Enjoying friends, jigs, reels

Howdy neighbor!

Recently, I had the pleasure of a jaunt out to Otisfield for a very fine spot of traditional contra dancing in the old Community Hall just up from Thompson Pond. The pleasant hours of jigs and reels I enjoyed there, in the company of friends and loved ones, got me to thinking as I usually do about the customs and olden celebrations of our forefathers here in Western Maine.

Though now several towns (and a county line) away from Bridgton, it used to be that Otisfield was Bridgton’s nearest neighbor, back in the days before Naples and Harrison were created in the early 1800s. The county line was shifted in the late 1900s. In those days, the interchange of music and dance between our towns was more pronounced than it is today; why Granville Fernald of Harrison once recalled that in the days of his youth, just about 1847 or so, he had heard a poem written by Enoch Perley, Bridgton’s own man about town and erstwhile poet, being sung at a celebration in Otisfield. Many were the sons and daughters of both our towns who delighted in and sang together the well-worn folk-ballads and mournful songs of those canal-boatmen who plied the waterway from Bridgton and Otisfield down to Sebago and far Portland on the Cumberland and Oxford Canal.

You can cut a fine rug to those old tunes, and we did just that this past weekend, waltzing to Appalachian fiddles and

In Ye Olden Times

by Michael Davis BHS Assistant Director

square-dancing old French-Canadian or Scotch-Irish pieces on banjo, guitar, accordion. In fact, just about every sort of folk instrument minus the jug. That too was in evidence, but filled only with clear spring water, much of which was needed for the refreshment of all. Despite the snow beating down outside, we were all very warm by the end.

In particular, one of the dances which we lately enjoyed in Otisfield, delivered courtesy of the incredible folk band Birds on a Wire and the masterful dance caller Kathryn Larsen, was that specimen of line dance known as a Virginia Reel, and that’s really what I wanted to talk about today, in connection with a curious story from the history of Bridgton Academy. Now, it is true that music has been a part of BA’s