Lincolnville Beach's Summer Colony Through the Postcards on Our Shelves

A picture postcard the size of a playing card can carry more truth than a thick history book. Tip a handful of them onto a café table and the sequence of summer fashion, the rise and fall of swimwear styles, the names of long-vanished boarding houses and the colours of vanished awnings all tumble out at once. Lincolnville Beach, that small curl of sand on the eastern shore of Penobscot Bay, has the good fortune of being well documented in this form. Beyond the Sea keeps a modest folder of them behind the front counter, and they are the closest thing most visitors will ever hold to a complete visual record of the Summer Colony that defined the village between roughly 1885 and the eve of the Second World War.

What follows is a brief account of that colony, drawn from the cards we sell, the captions printed on their versos, the postmarks that date them, and a great deal of conversation with locals who remember the houses when they still had names. Some of the dates and figures here come from our own records rather than a scholarly press; readers wanting a fully footnoted version can contact us and we will point them toward the Lincolnville Historical Society.

How the colony began

The story starts with a single word that mainland Australians will recognise at once: retreat. By the mid-1880s a small settlement of fishermen's shacks had grown up where the road from Camden ends at the water, and the families who had been summering inland began drifting east. The Maine Central pushed a branch line to Waldo, and a stagecoach, later a small steamer called the City of Rockland, ferried the trunks the rest of the way. The season was short — barely eight weeks between the Fourth of July and Labor Day — but it was enough.

What turned a working wharf into a colony was a familiar American trick: a hotel. The Lincolnville Beach Hotel opened in 1889 with a long verandah facing the bay and a dining room that could seat two hundred. Within five seasons more than thirty private cottages had been built on the rise behind it, and the shape of the village as we know it was set. Visitors from Sydney or Melbourne might hear an echo here of the way Barwon Heads and Portsea took shape a continent apart, when steamships and rail tickets opened up the Victorian coast to the city elite and a clutch of weatherboard villas appeared on sand dunes that had once been sheep pasture.

The people who came north

The colony's guest book, were one to survive, would read like a roll call of the East Coast establishment. Families arrived from Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, often with the same set of surnames appearing year after year. There were lawyers, brokers, a small contingent of academics from Cambridge, and a few European travellers who treated the Maine coast as a softer version of the English seaside.

Mrs Isabella Duffield, whose husband ran a textile firm in Lowell, kept a small cottage called Sea-Lavender from 1894 until her death in 1923. Her postcards, several of which we have handled over the years, are addressed to her sister in Connecticut with the same warm, faintly bossy tone that Australians of a certain age might recognise from letters posted between Sydney and the bush in the same decades. The Reverend Henry Vaughan, an Episcopal minister from Providence, spent seventeen summers in a cottage he christened The Pulpit and was famous for rowing out at first light to read his office on the water. Both names appear on real photo postcards printed around 1908.

A vocabulary of cottages

The postcards give us the colony in its Sunday best. Every board-and-batten cottage and every shingled retreat is shown at the moment of its life, before the storms of November had a chance to peel paint. The dominant style is what local carpenters called the Lincolnville vernacular — a hybrid of Stick, Queen Anne and the rough, salt-resistant shingle work that took its cues from the larger houses in Bar Harbor.

A short guide for new readers:

• Look at the publisher's mark at the lower left. Leighton, Hugh C. (Portland, ME) and H. H. Hay (Portland, ME) are the two local publishers most represented.
• Examine the card stock. Heavy card with no white border dates before about 1915; a thin white border dates 1915 to 1930; linen-textured card with brighter inks dates 1930 to about 1945.
• Check the postmark on used cards. A Lincolnville postmark with a date in late July or August is almost certainly a colony resident writing home from the season.
• Read the message side in good light. Many cards carry affectionate notes from children to grandparents, and occasionally a sharp complaint about the weather.

The colours of the cottages are softer than the cards imply. Most were painted in shades of cream, soft grey and the watery green that locals called "bay colour," a hue not unlike the pale blues and sage greens favoured in seaside houses around Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula.

The postcard boom and what it captured

The first decade of the twentieth century was the golden age of the American picture postcard. The introduction of the half-tone printing process, the liberalisation of postal regulations in 1907, and a national enthusiasm for sending greetings from every summer holiday turned the postcard into the country's favourite form of social media. Between 1905 and 1915, an estimated seven hundred million cards were mailed in the United States in a single year.

