On Searsmont’s Quantabacook Pond in May/June 2022 When From Durham to Tehran came out in 1991, I had been keeping journals for thirty years, edited 1986 and 1989 entries therein used to produce the book’s chronologically ordered contents. Then came From Classroom to Courthouse in 2008, which made use of journal entries from the early 2000s. In the meantime, I had been visiting Searsmont (ME) as much as possible in the summers and researching Mother’s forbears, who had arrived from England to Readfield, on the other side of Augusta, in the 1760s and had moved to Searsmont in the early 1830s. In the back of my mind lay thoughts of a final autobiographical narrative called From and to a Village in Maine. A score of visits to Readfield Historical Society, Searsmont Historical Society, and Belfast Free Library, trips to Montana to find Grandfather David Lincoln Craig (1970-1937) in his twenties and early thirties, and to California Gold Country and Eastern Oregon to find Great-uncle Charles Augustus Craig (b. 1832), who officially has never died. Then have come perusal of scores of local histories, records, newsletters, and newspaper clippings, walks through a dozen cemeteries, compilation of a dozen PowerPoint shows on ancestors, Searsmont, Searsmont’s RiverSide Cemetery, Bartlett Stream that runs into Ruffingham Meadow, continues as Bartlett Stream into Quantabacook Pond, becomes, among other names, Anderson Stream, passes under Schoolhouse Bridge in Searsmont Village, where I fished this morning and caught fish for dinner several nights ago, then joins George’s River, and eventually ends its southerly course in the Atlantic Ocean.
From and To a Village in Maine Michael Craig Hillmann
2023
Long story short, back in Austin this spring, it struck me that it would be time this year on rainy, early summer days at a camp by Searsmont’s Quantabacook Pond, to weave notes and journal entries penned over the years and relevant Facebook and Twitter posts since 2010 into From and To a Village in Maine. These slides are the visual record for a 2022 installment of the story.
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