"We've been underrepresented."
That's how Gerry York described the reasoning behind a nonprofit that spent three years without a building before finally buying one this year. York is president of the Harpswell Islands Genealogy and History Center, a group that started less like an organization and more like a standing lunch date: a handful of cousins with roots on Bailey Island, Orr's Island and Great Island, gathering around a kitchen table on Bailey Island to sort through old photographs of Mackerel Cove and argue affectionately about who was in them.
This year, that lunch group bought the former bed-and-breakfast at 10 Oceanside Road, a Bailey Island property with a long and layered ownership history.
A Bed-and-Breakfast, a Radio Tower, and a Long Road to a New Owner
The house sits at the corner of Route 24 and Oceanside Road on Bailey Island. Albert and Catherine Johnson once ran it as a bed-and-breakfast called Katie's Ketch. The Bible Broadcasting Network, a chain of evangelical radio stations, bought the property from the Johnsons in 2013 and has broadcast from a tower on the same lot since 1997. In 2022, the network sold the house to a company called Coastal Wireless, which gutted the interior but did not carry out its plans for the property. Two years later, Bible Broadcasting Network took the house back and tore down a garage that had an apartment in it.
Neighbors and town officials asked the network to delay plans to raze the house while they looked for a developer willing to convert the building into affordable housing. The Genealogy and History Center bought the building earlier this year. A sign advertising the group's future home went up outside the property by mid-August. The house, by the group's own admission, needs a lot of work. It's also, per the cousins, a colonial revival with a Dutch gable roof, which means the building itself is now part of the history the center exists to collect.
What the Cousins Actually Wanted a Building For
The group has been careful to say it isn't trying to replace the Harpswell Historical Society, which has run the town's archives and museum for years. What the Genealogy and History Center wanted was space for a narrower, more specific job: keeping track of the families who have lived on the three islands across generations, not just the town as a whole.
York said he regularly hears from people who won't donate family photographs or documents to local archives because they aren't confident there's room to keep them properly. That's the gap a physical address is meant to close. The group's Facebook page, Harpswell Yesterdays, launched in 2024 as a place to post historical photos of the islands and had approached 2,000 members within its first year, evidence that the appetite for this material already existed. What didn't exist was a place to put the boxes.
The Same Names Keep Showing Up
The history center's story fits a pattern visible elsewhere in Harpswell this season, where the institutions that hold the town together tend to run on family continuity rather than paid staff.
Cundy's Harbor Days took place August 1 and 2, and its centerpiece, the blessing of the fleet, was piloted by Frank Bichrest, who at 89 is the oldest active lobsterman working out of Cundy's Harbor. The ceremony includes a wreath laid in the harbor for those who have died, songs, prayers and a parade of boats, many carrying multiple generations of the same fishing families. The day before, a tollbooth fundraiser on Cundy's Harbor Road collected donations for the village's independent fire department, the kind of small-town financing that keeps a volunteer force running without a line item in a municipal budget.
Down at Holbrook's Wharf, the same weekend's lobster crate races are organized by the nonprofit Holbrook Community Foundation specifically to help preserve the village's working waterfront. Eleven-year-old Frankie Jean won the under-100-pound class for the third year running, finishing the 30-crate course in 16.9 seconds while most competitors ended up in the harbor. It's a minor detail, but it says something that the same young racer keeps winning the same event that exists to protect the same wharf her family likely still uses to land lobster.
A Fishing Tournament That Planned for Its Own Succession
The Bailey Island Fishing Tournament returned for its 84th year, July 18 through 24, run by the Casco Bay Tuna Club. This year's edition added a new competition category for anglers 12 to 17 and opened with an afternoon of tuna-focused activities built around families. A tournament in its ninth decade doesn't need a youth division to survive the summer. It needs one to survive the next several decades, which is a different kind of planning than most seasonal events bother with.
The Land Trust Is Working Out of Borrowed Space, Too
Harpswell Heritage Land Trust is in a similar spot to the genealogy center, minus the ending. As of mid-August, the trust has been operating out of a temporary office at the old West Harpswell Elementary School on Ash Point Road while it works through an expansion. Programming hasn't paused for the move. A naturalist-led walk on fall birding for beginners ran this past week, covering basic identification skills and what to expect from the season's migration, the kind of low-key public offering that depends more on volunteers who know the trails than on the address where the mail gets sent.
None of these organizations are large. None of them are new to Harpswell in any deep sense. What's changed this year is that one of them, after operating out of a kitchen table for three years, finally has a street address to match the work it was already doing.
The house at 10 Oceanside Road, once the Johnsons' Katie's Ketch, is now set to become a place where the cousins can make island history come alive for younger generations.
If you've got old photographs or documents from Bailey Island, Orr's Island or Great Island sitting in a drawer somewhere, the Genealogy and History Center is still collecting stories to fill that building. The Lauren Jones Team keeps close tabs on what's changing across Harpswell's islands and necks, this kind of thing included, and we're always glad to hear what residents are noticing that we might have missed.
