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2 weeks ago | 
downeast.com | Sara Anne Donnelly
During a trip to Bar Harbor in the mid ’90s, Cheryl Staples spotted a chunk of sea glass shining like a sapphire on the beach. She dug it out, dusted it off, and held it up to the sun. The smoothed jar bottom seemed to glow in her hand. “I really enjoyed how beautiful it was,” Staples recalls. “So I put it in my pocket and that was that.” Every day for the remainder of the vacation, she trolled the beach, filling gallon-size Ziploc bags with sea glass.
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3 weeks ago | 
downeast.com | Sara Anne Donnelly
According to Dave Copp, May 10, 1968 was “the best day I ever had in my life.” He was 12 years old, and a bottle collector from Union named Bob Heath had hired him and a friend to dig in cellar holes for buried treasure: handblown bottles in ruby, topaz, emerald, and sapphire shades. “He gave us lunch and all the soda we could drink,” says Copp, who came from a poor Rockland family, and by the time he’d unearthed a small mound of vessels, he was hooked. He told Heath, “I like what I’m digging up.
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4 weeks ago | 
downeast.com | Sara Anne Donnelly |Sara Anne Donelly
On episode 54 of the YouTube series “Kevin Talks Irons,” Kevin McCartney and a few friends try lighting an 1898 gasoline clothes iron on the porch of his Caribou bed-and-breakfast. The device spits flames from both ends and briefly ignites an ironing board before being rushed back to the safety of a trivet.
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1 month ago | 
downeast.com | Sara Anne Donnelly
A little over 30 years ago, Howard Hardy visited a cousin who was chopping wood with an axe he said was made in Oakland. Intrigued, Hardy began keeping an eye out for other locally crafted cutting tools and bought a few on eBay and in antiques stores. Then, he started asking around town if folks had any Oakland axes. “It’s a fever,” Hardy says. “You meet a person who’s got five axes and you buy them and think, well, I guess I need more.
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1 month ago | 
downeast.com | Sara Anne Donnelly |Sara Anne Donelly
Betsey Telford-Goodwin didn’t know much about quilts when an acquaintance in Massachusetts asked her to hunt around for some antique textiles from the American West to decorate her house. It was 1987, and Telford-Goodwin and her first husband had recently moved from the Boston area to Colorado.
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2 months ago | 
downeast.com | Sara Anne Donnelly |Sara Anne Donelly
Over 30 years working as an environmental scientist and planner, quilting had been Judy Gates’s creative outlet. But in 2020, the medium had her feeling boxed in. “I wanted a way to still use fabric without trying to force myself into cutting pieces a certain way or following a certain pattern,” she says.
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Jan 3, 2025 | 
downeast.com | Sara Anne Donnelly
As a teenager, Jaymi Poor painted her bedroom walls in eye-popping shades of hot pink, safety orange, highlighter yellow, and electric blue. Paired with a fluorescent-pink shag rug, a patchwork quilt, and mismatched curtains, the effect was something like peering into a kaleidoscope. “I’d have friends over and they’d be like, ‘I want to do something fun like this in my bedroom,’” Poor says.
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Nov 25, 2024 | 
downeast.com | Sara Anne Donnelly |Sara Anne Donelly
Every Thanksgiving, Dan Powell gathers with his family and about a hundred friends and acquaintances for a “Lights On” party. Powell, whose round face and bushy brown beard recall a boyish Santa Claus, serves hot cocoa and candy canes, then corrals the group for a Clark Griswold–style lighting reveal. “We count down from 10 in true Griswold fashion,” says Powell, who announces the event to followers of his exterior-illumination adventures on Facebook.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
newengland.com | Sara Anne Donnelly
By Sara Anne DonnellyThe shopping town of Freeport is more than just the home to L.L. Bean’s flagship store. It’s an all-season favorite with plenty of shopping, dining, and celebrations. If you’re planning a visit, our guide to Freeport, Maine, has you covered with the best things to do, places to eat, and places to stay. See more in the November/December 2024 Yankee Magazine feature “Holiday Weekend in Freeport, Maine.”The town’s only bespoke fine jeweler, founded in 1967.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
newengland.com | Sara Anne Donnelly
By Sara Anne DonnellyIn 1771, the British cartographer Joseph Frederick Wallet DesBarres surveyed the roads in the farming village that would later become Freeport. There were only a handful, the largest of which was Post Road (now Route 1), which bisected a town center so muddy that it regularly swallowed horses to their haunches. Back then, you’d be better off getting around town by boat, skirting Casco Bay and the Harraseeket River past the modest homes of retired sea captains.
