Lisa Brackett, of Monhegan Island, stands on Fish Beach on Saturday, June 7. Brackett, originally from New Harbor, has lived on Monhegan since the early 2000s. In that time, Brackett has been very involved in the community, at one point running the island’s grocery store. She is currently the town clerk, tax collector, and registrar of voters. (Johnathan Riley photo)
Those who live in a small community end up wearing a few different hats, and no one knows that better than Monhegan Island’s town clerk, tax collector, registrar of voters, manager of The Bait Bag, and former owner of the Bristol Diner, Lisa Brackett.
Brackett, who grew up in New Harbor, right across from Shaw’s Fish and Lobster Wharf, said growing up there was “incredible.”
“It was carefree, it was safe, you knew all your neighbors,” she said. “The summer kids would come, and so that gave you a whole bunch of new friends to play with, it just gave me a real secure feeling of home, of what home is.”
The lifelong worker and businesswoman got into the local economy early on. Her very first job was selling handmade candlestick holders decorated with sea glass found at the Rachel Carson Salt Pond Preserve from a stand at her grandfather’s dock in New Harbor next to Shaw’s Wharf.
“I was an entrepreneur from the get-go,” she said. “I’d get enough to buy an order of steamers. I’d do that, I’d have lunch, and then close up shop, and then I’d go back and sell some more so I could make enough to get a whoopie pie and a coke.”
Brackett attended Bristol Consolidated School and Lincoln Academy in Newcastle, where she graduated in 1979. Brackett said. She remembers a her time at LA was marked by friends, fun, and an appreciation for life when it was simpler.
“There was a group of us girls that hung out together all four years, and we had a lot of fun,” she said, laughing. “Some might say too much fun. We were the last, it seems, of a generation of kids that grew up with the innocence around us … when life seemed so much simpler even though you had the complications of being a teenager and hormones and the confusion around growing up in a small town and ‘Where do I fit in?’”
Throughout high school Brackett worked in restaurants like the Colonial Pemaquid Restoration, a restaurant in Pemaquid Harbor, with her mother, Martha Brackett, who was a long time cook in Lincoln County.
“My mother and I always worked together,” she said. “It seemed like whenever she got a job, she got me one too.”
After graduation, Brackett moved to West Palm Beach, Fla., where she worked in restaurants during the wintertime before returning to Maine in the summer to work in restaurants. After three years of being a snowbird, someone who moves seasonally from colder to warmer climates, Brackett moved back to Maine and lived in Portland for a year before relocating to Damariscotta.
In 1992, while she was working at The Samoset, the opportunity arose for Brackett to buy the building in the Bristol Mills that she and her mother turned into the Bristol Diner.
“It had always been a diner,” she said. “(Owning a restaurant) wasn’t a lifelong dream of mine, I always, always have said anybody that owned their own restaurant was crazy.”
In addition to jumping into owning and running the diner, Brackett was pregnant with her son Jack, who eventually became a part of the restaurant.
“The pregnancy and having Jack was like a lifetime achievement award,” Bracket said. “He’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Jack became a fixture in the corner of the diner … We had a wonderful time there, and it was a real community-based diner.”
That cultivated community aspect of the diner was one of Brackett’s favorite parts of owning the business, especially some of the regulars with whom she bonded. Those bonds were part of what sustained Brackett through her time owning the establishment.
“We had a group of guys that came in every single morning, which was my favorite part of the day, because it was Fred Naylor, Bobby Fosset, Leroy Griffin, and Guy Benner,” she said. “The four of them were staples… they were the best guys, but what kept me going, it seemed, was all the fun we had. Then, of course, all the regulars; we had so many regulars that came every day … I couldn’t possibly name them all, but they did, and it was so much fun there.”
While the life of running a restaurant can wear on a person, what facilitated stepping away from the business was a tragedy that happened in Brackett’s family. In processing the grief, Brackett said she took a day off a week from the diner to go out to Monhegan Island, a place she had a connection to in her youth.
Out on the island, Brackett traveled to the cliffs on the Eastern side, or backside, of the island, which are the tallest seaside cliffs in the state, according to Monhegan Associates, a private nonprofit land trust.
