Penobscot & regional collections
Research at the University of Maine, Orono; Stephens Memorial Library at the Penobscot Marine Museum; Maine Historical Society; Castine Historical Society; and Maine Memory Network.
From Maine
I knew the landscape before I knew how to research it.
I was born in Bangor and grew up along the Penobscot River. My grandmother's house, with roughly eighty acres behind it, was my childhood safe place. We explored the woods, followed old roads and streams, cut our own Christmas tree every winter, and hauled it home ourselves. My family still does. Now my children come with us.
The Penobscot was never random to me. I visited Fort Knox again and again as a child and wondered why such an enormous granite fort stood over a river in Maine. In seventh grade, I researched the Ice Storm of 1998 in Bangor and found photographs of the Penobscot that I never forgot. Later, while living in Boston, Thoreau brought me back to the river in a different way.
By the time I became a historian, I already had questions waiting for me.
The place I had been fascinated by since childhood turned out to contain exactly the kind of history I cared about most: ordinary people, institutions, resources, and war.
