Joel Crabtree

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.

May 1, 2024 | downeast.com | Joel Crabtree

Auburn is at least half an hour’s drive to the coast, and its economy was long tied not to the ocean but to the tumbling Androscoggin River, which powered all sorts of mills, from textile to brick to furniture. For the first half of the 20th century, the city was known for making shoes, at one point producing as many as 70,000 per day. Nowadays, it’s home to an attractive downtown with a nice smattering of restaurants and a pleasant riverfront trail.