Postcards illustrate the stories of Munjoy Hill

 INSET

At 10 a.m. Saturday, the public is invited to a free Maine Historical Society program. Earle G. Shettleworth Jr., director of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, will present a slide lecture at the Maine Historical Society on the history of Munjoy Hill. Born in Portland, Shettleworth has been researching, speaking and writing about Maine history since he was a teenager. He has been on the commission since 1971 and director since 1976. This is the finale of the Spirits Alive winter lecture series. For more information on the commission: www.state.me.us/mhpc. For more about Spirits Alive, visit www.spiritsalive.org.

Here's a history lesson for those who think that Munjoy Hill is pretty as a postcard but wonder what's below the picture-perfect surface.

On Saturday, Portland-born historian and director of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission Earle G. Shettleworth Jr. will use postcards of Munjoy Hill, many from a century ago, and talk about the up-and-down, rise-and-fall history of this critical section of Portland.

"The Development of Munjoy Hill," the last lecture in Spirits Alive's winter series, is open to the public at Maine Historical Society at 10 a.m. Saturday. (Visitors are urged to arrive early; seating for these lectures tends to fill up fast. It's 489 Congress Street.)

Spirits Alive is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the protection and preservation of Portland’s historic Eastern Cemetery. Shettleworth was born and raised in Portland and attended Deering High School. He has been the Maine Historic Preservation Commission director since 1976.

Munjoy Hill is one of those places where the stories outnumber the streets.

Shettleworth said his grandparents came from Denmark and settled on Hammond Street near Washington Avenue. 

"I grew up hearing many of the stories," he said.

Drawing on postcards from a private collection in Portland and the Augusta-based historic preservation agency's collections, Shettleworth said he wants to focus on the period from roughly 1900 to 1940.

"I think this enables me to both talk about the earlier history but at the same time concentrate on a major period of growth on Munjoy Hill, which would be the early 20th century," he said in an interview Wednesday.

"My approach here is to illustrate the history of Munjoy Hill through approximately 80 early 20th century postcard views," he said.

He will be showing several views of Hancock Street and the birthplaces, respectively, of famed poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Maine's larger-than-life Speaker of the House, Thomas Brackett Reed.

"Both of those figures were born within a few houses of each other on Hancock Street," Shettleworth said.

The Longfellow birthplace home is no longer in existence (Longfellow's boyhood home on Congress Street is the headquarters of the Maine Historical Society). A small monument near the entrance to the city's new Residence Inn by Marriott marks the spot. Reed's birthplace was a couple of houses up on Hancock.

Shettleworth will touch on familiar landmarks — the Portland Observatory, Eastern Prom, Fort Allen Park. But expect a deeper look at the immigrants who converged on the hill.

"The area was home to so many immigrant families, and consequently there was a demand for lower-cost housing, and people wanted to get the most return out of their small pieces of real estate," he said.

The result was that in 1911, the North Street apartments were built.

On the Eastern Prom, mansions adorn the skyline, but "within a street or two of those, people were building the triple-decker apartment houses," Shettleworth said.

"I have a great view of the North School next to Eastern Cemetery, which is now elderly housing, but in those days it was the largest school in the Munjoy Hill area," he said.

A 1907 postcard depicts three different group pictures, showing the 1,204 pupils who attended the North School that year.

Some landmarks have vanished altogether. There was the old Grand Trunk Station at India and Fore streets, built in 1903 and torn down in 1966.

For 125 years, between the arrival of the first train in 1842 and 1967 when the Grand Trunk Railway abandoned its service to Montreal on the St. Lawrence & Atlantic Railroad, passenger trains have been part of life in Portland. (Today, a tourist train, the Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad, runs at the east end of Fore Street.)

One of the postcards shows the Grand Trunk grain elevators, where grain was brought by train from Central Canada and then transferred to vessels for transport to Europe. The grain elevators were torn down in the 1970s.

There are no postcard views of the Abyssinian Meeting House, but some of the old churches, including the St. Lawrence near the crest of the hill and St. Paul's at the base near Washington Avenue, will appear in Shettleworth's slide show. Attendees can see the old Congress Street Methodist Church, which was near the Portland Observatory before being torn down. A 1929 slide displays the Jewish Home for the Aged, and there's a rare interior shot of the Jewish synagogue within the Home.

Munjoy Hill became a tent city after the destruction of the Great Fire of 1866. Shettleworth plans to focus on its rejuvenation after the fire.

"It was a very densely populated and vital neighborhood which developed just prior to the Great Fire but really had its greatest period of development from 1866 when the city was rebuilding after the Great Fire," he said.

Since Spirits Alive focuses on the Eastern Cemetery, expect at least one reference to that area which, established in 1668, is considered Portland’s oldest historic landscape.

Shettleworth said he will touch on the Stinson monument, located in the Eastern Cemetery near the intersection of Mountfort and Congress streets. At the Battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861, Sgt. Alonzo Stinson from Portland of the Fifth Maine Regiment was mortally wounded by a cannonball, becoming the first soldier from Portland killed in the Civil War.  The monument, erected in 1908, honors Stinson's memory, who was only 19 when he died.

Beyond individual vignettes, Shettleworth has a bird's-eye view of Munjoy and its surroundings.

This retrospective, taking in the East End of Portland, demonstrates how vibrant Munjoy Hill was a century ago.

"I think, what it does, is it illustrates the area as a very vital section of the city in which it was primarily a residential area, and what we see as a reflection of that are many many streets of houses ... what they show is such a high density of homes surrounding Munjoy Hill," Shettleworth said.