The inspiration for this book came from the tiny Pacific island of
Kosrae in Micronesia, where Brewer native and Bangor Theological
Seminary graduate the Reverend Galen Snow converted all of the natives
to Christianity, and Portlander Harry Skillins left a record as a
vicious pirate and who sired a line of descendants by native women.
Others in these twenty chapters are far better known, such as poets
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Pulitzer Prize winner Edna St. Vincent
Millay, opera singer Lillian Nordica, and Hollywood movie director John
Ford. But whether it is Woolwich's Sir William Phips, the wilderness
shepherd boy who went to sea and found a Spanish treasure and was
knighted by the king of England, or Brunswick's Asa Simpson, the
forty-niner who built a lumber and shipping empire in Oregon, or John
Frank Stevens of West Bath, the noted engineer who made the Panama Canal
possible, or Franklin County's Mark Walker, a 1930s' radical during the
Great Depression, these stories, varied as they are, provide a
continuous range of Mainers' contributions to the world at large. Told
chronologically from the time of pre-history Indians in Maine, they end
in the present with a look at our current connections overseas and at
several Maine women who have dedicated their lives to helping the poor
in Central and South America.
