Neighbors

Hard to believe, but May Williams started out in life as a person “from away.”

Although many people think of May Williams as quintessentially Stonington, in fact she’s “from away.” Worse yet, she started, in 1920, as a “summer person.”  She was 4 years old. 

It wasn’t until Williams was 12 that she became a permanent resident of Stonington. She has lived here ever since.

It’s with amusement that she documents various differences between the towns of Stonington and Deer Isle, long-time rivals: “Deer Isle is different.  Set in their ways.  Can’t change.”  Then she added, “Women locked men up so they couldn’t get out and get drunk.”

Fiercely pro-Stonington, May Williams can easily see beyond the end of her nose. That’s why, when there was an outcry against sending the Stonington bell, recently immured under the basement steps of the elementary school, up to the new school, she was a lone voice in favor of sending the bell. In response to those who said the bell should not be taken out of the town, she said that the bell should go up to the school with the children. It took two more years, but that’s where the bell is now.

When she first came to the island, of course it was by boat. She remembers being on the J.T. Morse with her mother, ready to go down to breakfast.

“It was really fancy…There was a velvet rope to keep people from going into the dining room.”  When she, her mother and her older sister Irene went in, her mother chose their food…”It was expensive.” 

So much has changed in Stonington since 1920 that a question about what was different brought Williams to a temporary stop. Then she began to speak. “Well, one thing that really has changed is business. When the quarry was around, there were a lot of people working. There were seven grocery stores on Main Street right up through Greenhead…and Stonington didn’t have any ruffians like now.”

She is particularly distressed by vandalism at the unused Burnt Cove Church, which destroyed the organ.  “They need someone to take them over their knees,” she added.

Until the Deer Isle-Sedgwick Bridge opened in 1939, Stonington was served by steamers from Rockland.  “People used to take the steamer to Rockland to go shopping,” she recalled. “ It would stop in Vinalhaven, and then Rockland.  My mother would send a list to the A&P. They’d ship it [the order] back to her with the bill inside.”

The bridge provided amusement even before it was completed. “We’d drive up every Sunday to see how the work was going”

According to Williams, the night before the official opening of the bridge “all the businesses in town trucked their stuff in to save money [the ferry which the bridge replaced wasn’t free and the bridge was a toll bridge].”  She ought to know. Her husband Francis “drove the truck back and forth across the bridge all night for Barter Lumber.”        

Long before they were married, Francis used to take May and her sister to school when it was too snowy or too wet to walk.  “They never closed the school…my mother would lean an old gray mop up against the house and he would see that and come for us.”  

She and Francis married when she was 17—“too young.” He was 25. All she knew how to make was piecrust, “because my mother liked to make pies, so that’s what she taught me.”  Williams taught herself to cook from a cookbook, cooking “all the way through it.

Not just a housewife, May became a teacher, going to Orono to get certification.  She also gave piano lessons, was a staunch supporter of the Extension, and an accompanist at the Methodist Church. She was on the school board and recently served on the building committee for the new Deer Isle-Stonington Elementary School

She used to play for dances in the American Legion Hall in a band with Julian Douglas who played the violin, and Norman Douglas, who played the viola and Carmen Hutchinson, who played the saxophone and “had his drinks in a coke bottle.” With regret, Williams says, “I’m the only one left. They’re all dead.”