Today

New Road to Ride Over Part of Aurora’s Past

The Airline Road cuts through this town like a divider, leaving the 121 residents either north or south of the major truck route between Bangor and Calais. Within weeks, the new Airline Road—and the old Route 9—will represent a division between the old and the new as well.

The Department of Transportation’s tractors will transform what is now a two-lane road into a wider stretch a few hundred yards from where it lays now, they are within site of the historic Mace’s Store.

Mace’s Store will absorb the biggest impact of Route 9’s reconstruction. As a country store that dates from 1851, Mace’s has the distinction as Hancock County’s oldest continuous store. But it won’t survive the bulldozers. Long-time owners Melody and Ted Knadler have plans to rebuild it nearby.

Change of these proportions doesn’t happen often in Aurora, one of Hancock County’s most rural towns. This is, for example, where Susan Chiavoli has been teaching at the Airport Community School for 21 years.

It’s also where Louise Larson—among many others—has lived all her life. In addition to becoming the ringleader for ladies’ quilting groups, she has worked as the Aurora postmaster for the last 25 years.

And Robert Larson, her brother-in-law, can claim distinction for having held his town responsibility even longer: He has been the fire warden for 40 years. He also has been registering voters in Aurora for 20 years.

It’s that kind of feel-good place.

Twenty-four miles north of Ellsworth, 26 miles east of Bangor, Aurora has retained its pristine, personal, open, original nature. The handful of farmhouses that dot Route 9, east of the town line with Amherst, retain reminders of their handsome pasts.

Aurora has always been more road and rural than town-like. There are only 121 people, after all. Many of them are tucked into the woods that bump against either side of the Airline Road.

Used to be that everybody knew everybody else. But not so, these days.

“There are so many new people in town,” said Ruth McCuskey, chair of the planning board.

Locals remember well those who lived there before them. They like to swap stories, the older the better. But for outsiders who don’t know otherwise, it’s easy to think that Aurora is mostly about times gone by.

For all of Aurora’s old-time atmosphere, however, there are some modern-day contrasts there.

One of those is the Union River Telephone Co. that was founded in 1905. Ninety-seven years later, it continues as a small, independent, locally owned company, while other phone companies in rural Maine were bought out over the years.

Now, the company provides its 1,500 or so customers in Aurora and surrounding towns with Internet connections via DSL service—something not readily available in most of the rest of Hancock County.

Clearly the biggest business in town, today the company employs 15 people. Its offices are in a Route 9 farmhouse, the one where Jefferson Davis stayed in that summer of ’58.

That’s 1858, mind you.