Sawyers Island from Isle of Springs Me. 1.

Sawyers Island from Isle of Springs Me. 1.

Sawyers Island from Isle of Springs, Maine View looking north east from the kitchen of the NeKrangan Hotel, Isle of Springs, Maine circa1915. Hotel staff could keep an eye out for arriving steamboats and alert guests. The east end of the main wharf can be seen at the bottom of the tree clearing. Sawyers Island, Maine is seen in the distance. "The barn in the middle stood until the late 1970s falling down (three square windows with two in the basement). To the left are big leaf trees that still stand. And to the left hard to see is the Sawyers Island House that burned in 1965. These as well as the house in the foreground were owned by Capt Elton Lewis. His daughter Eloise Ladd lived in the house into the 1970s or so. Eloise sold what is now the Isle of Springs parking lot & garages, Sawyers Island Landing and the former Sawyers Island House around 1960 for something like several thousand bucks. The IoS in turn sold the Sawyers Island House. In the 1920s, the old barn was used for parking my grandparents' Packards and Pierce Arrow. At that time, my grandfather also parked down at Thompson's Wharf (now Robinson's Wharf) at the Southport Bridge, where he kept his 33-ft open launch SAMOA while he was back in Worcester. A mechanic named Harold Whitehouse kept the boat in tune. Two buildings to the right of the Lewis Barn is a bigger barn with its door open. It still stands and is rumored to have been used to store bootleg booze during prohibition. I've been told that booze was carried in large burlap bags filled with rock salt so that if the Revenue officers pursued a boat carrying the stuff, it could be thrown overboard and sink eventually resurfacing when the salt dissolved." -- Alden Reed 2023