THE MONSON EXPERIMENT

Libra also started Piscataquis County’s first artist residency program here last year, partnering with Stuart Kestenbaum, the state’s poet laureate and former director of Deer Isle’s Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, to create Monson Arts. Kestenbaum worked his connections with art schools around the country, and soon artists were coming for month-long stays, even in the winter. Already, more than 100 artists have taken advantage of the studios, free housing and meals, and $1,000 stipend. Monson Arts also hosts exhibits, lectures, and film screenings open to the public and workshops for area high school students.

Suddenly, Monson looks like a place someone might like to stop, maybe even live. Anderson might be the person in town least surprised by Monson’s whirlwind transformation, if only because she always believed it was possible. In the early months of Libra’s presence, when the Suits began their work, they used her pub as a kind of office, making plans and meeting there with locals. Listening to them, she realized what was coming.

“This,” Anderson says, “is the reinvention.”

The black slate mines of Monson were as dangerous as they looked, but they made the town prosper and grow. The population doubled, to an all-time high of about 1,200 by 1910. Finnish immigrants arrived to work in the quarries, which supplied slate for gravestones, roofing, and electrical board around the world. Swedish immigrants became the town’s shopkeepers and business owners. Alan Bray, a 73-year-old painter who grew up in Monson, remembers community smorgasbords with Swedish meatballs, fermented cucumber, and pullas, the Finnish cardamom rolls that are still standards of any Monson bake sale. Downtown bustled in his youth. Monson was self-sufficient, with a hardware store, appliance store, and doctor’s office.

When the demand for slate collapsed and the last of the quarries closed in the 1940s, the population plummeted by a third. The town rallied and invested in what eventually became Moosehead Furniture. People again had jobs, but they also had better cars and better roads, and they started driving elsewhere, even to Bangor, 60 miles away, to shop. Monson’s downtown was withering, Bray says, even before the furniture mill closed.

“Little by little, the town had become more transient,” he says. “People didn’t take care of their houses. They began to look more and more decrepit.”

A version of Monson’s story played out in many small towns across rural Maine, but Monson was always unique. It was on a much-traveled highway. The Appalachian Trail brought a steady stream of hikers through town, which lent a touch of worldliness. The area drew some artists: the painter Carl Sprinchorn made several sojourns to Monson during the first half of the 20th century, and his friend Marsden Hartley spent part of the fall of 1939 in the area, sketching Katahdin. From the mid-1950s until her death in 1991, the famed American photographer Berenice Abbott lived in a roomy, clapboarded house along the Piscataquis River, just down the road in Blanchard. Lots of famous people visited her, including Jacqueline Onassis, who flew into Greenville on a private plane.

Wells, a longtime art collector, owned a few of Abbott’s photographs. The same summer the Libra crew was hunting for a Piscataquis project, Wells and his wife spent a weekend golfing near Greenville. On the drive home, Wells looked for Abbott’s house, with no luck. Back in Portland, he made some calls and learned that an artist who had printed Abbott’s photographs still lived in Blanchard, right next to her old house. Wells found a number for Todd Watts and dialed.

“A very grumpy man answered,” Wells says. Still, the two men talked for over an hour, mostly about Abbott. Before they hung up, Wells told Watts he wanted to come up to discuss an idea he had.

“Three days later, this fancy car pulls up into my driveway unannounced,” Watts says, “and two guys who appear to have on handmade suits get out. It wasn’t hard to figure out it was Owen and Craig.”

What Wells had in mind was an artist residency program, maybe in Dover-Foxcroft or Greenville. Watts suggested they look at Monson instead. The town was a scale where they could easily do something big, he told them, and it had the Appalachian Trail, the lake, and a mildly artsy heritage. The duo was unconvinced, but when Wells and Denekas came back for a second meeting, Watts took them to the town’s abandoned elementary school, a sizable structure on Main Street that could easily house artist studios. The price tag was $80,000. And it was far from the only piece of real estate for sale in Monson.

So in late 2016, Libra bought building after building, several of them for less than $100,000, including one known locally as “the rat’s nest.” After the spring melt in 2017, the construction crews went to work.

