Their stories are both part of the Gouldsboro Historical Society’s “Archive Without Walls” digital collection that launched today. You’re invited in for a first look at the ground floor. Admission charge? — $0.00!
GHS’s digital collection was once part the Digital Archive offered by The History Trust, a consortium of more than a dozen local non-profits that collaborate to safeguard historical collections of coastal Maine’s Acadia region. The GHS online collection is now available here.
The salt water farmer?
That’s Lutee M. Guptill, and her 5-year diary is part of our digital collection. Lutee was born in Gouldsboro in 1873 and died after the end of WWII at the age of 76. She and her older brother Marcus, both single, lived on their family’s farm in West Bay their entire lives. Her daily journal covers January 1939 to October 1943. In her terse 2–10 word diary entries, she poignantly depicts mourning, dealing with a winter death, loss and loneliness, and loved ones going off to fight a war, balanced by new babies, family dinners, joining the Seaside Grange, and the weather: all while continuing the milking, churning, cooking, washing, ironing, and mending of farm life.
The country doctor?
Dr. Nathaniel Pendleton served the residents of Gouldsboro from the mid-1830s until his death in 1877. He too chronicled his daily activities as a doctor, businessman, ship owner, Justice of the Peace, and postmaster in a “pocket diary.” The volumes from 1852 to 1874 have been preserved and protected by six generations of his descendants. These were graciously loaned to GHS to be scanned and shared online.
