Interesting things pop up in the Fifth Maine Museum collections weekly. The most recent was a handwritten “yarn” about a fisherman’s close call with a big fish in Casco Bay. Some context about details that appear in the story to follow: In the 1800s and early 1900s, “horse mackerel” was a vernacular term for …

What is the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery? Read on to find out! For a relatively small place (one square mile, approximately), Peaks Island has a lot of cemeteries, a testament to our long history of settlement. The earliest is the somewhat awkwardly named Ye Olde Trott Burying Ground off Upper A …

Before highways connected towns and cities together, the easiest way to move around coastal Maine was by boat. Island communities were in some ways less isolated than they are today. Islanders, many who made their living from the maritime trades, moved from island to island routinely. Peaks, House, and Monhegan Islands were linked by …