Lincolnville Beach got its share. Local publishers — Hugh C. Leighton of Portland was the most prolific — sent photographers south from Bar Harbor with explicit instructions to capture the new cottages. The cards they produced are recognisable at a glance. They use a wide horizontal format, a soft tonal range, a generous margin for the caption, and almost always a body of water in the foreground. The captions are hand-lettered in a slightly uneven copperplate; the publishers' names sit in tiny print at the lower left.

The card stock changed decade by decade. The earliest are on heavy card with a divided back, a feature only permitted after 1907. The cards of the late teens and 1920s shift to a thinner stock with a white border. The linen-textured cards of the 1930s have an almost cartoon-like clarity and were printed in Chicago. Each of those tells you something about when the picture was taken.

Decline and reinvention

The colony did not collapse all at once. The Wall Street crash of 1929 thinned the guest lists. The paving of Route One in 1936 made the long detour through Camden feel unnecessary. The Second World War pulled the young men away and the great houses began to feel their age. By 1955 the Lincolnville Beach Hotel had been demolished and the cottages were passing into the hands of a quieter class of owner — weekenders from Portland and Boston who used them for two weeks in August and locked them up the rest of the year.

The reinvention was slow and is still in progress. In the 1970s a small group of locals began photographing the surviving cottages and matching them to the postcards they had collected. Some were restored with care; others were lost to fire, storm or simple neglect. The ones that survive are now part of the village's working inventory — guesthouses, art studios, the occasional year-round home — and a number of them still appear on the cards we sell, only now captioned with the names of the families who own them rather than the families who built them.

Reading the cards at Beyond the Sea

Beyond the Sea stocks the postcards not as souvenirs but as a kind of compact archive. Customers who come in looking for a card of the colony usually leave with three or five, because the cards work best as a sequence: a view of the wharf, a view of the hotel, a view of a particular cottage in its first decade, then again in its second or third. Laid out on the table in our café corner, with the kettle on and the arvo light falling across the rack, they read like a yearbook.

Recurring motifs you will see again and again:

• The wharf at high tide, with three or four yachts moored stern-on and a flagged staff above the freight house.
• The Lincolnville Beach Hotel in its pre-1910 livery, always photographed from the bay, never from the road.
• Named cottages with their names painted on a shingle by the gate, often in a slightly misspelled copperplate.
• Beach scenes showing a strict division between the swimming enclosure on the women's side and the bolder bathing on the men's.

We keep a small annotated list of the cards in stock and update it as new ones arrive. Anyone planning a visit to the shop can find out what is on the shelves that week through our main site.

A reflection from another coast

Step back from the postcards and what strikes an Australian visitor is how ordinary the Lincolnville colony actually was. The names change, the bay colours change, but the pattern is the one that runs through almost every temperate coastline on the planet. In Victoria the Mornington Peninsula filled up with weatherboard villas between 1880 and 1910. Barwon Heads did much the same in the years between Federation and the First World War. The NSW South Coast followed suit. In each place the same short season, the same handful of surnames, the same box of geraniums and the same flagpole in the front yard. The postcards could be from any of them, fair dinkum cousins rather than local artefacts.

What is particular to Lincolnville is the quality of the surviving archive. The village is small enough that the records, the buildings and the descendants still overlap, and the postcards have not been dispersed into a thousand albums in a dozen cities. What follows sketches the three main eras of the cards we sell and the visual cues that mark each.

Era	Card stock	Typical publishers	Visual style
1905–1915	Heavy card, divided back	Hugh C. Leighton, H. H. Hay (Portland, ME)	Soft sepia tones, hand-lettered captions, wide margin
1915–1930	Thinner card, white border	Leighton, local books, souvenir publishers	Brighter inks, simpler captions, often hand-tinted
1930–1945	Linen-textured stock	Curt Teich (Chicago), souvenir chains	Bold flat colours, near-cartoon clarity, mass-produced feel

Beyond the Sea sits in the middle of that living collection, and the cards we sell are a quiet way of keeping the colony in the conversation. If you drop in on a slow weekday, the cottage pictured on a ninety-year-old card will usually be visible from the front window of the shop, and a short walk will let you match the printed view to the building still standing across the road.