“I felt like we’d won the lottery,” says Monson resident John Wentworth, the furniture mill’s last owner. “I didn’t know if I would live long enough to see the next rebirth, and I have.”

A few months ago, on the first truly fine summer day of the year, the Suits came north to check on Libra’s final wave of building. They stopped in Dover-Foxcroft, where they’ve erected an ice arena to restart a regional youth hockey program, which had shut down. Foxcroft Academy will manage the arena, which is designed for any ice event, from figure skating to curling. In Monson, as they waved blackflies from their faces, they toured a turn-of-the-20th-century storefront being reworked into roomy artists’ studios, some of which overlook the lake. The studios were originally in the old school, but that is now being converted into a health center. Libra has offered Northern Lights hospital network free rent to bring in resident doctors and dentists, as well as an optometrist on a rotating basis.

“What happens when there is no dentist and people don’t have a car?” Denekas asks. “They pull their own teeth out.”

Denekas’s fine business attire might make him stand out in town, but there’s nothing formal about his demeanor. A Midwesterner by birth, he uses words like “skedaddle” and chomps with relish into his pulled pork sandwich at the town’s BBQ joint. Bray says that when the town held a meeting to decide whether to sell the school to Libra, one resident asked plainspoken Denekas if the town could still use the building. He said no, because Libra wasn’t sure yet how it would use it, and he didn’t want to make promises he couldn’t keep. The locals, Bray says, liked his honesty.

“That’s what you say to people in a town like this,” Bray says. “The vote was 70 to 4. Jesus couldn’t get 70 to 4 in this county.”

That same honesty unnerves some, though, to hear Rebekah Anderson tell it. As her neighbors have watched their town transform over the past two years, she says, they’ve often wanted Libra’s staff to explain their plans at town meetings, but the foundation’s staff doesn’t always know their plans — and says so. They have yet to decide, for instance, what to do with a wooded corner lot with a pond, along the north end of Main Street. Libra spent months prying trees and bushes out of an abandoned farm just outside of town, but staffers haven’t decided how they will use that either. They also don’t have a time frame for how long Libra will pour money into the town — for a long time, Denekas says, but “not forever.”

What Denekas does know is the organization’s goal: to keep residents from moving away and to attract new residents, ideally millennials, which in turn could create jobs. But what would make millennials, or anyone for that matter, move here? Denekas doesn’t pretend to know the answer, and he admits an artist residency is not a standard economic- development tool — that what Libra is doing in Monson is to some degree an experiment. The hope for the residency program is that the artists will not only give the downtown vitality, adding some year-round foot traffic, but that they’ll also become town ambassadors. When they return home, they’ll spread the word about the little town on the lake with inexpensive real estate. This summer, Monson Arts partnered with the Rhode Island School of Design to bring in furniture- and industrial-design students, with the idea that they might somehow reinvigorate the town’s furniture-making tradition on a small scale.

“The whole point was, what can we do today?” Denekas says. “Let’s buy some property and see what comes of it. Activity begets activity. We don’t know if it will work, but we hope it will.”

“I’m looking forward to the day someone decides to stay and open a business,” says Dan Bouthot, the residency’s program manager. “That’s the bigger vision for me, to see Monson exist as an ecosystem.”

Bouthot is, in fact, the first millennial to move to Monson because of Libra’s efforts. He and his wife, who is pregnant, moved to Monson in the spring of 2017 for his job, which came with one of Libra’s rent-free refurbished houses. The Deer Isle native had migrated to the West Coast for a graduate degree in fine arts with an emphasis on social activism. Now, he is living “his art,” so to speak, by helping revive a town.

Libra also kept one millennial from leaving. When the Suits came to town, 29-year-old Lucas Butler, the then-town manager, was planning to move. Then, Libra hired him to manage all the construction projects, so he and his wife stayed put. “I can’t wait for the next census,” he says.

That will be next year, far too soon to know whether Libra’s experiment in Monson is working — if this is the reinvention, if people will move here, if tourists will bother to stop. That will likely take years. For now, though, there’s reason to hope where there wasn’t before.