Residents from 7 to 97 find common bonds at the Blue Duck
Islesford Boatworks, a year-round boatbuilding organization and community hub, lives in Blue Duck, an historic building at the head of Islesford Harbor. Photo Ashley L. Conti
Once leaves start their transformation from verdant to fiery, Little Cranberry Island’s population dwindles. In the harbor summer sailboats slip their moorings for warmer climes, leaving only working lobster boats that power the island’s economy.
Little Cranberry Island – or Islesford – is one of five islands off Mount Desert Island that comprise the Cranberry Isles. Despite a 20-minute boat ride from the mainland, the Little Cranberry Island community is humming with opportunities for all ages that have grown with funding from MaineCF grants.
Islesford Boatworks (IB), a nonprofit organization founded in 2006 and MaineCF grantee, supports the working waterfront and keeps the art of boatbuilding alive. Its core program is a summer boatbuilding workshop for children who live on the Cranberry Isles and Mount Desert Island. Like most of Maine’s unbridged islands, Islesford’s industry and population have decreased over the past several decades. Once home to thriving maritime businesses, most of its year-round residents now work in the lobster fishing industry.
Elliott Hadlock, 8, works on a project during a Saturday community workshop at the Blue Duck. Photo Ashley L. Conti
During high summer the Islesford population swells to 300. But come fall, its year-round population drops to less than a third of that. Island children attend a two-room schoolhouse with 12 students this year and a handful of teenaged islanders travel daily by boat to high school on Mount Desert Island.
IB Executive Director Tony Archino has helmed the organization since 2014. A trained educator-turned-boatbuilder, Archino has grown the organization from its summer program roots. Today IB’s programming serves ages 7 to 97.
Archino oversaw the organization’s 2019 lease and renovation of Blue Duck, an historic building at the head of Islesford harbor that sat vacant for more than three decades. A $16,000 grant from MaineCF’s Belvedere Historic Preservation Fund helped support renovation of the 170-year-old structure that has become the island’s de facto community center.
With an established children’s summer program and a new waterfront home, IB saw the need to expand formal programming to older residents of Cranberry Isles where the median age is 62, compared to the statewide median age of 45. Archino turned to MaineCF’s Lifelong Communities Mini-Grants program, which supported efforts to improve the well-being of older people and their ability to age in communities.
A Lifelong Communities grant allowed IB to offer its masters program to older residents so they could spend afternoons and evenings working on the boat children crafted during the summer workshop. This year’s project was a 16-foot dory that a local lobsterman uses for bait fishing. Frank Reece, an Islesford summer resident of 65 years, joined the masters program because he wanted to give boatbuilding a try after a lifetime of boating. “Creating this boat out of nothing was really wonderful,” said
Reece. “The program wove together the members of the community from Islesford and Great Cranberry – lobstermen, families, fishermen, and summer folks from all over the globe.”
A community-building grant funded through a MaineCF donor-advised fund also supported IB’s new paid apprenticeship program so young adults could take on larger responsibilities in the shop and summer programs.
Islesford native Louise Chaplin has been involved with IB since she was six years old. Now a sophomore at the University of Maine in Orono, Chaplin was part of last summer’s apprenticeship program as lead instructor for the summer workshop. A grant from MaineCF’s Hancock County Fund enabled IB to pay teens for their work as apprentices. “It’s giving island teenagers a paid job and involving young adults at the next level of learning and involvement with the program,” she said. “Hopefully others will do what I did – start as a student in the summer workshop and work their way up to apprentice.”
Ages 7 to 97 participate in Islesford Boatworks' woodworking and boatbuilding workshops, or stop by Blue Duck for coffee and stories. Photo Ashley L. Conti
New job opportunities are yet another benefit of IB’s expanded programing. “We have the chandlery job at Blue Duck, the school-year teaching jobs, and the paid apprenticeships for teens,” Archino said. “It’s added jobs that are making a difference for the island economy.”
Expanded offerings can help enrich life on Islesford and make it possible for families to stay on the island, or even choose to relocate there. “It makes a huge difference for whether a family might stay on the island during a child’s teen years,” Archino said.
Even those who aren’t craftsmen gathered at Blue Duck this summer for a series of coffee and storytelling from older islanders. Gail Grandgent lived on Little Cranberry Island for 25 years and is president of the Islesford Historical Society and a teaching assistant at the island school. She said IB’s community hub is a boon to the island.
“I think almost every family on the island has had something to do with IB, whether their kids were involved, or they volunteered,” said Grandgent. “It used to be everyone would hang out on the dock drinking coffee and telling tales. Now it’s a gathering place like in the old days.”
