Memories

Virginia Simmons describes Sedgwick as a “town of four neighborhoods,” and she knows each of them well.

“Sargentville has a personality of its own,” she said of the “neighborhood” she currently calls home. “When anything goes wrong, they all go to help.”

She said Sargentville is characterized by saltwater frontage. It is populated by summer people and the descendants of summer people.

“The Village is altogether different,” she said. “It is a living history of the way Sedgwick was.”

Simmons said of West Sedgwick: “It’s Grays, Perts and Astburys. The Bagaduce River is a big part of West Sedgwick. It’s beautiful down there.”

Simmons was born in North Sedgwick in 1928. She lived with nine other family members in a farmhouse near the Country View drive-in.

“I had the best view in town,” she said, “overlooking Bar Harbor. You could see the lights in Cutler.”

The house Simmons grew up in got electricity only about eight years ago.

“Ten of us lived in that house,” she said. “It was nice and cozy. Daddy would get up and build a fire and let it roar up the chimney.

“It was a farm, and we always had milk. We really lived very good.”

But it wasn’t the easy life.

“I remember picking those gosh-darned beans,” she said. “Daddy would sell them to the cannery in Penobscot. We’d sell squash too, and sometimes sneak in a pumpkin.”

Simmons grew up in the town’s primary blueberry area. As a teenager, Simmons supplied G.M. Allen’s blueberry factory with plenty of stock. The plant was located in North Sedgwick at the time.

“I used to break my back raking blueberries,” she said.

Simmons later lived on the Ridge Road, also in North Sedgwick, with her first husband, Lawrence Torrey.

She remembers the grange hall on Route 172, which opened yesterday (Wednesday) as the North Sedgwick Redemption Center.

“The best times were our harvest suppers,” Simmons said. “Everybody helped us do that, and the tables had to be set just right.

“We ran bingo there too and raised money to buy a furnace and other things.”

The ferry service ended after the Sedgwick-Deer Isle Bridge was completed in 1939, but the pier at Ferry Landing remains today.

“We used to go down and catch flounders,” Simmons said. “Now, you go down there and you can’t catch anything.”