With little fanfare, a tiny Maine town fades away
CENTERVILLE, Maine -- Just 10 residents showed up at town hall Monday night, raising hands dutifully and in unanimity as the business of killing off their town got underway.
The nine town hall benches, it was agreed, would be sold for $10 apiece. A sum of $1,670.82 would be paid to sever the ambulance service contract. The town hall would be put up for sale; its flag with a gold-painted staff given to Philip Gaudette, the town's oldest resident at 70.
And when all was settled and mathematically divided, it fell, as things usually do, to Sue Dorsey to say a little something.
"Just because we won't be official anymore, we will still be the town of Centerville," said Dorsey, who serves as first selectwoman, first overseer, first assessor, and school committee member. "It's the people, not the property, that makes the town."
Such is the end of a town, 162 years old, with a history dating to the settlement of the wilds of Northern Maine, but now with just 25 residents and none willing to hold office and keep government going.
Centerville, an outpost of blueberry barrens and weathered homesteads 70 miles east of Bangor, is one of a growing number of Maine municipalities -- many
remote and dwindling in population -- that are disbanding and becoming a part of Maine's unorganized territory, which is overseen and managed by the state. The move is striking, some say, because it runs counter to core Yankee values of self-reliance and local control. But it also highlights the growing division in Maine between wealthy coastal and southern towns thriving with healthy tax bases, and the inland and northern towns struggling for survival.
"As towns become deorganized, it contributes to a sense of cultural and economic imbalance in the state as a whole," said Kent Ryden, a professor of American and New England studies at the University of Southern Maine. "That not all Mainers are equal anymore."
By the state's count, Centerville is the ninth town to disband since the 1980s, with more eyeing the possibility. Local officials considering such a change cite the hassle and cost of providing services in towns too small to realize economies of scale.
"Running towns is difficult," said Doreen Sheive, the fiscal administrator for the unorganized territories. "No one says, `Thank you.' They will come and complain but they won't thank you."
The trend is a worry to state officials, who last year stiffened requirements for disbanding by mandating that 50 percent of registered voters in a municipality, rather than the previously required 10 percent, sign a petition required for the process. State officials' concern is the effect that dissolved towns can have on surrounding communities, which can incur increased financial burdens after the change. At times, the services that disbanded towns require cost more than the amount they contribute, based on their valuation, to the unorganized territory pool.
But there is also the intangible, Sheive said, of "an awful lot of people giving up their communities and local control."
Maine has nearly 10 million acres of unorganized territory concentrated in the upper counties of the state, like Aroostook and Washington. The territory comprises over half the state, and yet in a measure of the sheer untamed quality of Maine's furthest reaches, counts fewer than 8,000 residents.
Within the unorganized territory are 422 townships, boundaried but mostly undeveloped areas that remain from early settler days and never got around to forming their own local government. Some were once full-fledged towns that disbanded after World War II when soldiers resettled elsewhere at the war's end. The latest round comes as population drains from the north, this time with a series of paper mill closings and other industrial losses.
Centerville, incorporated March 16, 1842, once boasted a sizable population. Some say the peak hit 500 when logging was a living for many in the area and the town counted sawmills, along with a gristmill, two schools, and a store. Today all are gone. Just one full-time business operates in town, Kelley Peat Moss Co., and come summertime, pickers arrive for blueberry season in the fields of ash-violet bramble stretching for miles around the town.
Indeed, Centerville's identity now is forged by its diminishment: It was dubbed New England's smallest town by Yankee magazine in 1987, when 20 people lived there.
Residents are the first to admit there is not much happening in Centerville. For the most part, the daily doings of life long have been carried on elsewhere: the post office is in nearby Columbia Falls, as are the fire station and the transfer station. Mail is addressed to Centerville, but the ZIP code is Columbia Falls.
The one hub, of sorts, is the town hall. Yet even that is unimposing, a plywood structure not big or safe enough to store town documents. Gloria Bagley, the town clerk, keeps tucked away in her home irreplaceable documents such as death certificates of veterans of the War of 1812 and the Civil War.
Enthusiasm for keeping the town intact has been on the wane for some time.
"You have to have seven people to conduct a town meeting," said Julian Bagley, Gloria's husband, a Kelley's Peat employee. "I went to one where they had to get someone out of a sick bed to have the meeting."
Last year, things unraveled quickly when the town clerk -- who also served as overseer, school committee member, tax collector, treasurer, registrar and deputy fire warden -- quit all posts before walking out of town meeting in a protest over a variety of issues.
"It was like that night everything stopped and someone said, `What the hell happened here?' And then we all said to ourselves, `We should just get on with it' " and disband, Julian Bagley said.
Several weeks later, at a special town meeting, a decision was made to dissolve Centerville, a process that will be officially concluded July 1.
So, on Monday night, Centerville held its final town meeting. There were almost as many visitors from out of town there to witness the event as there were residents, giving the meeting a performance-like quality as residents marched through the 22 final articles of business.
Maxine Caler snapped photographs; Julian Bagley cracked a bit of gallows humor. Afterward, the voters lingered inside, sipping
No one, it seemed, was in a big hurry to leave.
Sarah Schweitzer can be reached by e-mail at schweitzer@globe.
com.
