expect for our patients. Imaging staff fully researched different CT scanners, then visited a GE facility in Milwaukee in January to see what they had to offer.

By Paul Sylvain

Historic Liberty Hall will open its doors to the public for a grand open house from 1-4 p.m. Saturday, July 26, at 325 Port Road/Route 92, in Machiasport. The event comes 152 years after the construction of the majestic building, just a stone’s throw from the Gates House, was completed in 1873. 

The event’s organizers say the focus of this year’s open house is on the building’s theatrical history. The group also hopes the event will raise awareness and funds to continue restoration work to return the building to use by the community.

By Paul Sylvain

Washington County Sheriff Barry Curtis and Commissioners David Burns, Billy Howard, and Courtney Hammond are weighing the possibility of entering into a county vehicle leasing arrangement with Enterprise Fleet Management Services in Boston.

If an agreement is reached, it would mean that, instead of replacing aging vehicles by purchasing them through traditional car dealerships, the county would eventually be replacing them at a regular five-year interval through Enterprise.

By Nancy Beal

Nearly 40 Jonesporters turned out last week for a second look at a budget for their elementary school. It was a mob compared to the handful of voters who rejected an earlier version of the budget in a late May meeting at which two of the three school board members were absent. 

Word had spread about the earlier failure, and, as several of the school’s teachers had firmly predicted, the “right” people were there at the second meeting and approved the budget by a vote of 30 to 2.

Selectman Alley Resigns, Cites Work Demand

By Nancy Beal

Jonesport’s special town meeting on ordinance changes, originally set for July 23, has been postponed a week to 6 p.m. Wednesday, July 30, at the Jonesport Elementary School gymnasium.

The change was announced at the selectmen’s July 16 meeting and was prompted by the need to comply with posting and publishing schedules by which residents are informed of events on which they have a vote.

By Will Tuell

The Machias Area Little League has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years, as several of its baseball and softball teams have regularly punched their tickets to the state tournament. As Machias’s prestige as a league has grown, so too has enthusiasm amongst players, their families, and fans. 

By Paul Sylvain

With scarcely three weeks until the annual Machias Wild Blueberry Festival’s musical opens for its all-too-brief four-night run at the Centre Street Congregational Church, Gene Nichols and company are hitting their weekly rehearsals hard.

This year’s production, titled The Pringle Family Re-enactors, was written and is being directed by Nichols. With about 30 parodies of mostly well known songs planned for the show, calling it ambitious is an understatement.

By Paul Sylvain

It seemed only fitting, somehow, that an event first held at the Jacksonville Campground in East Machias, just months after the carnage and destruction of the Civil War ended, should — on July 23 — turn to honoring a group of area military veterans with the presentation of Quilts of Valor.

By Nancy Beal

The Beals selectboard was kept busy this July, holding two regular meetings and a third session related to a proposed aquaculture ordinance with an attorney. Sandwiched in between money issues was an effort to recognize all those who had contributed to the town’s successful centennial celebration during the weekend of July 11.

By Will Tuell

On a bright sunny day in late July, the last place you would expect to find a group of ten junior high school boys and girls is waiting for a school bus at 6:45 a.m. Yet, it was just such a day on July 24 when the very bus that delivers many of them and their friends to and from Elm Street School in East Machias during the school year rolled up to take the youths and their four chaperones on a mackerel fishing trip none will soon forget. 

By Paul Sylvain

Efforts to raise funds and community interest to restore Machiasport’s 152-year-old Liberty Hall back to its former grandeur as a hub for activities in the town of about 1,000 residents took center stage, so to speak, at an open house there last Saturday.