Dexter is a community that has matured over its two hundred years but is still tied together by a common invisible thread leading back to the earliest settlers. It is a community that takes pride in itself. I want to give people a sense of continuity, to bridge a generation gap, to show how fascinating the story of ordinary life can be, and to show the spiritual bond connecting the ages.

This book is a compilation of photographs, accompanied by vignettes and anecdotes that reveal more than the photographs show. It is a guided tour divided into eight ages.

An attempt has been made to use as many interesting and unforgettable photographs as possible, ones that show the local citizenry at work or play. I tried to include people form all walks of life. Many of the photographs are from the Dexter Historical Society archives and have not been seen by the public before.

Chapters within this book cover a wide variety of events and topics including:

• The Ku Klux Klan – The night They Burned the Cross
• Hanging May Baskets
• Circus Time in Dexter
• The Park Theater
• Minstrel Shows of the Past
• Toboggan Slide and N.Y.A. Boys
• Dexter's Tragic Plane Crash
• Burning the Field
• Pickling Fiddleheads
• The Inlet
• Pasture to Armory

Bert Call (Albert Lincoln Call, 1886-1965) was a local professional photographer in the rural Central Maine town of Dexter from February 8, 1886 to the middle of the twentieth century. At the age of 20 Bert settled in Dexter. He found employment working as an apprentice photographer. He honed his newly learned skills, soon bought the business, and expanded his portraiture skills to include photographing scenic landscapes in Central and Northern Maine.

We have a, “graphic documentation,” says Richard Judd, University of Maine Professor of History, of the region where Bert traveled in Thoreau's footsteps. These prints include sweeping views of spectacular mountain and lake scenes all recorded by Bert's keen, observing eye.

This catalog consists of reprints of Bert's photos of the Maine Woods at the approximate locations mentioned by Henry David Thoreau in his three essays in, “The Maine Woods.” Accompanying each photo is a quote from Thoreau matching his words with the images Bert Call recorded.

“The Maine Woods,” edited by Joseph J. Moldenhaur and published by Princeton University Press, (1972) has been used for the Thoreau quotations by page number. These reference page numbers also coincide with those stated in, “The Wildest Country, A Guide to Thoreau's Maine”, written by J. Parker Huber, Appalachian Club Press, 1981.

On Main Street celebrates the lives of he author's family members—a grandfather who is known for his egocentricities and eccentricities, his children who grew up in two very different worlds, and a great-aunt whose strength of character shines through. This book also details the lives of ordinary people and unusual character in the community. Some chapters include “Lloyd Harvey Hatch, Sr. the Man , the Myth”; Aunt “Teddy – Working Woman” and Summers at Lake Wassookeag”.

Whoever said you can't judge a book by its cover should read the Dexter Historical Society's oral history of rural life in the western Penobscot County community. Pictured on the cover with a facial expression torn between terror and joy, is 6-year-old Benjamin Spizuoco at a 1995 pig scramble in neighboring Garland.

Ben's grandfather is Frank Spizuoco , the book's co-author and a founder of the local historical society. Spizuoco's love of family traditions and Dexter's rich farm legacy goes far beyond the wonderful cover photograph. The book's 206 pages and 130 illustrations sparkle with his admiration for the tenacious farmers who began tilling Dexter's soil in the early 1800s.

Carol Feurtado, a writer and genealogist, and Spizuoco, a timber manager and farmer, dedicate their book “to the few remaining Dexter area farmers, the survivors.” Four years in the making, the book's anecdotal and statistical information was gleaned from library research and hundreds of hours of taped interviews (both audio and video, available to researchers at the historical society) with many residents of the town's four sections (southeast, northeast, north and south). The book is just the right mixture of scholarship and entertainment.

Images show old farm buildings, families, schoolhouses and other town landmarks such as the Seba French homestead and Silver Mills. Local photographer Bert Call, who arrived in Dexter as a farm boy in 1886 and lived long enough to cross paths with Spizuoco in the 1960s, took many of the old pictures. The young historian picked Bert Call's brain and he offered to donate his images to the Dexter Historical Society.

When Weavers Wove is the story of every small town New England family who lived during the tumultuous transition from Industrial Age to baby boomers of the sixties and seventies and the loss of their innocence. It is an embellished view written by a fifth generation Yankee blessed with the gift of knowing people and capturing their stories from the 19th, 20th, and 21st century.

When Weavers Wove is a collection of short stories written to capture the taste, smell, sounds, and realities of a by gone era. An era that looms large in our memories. An era which, in no small way, still longs for its innocence. When Weavers Wove is by and large a work of nonfiction written as a stroll through Dexter, Maine, a small New England Mill town, which typifies the birth and end of the Industrial Age.

I've been reading Isabel Ansell Jacobs' “Bubbles in the Sun,” about her growing-up years in Dexter.

The geography, the mills, the schools, the library, the seasons, radio and magazines and V for victory, town meeting day and the era of the kicksled are all fodder for Jacobs' memory sharing.