August 27, 1935- Eastport Begins to Doll Up as Quoddy Project Starts Boom
The Washington Daily News—Tuesday—August 27,—1935
Eastport Begins to Doll Up as Quoddy Project Starts Boom
By Ernie Pyle
(Last of four stories on Maine’s big PWA tide-harnessing electric power project.)
EASTPORT, Me.—Eastport is the easternmost city in the United States. It is very old, it has always been a sea town, and is still a sea town. It is quaint, and smells rankly of sardines, and is every inch New England coast.
Eastport is about to become a boom town. By that we mean boom towns like the West used to have boom towns, in the wild gold and oil days. It seems out of place in rock-ribbed New England, but here it comes, anyway. The great Passamaquoddy Dam project, which will draw in 10,000 workers, is the reason.
The project is less than two months old, yet already it is impossible to get a room in Eastport. Restaurants are crowded, so are the aged and narrow streets.
The boomers are flocking in on every train. The daily choo-choo carries twice as many coaches as it used to. Freight cars have tripled.
Soon new restaurants, new boarding houses, new stores will spring up. Prices will skyrocket. The slick-tongued city fellers will arrive to take the boys with cash in their pockets for a ride. It’s always thus in boom towns. New England has always done a stern and tight-lipped job of repelling its invaders, but I doubt that it can cope with the gentry who follow the gold, and the oil, and in recent years the big dams.
● ● ●
Maine is loosening up on gambling. Just a few days ago mutual betting on the sulky races at the Skowhegan fair was started. Whether Maine will permit Eastport to become another Las Vegas, with 40 gambling casinos and 40 saloons, I don’t know. But if it does, what a shock New England is going to get.
Eastport is small, about 4000. It has one main street, about three blocks long. The street, wide enough for a sea town, is now a congested mess. The sidewalks stand a couple of feet above the old asphalt pavement. On one side of main street, the town rises sharply up a hill. On the other side, with one row of buildings between, is Passamaquoddy Bay. The stores which front on this side of the street hang out over the water’s edge.
It is in one of these buildings, an old warehouse, that the Army has established administrative headquarters for the Quoddy project. Tied up at the rear of the building is a large ship, the Sea Hawk, on which all Army men are living until Quoddy Village is finished and they can get their families here.
Right out in the bay, just a few hundred yards, is what is advertised as the greatest whirlpool in the world, caused by Fundy’s swirling tides. Sometimes the core of the whirlpool is 30 feet deep. In 1919 a schooner and all its crew were swallowed up right there, within throwing distance of the wharf.
Eastport itself is starting to doll up for its onrushing prosperity. The day we were there they were painting diagonal white lines on the main street for parking, the first such intrusion that decrepit old asphalt had ever felt.
● ● ●
Col. Philip Fleming, the officer in charge of everything at Passamaquoddy, medium-sized, tanned veteran of a thousand lesser-scale water-building projects, dressed in work uniform, walks proudly through the fresh loam of sprouting Quoddy village. He stands by a place where a house will be and points out over a neck of land, and beyond that to the spruce-covered hills, and asks if you ever saw such a spot for a home. He gives an order here and there to a foreman he never saw before, then jumps into his car and hurries back to his desk and papers.
Capt. Roy B. Lord, second in command, youthful, pleasant, serious, wears mufti, dark pants and a green sweater, can do a hundred things at once. His job ranges from picking out colonial lighting fixtures for the Quoddy village to organizing and directing the 10,000 men who will build the Quoddy dams. He is neither fussed nor officious. Maybe engineers are different; anyway, at Quoddy you get none of the Army’s famous red tape or run-around.
There is pride in both these men’s eyes, and although they are merely putting into effect a lifetime of training, they are aglow with the drama of the thing, its bigness, its romance, its challenge. I think they are pleased to hear you gasp when you’re told a city will be created in 45 days, the whole dam project in two years and a half.
We stood on the hill and looked down over Passamaquoddy Bay when we said good-by. I told them I was coming back someday to check up on them.
They said, “We’ll be ready for you.”
💛 **Enjoyed this post?** Your support helps The Ernie Pyle Legacy Foundation continue to transcribe and promote Ernie’s work. Please click the link below to donate.
https://www.erniepylefoundation.org/home
