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 The three latest Bulletins, prior to this issue, have featured Castine’s early fire engines and fire companies. One of these issues was devoted to the Bagaduce Engine Co. No. 2 and, until recently, the only picture we had of the fire engine was a very faded stereoscopic view. We are grateful to the Maine Historic Preservation Commission in Augusta for a copy they had of this view. It is No. 34 of thirty-five “Views of Castine and Vicinity” published in 1873 by George E. Collins of Portland, ME.
“The Bagaduce Engine Co., No. 2” is an excellent item to add to our archival material on Castine’s early fire engines, but Collins’ composition offers us another treat. In the background is a church which Harry Thombs, Sr. (1884-1966) identified as the church at No. Castine . . . opposite Colby Gray House. The 1860 map within locates a church opposite and to the north of the Ferry Road.
Dorothy Conner Farnham was the youngest of nine children. Though she did not remember the church, she remembered her eldest sibling Iva Pauline (1891-1980) and Esther Steel Perkins, both of whom grew up in this neighborhood, telling of how they used to play hide and seek in and round the church building, which was then used only as a storage building for hay. The Atlas of Hancock County . . . published by S. F. Colby & Co. in 1881 defines this building as a Store Ho[use].
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