The first one recently arrived on Louds Island, but it still doesn’t have a door.
It, is the first flush toilet to grace this decidedly old fashioned and unconventional Maine island community that some call a window into Maine’s coastal past.
“Yes, I can confirm we installed a flush toilet and will put in solar panels as part of our restoration,” said Frank Plimpton.
“We know how important the shell fish industry is to the coast and thought installation of a septic system would better protect the environment than an outhouse. Waste can be very harmful,” he said.
Plimpton, a Greenwich, Conn. lawyer and banker, is renovating the 46-acre Lookout Farm, which includes 1000 feet of shorefront property, on the storied island first settled in the 1600s.
Plimpton admits some of his neighbors are a bit unsettled by the project and have complained to the Maine Land Use Regulation Commission.
“We are not building condos, as one complained,” he said.
Scott Rollins, the division manager of permitting and compliance for MLURC, said all complaints have been investigated and said no violations of Plimpton’s permit were noted.
Just four miles long, Louds Island is located off the rocky coast of the Pemaquid peninsula, not far from the village of Round Pond.
It has a storied past that included a mini skirmish with neighboring Bristol over the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, attempts to draft island men into the Union Army and a refusal to pay property taxes.
The news of the island’s first flusher surprised Steve Nichols, husband of The Lincoln County News Long Cove columnist Vicki Nichols. “Oh that’s terrible,” he said. “When you go out there it is like going back 100 years. You walk the roads and the farms and the telephone lines strung on the ground between the houses and hand cranked phones,” he said.
His wife echoed her husband calling the installation of the automatic waste disposal system “historic.”
Despite the recent plumbing modification, Louds Island still has no government, no store, no school, no constable and no roads.
It has no mayor or town manager. It is called an unincorporated territory. Property taxes are paid to the state and land use permits are issued by state officials.
“People get around in tractors or on sort of golf carts called “Pogos,” on the paths that are old tractor roads,” said Laura S. Chaney, the director of development for Franklin Pierce Law School in Portsmouth, N.H.
Chaney is quick to tell an interviewer that she is a Maine native, from Alna and that her father worked on the island and saved enough to buy a place. She inherited it.
She said the phone lines, strung on the ground, connected the homes via hand-cranked phones. The system is in need of repair.
“Our ring was 4-long (rings),” she said.
As for the fast-paced equipment of the 21st century, she says it is a relief to be relieved of that high tech stuff.
“There is no internet, no TV, no electronic noise. It is quiet,” she said. “I tell people I get cell phone reception by going up stairs and standing on a chair, but really, we usually go outside and sit in a chair on a rock (to use the cell phone),” she said.
Island historian and archivist Lorraine Morong says much of the island’s past escapades may not be true, or maybe they are.
In 1964, in her book “State O’Maine,” Louise Dickinson Rich relates a tale of the election of 1860 that brought Republican Abraham Lincoln to the White House.
She says the Louds Islanders were affiliated with the town of Bristol where they voted and paid taxes.
It was a simple system. The tax assessor just came to the island once a year and chalked the tax bill on the front door of the homes. The islanders paid their bills and erased the chalk marks.
Simple it was until the 1860 election when Bristol was Republican and Louds Island favored the Democrats. There were more Islanders than townies, according to Rich.
Fearing an election loss, the Bristol officials remembered that Louds Island was not on the official State of Maine map, so they invalidated all the islanders ballots.
The islanders were not amused and set up their own independent republic. Citing the phrase: “taxation without representation,” they ran the tax collector off the island and rubbed off his chalk marks.
“They were determined to prove that they could get along very well without Bristol and for a while Bristol was very glad to get along without them,” she wrote.
Then came the draft seeking Union soldiers.
Bristol put the names of nine island men on the draft list. When army recruiters came to collect the new draftees, the islanders prevented them from landing brandishing firearms and pitching vegetables at them.
Many hate the idea of change, and you can see why, said Chaney. “The air is clean. The sky is clear. At night, the full moon is so bright it is like daylight,” she said. “It is a place where you could just be.”