“I’d take a day off from the diner, and I’d come out to Monhegan once a week and just go to the backside and hang out,” she said. “I’m one of those people that stepped my feet on that dock and went, ‘Oh my god, I love this place. This is it,’ and I hadn’t even left the dock yet. I loved Monhegan right from the get-go, and I do believe that it comes back full circle to that security of home.”
Even though Brackett had visited the island previously, she said that this time was different.
“I thought it was absolutely beautiful here, and I loved it, but it wasn’t until in the diner days that I stepped off the Hardy boat, onto the dock, and went, ‘Oh my God,’” she said. “It went up through my body. You know, I just felt this incredible pull to be here.”
Brackett eventually sold the diner to fund a down payment on a house along the water on the island. For the first three years, she summered on the island, but found it harder and harder to leave come winter. By the fourth year, she decided to stay full-time.
“I would dream about this island all when I would go in my car and sit down at Salt Pond and look at it, I’d go to (Pemaquid Point) and I’d look at it and count the days till I could get back here again,” she said.
Brackett has now been on the island full time since 2004 and has kept as busy as she was on shore, becoming an integral part of the year-round community.
From 2005 until 2013, Brackett managed the fish market on the island. In 2013, she leased the grocery store and ran the business for eight years under the name L. Brackett and Son. The format of the name was an homage to C.E. Reilly and Son, a grocery store in New Harbor.
Brackett ran the store until 2020, when she decided to step away from the business after feeling ready to move on.
During her time with the grocery store on the island, Brackett said she got sober from alcohol use.
“I was desperate,” she said. “Today, what keeps me sober is one, my son, my (Alcoholics Anonymous) community, my higher power, which is the universe for me, and my dog, who saw me at the worst of times and the best of times, Chaco.”
Early in her recovery, Brackett started hosting the twice weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, a support group for those in recovery from alcohol.
The person who helped Brackett get sober and who had been hosting the meetings died, and Brackett took up the responsibility of holding the meetings even though no one else attended for over a year.
“I knew he intended for me to keep that AA meeting open, so I would go down to the library twice a week all winter long, and open up the doors, turn the light on, and sit there, and I would hold an AA meeting by myself,” she said. “I was so desperate to stay sober, I knew the only way I would would be to go down to that library twice a week in the freezing cold. The library is not insulated. It’s so cold in there, and I would sit on the heater, and I would open the meeting, then I’d close the meeting, and I’d go home, and all the better for it Then a year later, a year and three days later, the door jiggled, and somebody else walked in, and it was lucky I was there and had that door open.”
Brackett has now been in recovery for eight years.
After leaving the grocery store, Brackett took on managing The Bait Bag, which is the food trailer parked at Monhegan Brewing Company, the island’s brewery, a job she continues to do today.
In addition to her full-time work with The Bait Bag, Brackett is also Monhegan Island’s tax collector, town clerk, registrar of voters, and runs Brackett Rentals, a small rental business on the island.
Throughout various job titles on the island, one of her longest-held positions may be as a donut maker. Brackett has been making her homemade donuts since she arrived on the island in the early 2000s and selling them at businesses on the island.
Brackett’s been making them long enough that she’s seen kids grow up eating them on the island, which is why she continues to do it.
“I fried the donuts for the kids,” she said. “I love that they grow up on them out here. One year, I decided to stop, then I heard this little boy, who had been coming to the island since he was a baby, and he was probably 7 or 8 years old, he cried because there were no donuts. The next year, when they came back, we had donuts, and it was because of him that I started the donuts again.”
In her recovery, Brackett is finding herself a little more bored during the winters and has started to venture off the island during that time in recent years, but she still feels in her heart that Monhegan is home.
“(I’m) beginning to stretch out my wings and looking for more, but I still love coming back to the island in the spring, and I still love my job,” she said. “I love Monhegan, and I still love it. I still love this island, and I love the community. I have made a life here.”
(Do you have a suggestion for a “Characters of the County” subject? Email info@lcnme.com with the subject line “Characters of the County” with the name and contact information of your nominee.)
