Maine villagers knocked off keel by school's plans

CASTINE, Maine - To seekers of a certain kind of aesthetic purity, hard to find in this age of mushrooming McMansions, this coastal village beckons like an earthly paradise.

Graceful elm trees bend over stately, Federal-style houses, and students from the white clapboard schoolhouse play kickball on the town green. Bell buoys chime on blue Penobscot Bay, and wooden signs around town, carefully painted with flags, mark the sites of battles in the town's long military history. The nearest stoplight and supermarket are 16 miles away, down a rural, winding road.

The exquisite scenery and deep, off-season quiet have attracted an eclectic, sophisticated mix of well-off transplants, retirees, and part-time residents from out of state, including Hollywood screenwriters, Harvard professors, political aides, and national magazine editors.

But now, some residents say, the town's unique beauty is threatened by the small public college that has occupied a corner of Castine for 66 years. Fiercely protective of their idyllic retreat, some townspeople, with support from town officials, have vowed to stop the Maine Maritime Academy from expanding beyond its long-established boundaries, onto a landmark, 6-acre estate across the street from its campus.

The academy purchased the elegant hilltop property, known as the Abbott House, for almost $1.5 million last week, after the town's three-member Board of Selectmen vowed to take "any and all actions necessary" to prevent the school from using the house or land. Built in 1802, bordered by a white picket fence and backed by a forest of towering hackmatack trees, the estate sits in a residential district, where local zoning rules prohibit use by institutions, said selectmen.

"How can the town let this beautiful property be anything but maintained?" said Deane Richardson, a cofounder of a global industrial design firm who retired to Castine two years ago from Ohio. "This purchase puts a question mark in that."

The president of Maine Maritime Academy, Leonard Tyler, said the town has overreacted. He said the Abbott House will become the new home of the college president, a use he believes is allowed under residential zoning. The move will allow the current president's house across the street to be converted to office space Tyler says the school badly needs, and a new alumni center, which in turn will free up space in the cramped college library.

Tyler, who expects to retire in three years, said he is not planning to expand enrollment or build on the Abbott House land.

But he acknowledged he cannot speak for future leaders of the academy.

"What happens 10 or 20 years from now, I don't know," he said. "Governor [John] Baldacci wants to increase the number of Maine kids getting an education, and if he gets letter after letter saying 'I was turned down by MMA because there's no room,' then they might have to do something different."

The disagreement over Abbot House is expected to end up in court. Peter Vogell, a Castine native who is chairman of the Board of Selectmen, said the town will take action as soon as the academy tries to use the property.

Meanwhile, Maine State Police are searching for a vandal who threw a sledgehammer through the front window of a real estate agency involved in the property sale. The damage was discovered Friday, the day after the deal was finalized.

Town and college have long been bound in uneasy codependence. Residents acknowledge that they need the school to shore up the tiny, aging population on their isolated peninsula. College students serve as volunteer firefighters for the town, and local schoolchildren play sports on the academy's fields.

There have been clashes before, over building heights and generator noise from the State of Maine, the academy's 500-foot training vessel, which looms from its berth at the edge of Castine's deep-water harbor.

But tensions have heightened as enrollment in the academy has grown. This fall, 880 students are preparing for careers in the booming shipping industry, ocean science, and engineering.

The students, already a majority of the town's 1,300 year-round residents, park their pickup trucks on narrow village streets; some speed through town late at night, residents said, host loud parties, or throw trash on well-kept sidewalks.

"There's pressure on the academy, from the state and the Legislature, to expand, and there's pressure on the town to keep it from expanding, to maintain that delicate balance, which, if it goes too far in either direction, destroys the relationship between town and gown," said John Parish, an opponent of the expansion who retired to Castine from Hartford.

To fight the school's plan, residents have put their skills and connections to use, making phone calls and writing letters of concern to academy board members and Governor John Baldacci of Maine. One set up a website, mmawatch.org, to post updates on the real estate transaction.

Critics of the academy say they are driven by more than aesthetics. They say their anger is also fueled by loyalty to the property's previous owner, Deborah Pulliam, a longtime resident who died of cancer last May at 54. Pulliam was a colorful, well-known character who walked her beagle, Flugel, everywhere she went. She was also a quiet philanthropist from a wealthy Indianapolis family who gave generously to local causes.

Several people who knew her said Pulliam would not have wanted her family to sell her home to the academy.

"I know how much she loved these woods, and the last thing she would want is for them to be at risk of being developed or cut down," said Josh Adam, an artist and gallery owner who tended Pulliam's land. "I believe she didn't protect them because she didn't think they needed protecting, because of the zoning."

But Pulliam's sister, Myrta Pulliam, and lawyer, Ellen Best, said Deborah Pulliam never expressed any concern about the academy buying her property, even before her death, when she was working on her will with lawyers. Her bequests included $4 million for Castine's public library, $4 million for its historical society, and $4 million for a local church.

"I would never have done anything to hurt my sister," Myrta Pulliam said. "She said she wanted it to be lived in, so when they said the president would live there, it seemed perfectly legitimate to me. The whole idea that it vilifies her memory is ridiculous and wrong, and it's hurtful.

"She would be furious with the way they're behaving, these people saying they know better than her," she added.

Townspeople said they would prefer the academy expand outside the village, on 225 acres its leaders bought 10 years ago in Penobscot. Tyler said school leaders drafted a plan to build affordable housing for faculty and students on the land, but faced concerns from Castine selectmen about the drop in town population that would result.

If the school is unable to use the Abbott House, it will sell it for a profit, Tyler said, to ensure that the purchase remain a good investment. But he said he is bothered by "the assumption that our intentions are different than what we're saying."

Scott Vogell, a local contractor and Peter Vogell's brother, said the academy could regain the town's trust if it placed legal restrictions on the property.

"They say they want a better relationship with the town," Vogell said. "This, to me, is an opportunity to prove it."

Jenna Russell can be reached at jrussell@globe.com.