by Nancy Beal

When Jonesport’s church on Sawyer’s Square held its Summer Fling festival, the $4,000-plus that it netted resulted from a tradition of service by its women that reaches back a century and a half. A decade before 1887, when Daniel J. Sawyer commissioned what would be the Sawyer Memorial Congregational Church, the Ladies Aid and Parsonage Society was formed and took up, as its first task, raising money for the installation of a clock in the church’s bell tower, a pinnacle so prominent that it became a feature on nautical charts.