Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Belfast, Maine

Belfast, Maine has a long and interesting history involving ship building, farming, shoes, chickens, a railroad, and of course lobstering and fishing.
Main Street is lined with beautiful old buildings from the late 1890s. This old bank building is particularly decorative and enhanced with window boxes full of flowers.
The colorful Colonial Theatre has a fiberglass elephant on its roof that used to grace the Perry Nut Company.
This peaceful reading room is at the library. My library back home was some exposed-concrete-and-steel-1960s-modern-disaster that always felt cold and unwelcoming. Now, Belfast has a proper library!
We also visited the museum where we saw this quilt from 1864. It too had an interesting story. Made during the Civil War to recognize and honor those who fought for our Union it hung for several months in a Washington DC hospital. After the war the chief surgeon took it home and it found its way to Montana with some of his descendants. Stored in a closet for many, many years, it was finally found and returned to Belfast in 2011.

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