People, Places, and Things of Mackerel Cove
For the past six to eight weeks we have been studying Mackerel Cove, Bailey Island. We took a field trip to Mackerel Cove on September of 2008, to clean up the beach. We ended up cleaning up 1,480 pounds of trash.
On this page you will find information about the people, places and things of Mackerel Cove. The information on the page will not just be written in paragraph form but will range from slide shows to graphs. Hope you enjoy it.
Thank you,
Sierra
Webmaster for" People, Places and Things" group.
John Darling
The Hermit of Pond Island
Once there lived a man named John Darling. He was born in 1850 in a lighthouse on Pond Island, off the coast of Harpswell, Maine. John Darling was one of 10 children. He was about six feet tall and 250 pounds as an adult. At the age of 21 John married his first cousin, Aurilla Darling. One month after the marriage she gave birth to stillborn twins. Two years later she gave birth again to a boy named James. Over the next six years town records lost track of John Darling.John died on January 15,1918. Two fishermen found him frozen solid in his bed. His body was being eaten by rats and seagulls when he was discovered. This is the myth of John Darling.
By Brandon and Sierra
Harpswell area Population, By Nate
The Graphs above show the population of Harpswell from 1790 to 2009. As you can see the population from 1790 to 1910 stayed relatively the same untill 1950 when the population shot up at an average rate of 719 people per year and then declining by 1064 people. This sudden and dramatic incline followed by a pretty significant decline over the last few years made me wonder what may have cause this. My first step was to find out what was going on at the time and come up with theories. I looked around on the internet and ask old timers that have been in the area for a while and came up with two theories. My two theories were out of staters moving to Harpswell for retirement and the Naval Air Station in Brunswick Maine that opened in 1951. To find out which theory may have caused this I looked at the population of towns across the state that have the similar geography a Harpswell such as Boothbay Harbor and BarHarbor along with towns in the area of the Brunswick Naval Air Station. I discovered that towns that had similar geography as Harpswell, there population stayed the same or decreased and towns in the area of the air station population shot up just like harpswells which means that the opening of Naval Air Station of Brunswick was most likely the cause of this spike in the population. To help support this theory the base is schedule to close in 2011 which could be the cause of the recent decline in the population as the navy personnel move away to different bases. Most likely the population will continue to decline and will then level back out after the the base closes.
Group members: Austyn, Nick, Brandon, Nate, Cee Cee, Sierra, Mike, Justin