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It’s All Sunny Skies to Sawyer These Days
Most sunny days,
small float planes can be seen streaming across the Osborn skies.
From Sylvia
Sawyer’s Moosehill Farm, the small “puddle jumpers” can be seen
hopping among the lakes of northern
Hancock
County.
Sylvia Sawyer stands before her
home in Osborn. Sawyer’s great-grandfather built the family farm
on Moose Hill in 1840. |
During World War
II, Sylvia Sawyer’s mother, Nathalie Jordan, was on the lookout for
more threatening aircraft.
Jordan
was actually enlisted to keep her eyes on those skies— to stay
watchful for what could be enemy warplanes.
Noting that the
Jordan
family lived on one of the highest points in the area, Sawyer said
that the U.S. government asked if Jordan might do her part for the
war effort.
“She went up to
Bangor to take a plane identification class,” recalled Sawyer.
Sawyer remembers
pictures of enemy warplanes lining a wall in the old family
farmhouse at the top of Moose Hill.
She also recalled a
“red phone” near the pictures, which she thought might have been a
direct line to the government
Once, Sawyer said,
her mother thought she recognized an enemy plane.
Was she right?
“I think we were
wrong,” Sawyer laughed.
Nathalie Jordan had
been an elementary school teacher at several Hancock County schools.
Sawyer said that she was always willing to do her part.
After a long
absence from the town of Osborn, moving to New York City for a time
and living as far away as Flagstaff, Ariz., Sawyer now relives her
childhood memories in the house where they were created.
Sawyer is willing
to do her part for the town, just as her parents did. She is the
president of the Four Town Historical Society. The group that
gathers from Osborn, Great Pond, Aurora and Amherst meets in the old
school house—which her father helped revitalize.
“A lot of people
doing a lot of work,” Sawyer said, “makes this a nice place to
live.”
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