Eighty-five-year-old Buddy Folino loves Stonington. Not content with a successful laser-etched granite presentation welcoming visitors to the area at the Caterpillar Hill scenic turnout on Route 15 in Sedgwick, he now wants to place a similar set of laser-etched granite blocks explaining Stonington and its varied fisheries somewhere on the town’s waterfront.
He calls his plan The Stonington Project. Although he’s had help from friends, he said, “I’m a one-man band,” and, in a way, it’s his love letter to the Maine fishing village he’s come to know and appreciate.
Visitors to the Caterpillar Hill scenic turnout can now see photographs and read descriptions about the area etched into three blocks of polished black Chinese granite attached to distinctive pink, dark gray and white Deer Isle granite bases.
Folino chose the Chinese black granite over the Maine black granite because the Chinese granite reproduces a better, sharper etch. “It’s like black and white tracings,” he said. “The contrast is better than the black Maine granite.”
The descriptive monuments look out over what used to be the old Cooper Farm to the Deer Isle Bridge and all the islands beyond. The almost 180-degree view is hard to beat in this part of the world.
Folino came up with the idea for the monuments. This “flatlander” from Vermont fell in love with the area when his artist wife, Virginia Folio, brought him to Stonington fifteen years ago. Because he had been in construction in Vermont, ten or twelve years ago Folino became part of an advisory board for the highway department: a group of people from Hancock and Washington counties that the then-commissioner of the Maine Department of Transportation, John Melrose, put together to look into existing needs for roads in the two counties.
“People complained that Route 15 was not well paved between Orland and Deer Isle,” Folino said. “We’d tell him how horrible it was.”Folino, who thinks highly of Melrose, referred to him as “real smart” and explained that Melrose got funds for the work on Route 15 and other roads from the state’s gasoline tax and from federal matching grants.
Folino suggested Maine do what Vermont does, and told Melrose, ” `We put up some artistic work to welcome people to Vermont.’ “Melrose liked the idea and came up with a budget of $150,000. Folio took photographs and descriptions of the area to St. Stephens, New Brunswick, to have them laser-etched onto black granite, polished to a glass-like sheen — he’d seen the artist’s work some 15 years before — then went to Tony Ramos, who owns New England Stone, the company that operates the Crotch Island quarry off Deer Isle. Ramos donated granite for the project and had it shaped to form the bases and to hold the four-foot-square sheets of black marble for the three Caterpillar Hill monuments.
Installed in 2004, the three monuments met with public approval. So, with $8,000 left over from the Caterpillar Hill project, Folino began to plan for descriptive monuments to welcome visitors to Stonington’swaterfront. He collected photographs and started writing the descriptions to be etched onto the sheets of black granite that would tell the town’s history and how it has adapted to changes in the fisheries.
Part of the story is how Stonington educates its young people for the fisheries through its Marine Trades Program at the high school, about its lobster hatchery, how trapped lobster is stored, and the story of the sardine carriers and purse seiners that land the herring used for lobster bait.
One aspect of the lobster story involves lobstermen’s wives who take the crabs that are trapped along with lobster, cook them, pick out the cooked meat and sell it. Another feature is Stonington’s clam-flats and how they are seeded with clams when needed. Stonington’s fishermen seed scallops, too. That effort by all fishermen has been enormously helpful to the local scallop fishery, and Folino wants the public to understand how these varied fisheries and townspeople are interrelated.
Folino and his wife, Virginia, have been helped in various ways by committee members Jacqueline Davidson, Richard and Fraun Martin, Susan and Donald Jones, James Bray and Richard Larrabee, who wrote grant proposals including one to the Maine Community Foundation to with the descriptions.
Coming up with the last $700 needed and finding the right place for the monuments have thrown the project into limbo, according to Folino.
“I’m going to let the townspeople decide,” Folino said. “I own the Post Office property. I thought I might put it there.”
Folino, the Vermont flatlander, wants everyone who comes to Stonington to see and understand what a remarkable fishing village the town he fell in love with is, and with some help from townspeople he hopes he’ll get his way.
To contribute to the Stonington Project, contact Ellen Pope, Vice President in charge of Community Affairs, Maine Community Foundation, 245 E. Main Street, Ellsworth, Maine 04605. The foundation will disburse contributions to the project through the school district.