A little less than two years ago I walked into an empty field on Swan’s Island and was overcome by the grief of standing where the community’s historical and library collections had been consumed by fire. In July of 2008, the old Atlantic School House that housed the collections was struck by lightning in the night and all was lost.
I stood in that spot recalling a visit in 2006 to what was, at that time, the newly renovated old School House. Back then I wandered to the second floor where the historical collection was housed. I stopped to admire the map collection, the island’s historical geography beautifully presented in a map cabinet that had been built by a local craftsperson. Each drawer contained extraordinary historical reproductions of the island, showing how it changed from a place made up of three separate villages to its current status as a singular municipality.
The community library and more than 100 years of history vanished overnight. Yet, within three years, I would be standing in the sun alongside community members and visiting dignitaries touring a beautiful new facility that stood where the old one had been.
The community response to these losses tells us something about what makes island communities resilient: how they rebuild key institutions and history in ways that allow them to move forward.
A community of roughly 350 year round residents was able to: Successfully compete for highly competitive national funding by raising over $300k in USDA rural development funds for the rebuild (reportedly one of the largest ever USDA library grant in history); Agree, and in some cases agree to disagree, on the look and functionality of the new structure; Raise significant funds from within the year-round and seasonal community to allow the project to reach its ultimate vision; Design and implement a very creative art auction where prominent artists were asked to incorporate the burnt pages of books into their artwork; Run a professional bidding process and manage the construction to within budget; Develop a highly creative approach to reproducing their history (more on this below); and have the depth of local leadership to make all of this possible
A number of committed Swan’s Island residents put in the long hours and hard work to make all of this happen, and I know that many of Maine’s other island communities would have shown similar dedication to rebuilding their library and history.
One of the unexpected outcomes of the fire was the opportunity to rethink how the community might want to retell its history. Many artifacts that are available to historical societies are those things that people leave behind, perhaps unwanted, certainly without much of a sense for how they are a part of the narrative arc of the history of a place. Local historians are then challenged to create a story out of these remains.
On Swan’s Island they lost all of these physical items and had a chance to recreate their history from scratch. The slate was wiped clean for community elders to repopulate with their memories of how things used to be. A group of Swan’s islanders was inspired by the opportunity. They hired an audio documentarian in the form of Island Institute Fellow Megan Vigent to spend two years in the community recording the stories of community elders. The product of this history making can be found here.
The move from an old school house to a beautiful new structure, and from a random collection of historical artifacts to a deliberate set of stories, tells us something about island resilience. Part of island community resilience comes from the sense of continuity that is derived from place and memory. Our key institutions and those parts of our history that we choose to remember about our communities live on. Island leaders responded to this crisis with a creativity and vision that recognized the importance of community institutions and memory in retaining a sense of the continuity of their place.
I hope you will make a trip to the island library and visit the Swan’s Island Memory project website. Each provides a rare chance to experience how the past is revisited in ways that create new material and a foundation of stories for what will become the history of this place going forward. On Swan’s Island they have gone about the work of examining and remaking the community and it will be this legacy that carries the sense of continuity on Swan’s Island well into the future.
Rob Snyder is Executive Vice President of the Island Institute in Rockland, Maine.