Here is part of a little social media project I started many months ago but lost interest in—mainly because no one else seemed interested—but remembered this morning after reading Bob Keyes’s entrancing article in the Maine Sunday Telegram. It’s half homage to the old days in West Point Village and half a business piece looking at the local oyster trade in the midst of oceanside gentrification and the Covid Pandemic. Give it a read.
In any event thinking about it reminded me of Ernest Haskell, his house on the West Point Road, his introduction of John Marin to Maine, and that iconic view of the Phippsburg Congregational Church you see across Center Pond when headed north on Route 209. The title of Haskell’s 1924 etching is Crystal Morning which really brings to mind that sparking view you get under blue skies with Center Pond twinkling, but this broad view is a lot quieter. With the bluff on the left and the high trees it recalls the aspect of the pond you would see before the DOT undertook a big project on Route 209 in the early 1980s when the “cliff” on the west side of the road just on the Bath side of the Basin Road was blasted and moved back from the pond fifteen meters or so—that stretch of road got straightened a bit, and widened a good deal, allowing for faster travel and the consequent loss the leisurely pace to really take the view in.
One of the things that intrigued me most about Haskell ’s story was his connection to John Marin and introduction of Marin, much better known as a “Maine” artist than Haskell, to Maine through West Point. Haskell had met Marin in Paris a few years earlier. Marin was a bit of an itinerant wandering up the coast and stopping here and there and is better known for his connections further downeast. Haskell, in spite of putting roots down in one place, is sort of lost to time. A second thing that intrigued is Haskell’s death in a Bath hospital as the result on a car wreck on those beautiful winding roads of Phippsburg just about a mile from his on the West Point Road. Third, and something that really resonated with me at the time I “found” Haskell in the Sumer of 2020, was death of his first wife, Elizabeth Louise Foley, in 1918 as a result of last great American pandemic, the Spanish Flu.
Haskell, by Doretha Lange