WELCOME TO THE LINCOLNVILLE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

& SCHOOL HOUSE MUSEUM

"The Lincolnville Historical Society was founded in 1975 to stimulate community interest in the history of our Town of Lincolnville, Maine. That includes, but isn't limited to, its early government, industries, agriculture, schools, churches, and organizations. We're also interested in the founding families and their genealogies and the people who live here now.

We’re very excited about our current project: finding our historic sites, noting their exact location or former location, and then marking them on an interactive map of our town. This process, which records sites using latitude and longitude, will be just as helpful in the future whether properties change hands or road names evolve, and it lets us include basic information keyed to each site.

Using Satellites to Track the Past

Our town is unique in having so many public and semi-public lands such as Camden Hills State Park, Coastal Mountains Land Trust parcels and four miles of shoreline. Because these lands haven’t been developed, signs of early days like cellar holes, stone walls, dams, bridge abutments, wells, lime kilns, pilings, quarries, roads, cemeteries—even single, stand-alone graves—are still relatively intact and undisturbed. These features are out there in the woods and along the shore, often familiar to hunters and hikers, but unknown to many of the rest of us. If we do come across them, we often don’t realize the significance of what we’re seeing.

You may remember your grandfather or a neighbor talking about a certain old road or hearing about the family that lived in a house that’s only a cellar hole now. Time is running out to preserve these stories and, at the same time, somehow connect them to actual features on the ground.

That’s how Global Positioning System is a crucial tool for us. GPS, a technology familiar to some, uses signals from orbiting satellites to pinpoint the latitude and longitude of a site. Those “waypoints” can be downloaded to a computer and placed on a map. A plan to build a map of our early historic sites using GPS has been on the back burner for several years, and now it’s finally happening.

To learn more about our project and use the preliminary version of our interactive map, click on the satellite image of our town (shown above).