Camden Town

All I could see from where I stood

was three long mountains and a wood;

I turned and looked the other way,

and saw three islands in a bay.

 

Mt. Battie viewed from Camden Harbor



6/15/12:  Who knew that Edna St. Vincent Millay was from Camden, Maine.  At 20, she wrote one of her most famous poems, Renascence.  Its opening lines, at the top of the page, were inspired by the view from the top of Mt. Battie.  (The house where we are staying is at the base of Mt. Battie.)  Born in 1892 in Rockland, where our boat is, she lived with her mother and her two sisters in Camden after her parents divorced.  Although the family was of modest means, her mother exposed the girls to culture and literature.





 

The Whitehall Inn, where Millay first read Renascence in public

Millay first read Renascence in public at a gathering at the Whitehall Inn in Camden, and one of the wealthy guests was so taken with her talent that she offered to pay for "Vincent," as she liked to be called, to go to Vassar.  Millay accepted the offer, graduated from Vassar, became a feminist, a political activist, the author of 15 books, and at the age of 30, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. 

Now the opening lines of her Renascence are quoted in every brochure and book you pick up about Camden - you can't visit without knowing she was here!





Main Street in downtown Camden

Friendly Phyllis toured me around the Camden shops

While Conrad has been working on the boat, I've received the many boat-related FedEx parcels delivered to the house, and spent some time wandering around Camden.  The small downtown area is an easy walk from where we are staying, and our land lady, Phyllis, even took me into town one day to see her shop and introduce me to a bunch of the other store owners who are her friends.  She tells me that in July and August it is difficult to walk down Camden's Main Street, above, because of the glut of summer visitors.

 

Camden is known as the town "where the mountains meet the sea."  Although the mountains are granite, they're not mountains by California standards.  They've  been around a lot longer geologically and are worn down to what we Californians think of as hills.  The Megunticook River runs through Camden, and when the area was first settled, a sawmill and gristmill were built in 1759 on the river.  Later there were woolen and paper mills.  And later still, the area became a major producer of the lime shipped around the world for use in mortar and eventually, cement.  Today the river still runs under Main Street and splashes in a wide, shallow waterfall into Camden's harbor.  

The Megunticook River flows under Main Street and into the harbor

But Camden's greatest prosperity came from the sea.  In 1792, the first shipyard opened in Camden and sailing ships were built in the town until 1920.  Along with building ships, Camden provisioned those ships, and in time sea captains from Camden sailed to all corners of the world.


Once a sea captain's home, now a B&B

 Many of the large clapboard homes built by wealthy 19th century sea captains still grace the town, and quite a few today are Bed and Breakfast Inns.

In 1892, Camden's business district burned to the ground, and many of its wooden buildings were replaced by large brick buildings (some of which you can see in the photo of Main Street), including an opera house.

After the Civil War, the railroads and Industrial Revolution gradually ended the shipping industry that once made Maine the most prosperous state in the nation.  A brief renaissance of shipbuilding occurred during WWI and WWII when a number of warships were built in Camden, and, at the same time, the mills along the Megunticook River operated around the clock to fill wartime orders.  


One of Camden's many B&B's

Summer visitors have come to Camden since the late 1800's.  In 1897, an inn, which no longer exists, was built on top of Mt. Battie.  A few years after that, the Whitehall Inn, now a Bed and Breakfast, opened in an old house built by a sea captain.  Today there are over thirty B&B's in this little town of 5,300 residents.

Camden has become a popular living place for artists, writers and retirees, as well as a summertime mecca for tourists, like us.  We're lovin' it!


 

Camden Harbor