Joel Crabtree

2 weeks ago | downeast.com | Will Grunewald |Joel Crabtree

Ice cream is a critical element of every Vacationland summer. Strolling down Main Street or sitting on a bench by the shore or relaxing after a hike — are any quintessential Maine experiences not improved with a waffle cone in hand? If we missed any of your personal go-tos, — this list might need an update. Velma and Earl Butterfield opened this stand on their farm in 1950, and though ownership has changed since then, not too much else has.

Jan 7, 2025 | downeast.com | Joel Crabtree

On a camping trip in 1979, Ted and Laura Sweeney, a Massachusetts couple, fell in love with Acadia National Park. A year later, they started a business, Tempshield Cryo-Protection, making gloves that could shield laboratory workers’ hands from temperatures several hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Not coincidentally, they decided to set up their production facility in Trenton, just outside Acadia.

Oct 30, 2024 | downeast.com | Joel Crabtree |Mary Pols

John Meader runs a company called Northern Stars Planetarium, traveling around the midcoast and central Maine with an inflatable-dome star theater, for educational programming at schools, public libraries, and other groups. But his greatest passion is the genuine article, the real night sky.

Jun 19, 2024 | downeast.com | Joel Crabtree

In 1999, fresh out of college, two women signed up to be dropped into small island communities as part of the Rockland-based nonprofit Island Institute’s fellowship program. Except that there was no fellowship program, at least not really. The institute’s mission, since its founding 16 years earlier, had been to support the economic and social well-being of coastal towns, but it had never tried this before. The inaugural fellows were Jes Stevens and Susan Olcott.

May 7, 2024 | downeast.com | Joel Crabtree

Every second of every minute of every hour of every day, the dozens of antique clocks in Peter Rioux’s Winterport shop tick and chime the time away. The endless cacophony is enough to drive a person cuckoo, but for Peter, who painstakingly repairs mechanical timepieces in a red-clapboard Cape he and his wife, Susie, built near their home, the discord sounds like a job well done. “I find it very comforting,” he says.