THORNDIKE, Maine — A century ago, the small Waldo County farming community of Thorndike was a bustling town on the railroad line with an active grain mill, a department store, a cheese factory, an inn, a theater and even an automobile dealership.
Asked what it’s like today, and Diana Prizio, who owns the Garden Variety antique and home goods shop in downtown Thorndike — population 890 at the last census — doesn’t mince words.
“It’s a ghost town,” she said.
But Prizio and a group of residents have a dream of bringing more life to Thorndike, and a concrete plan of how to do so. It involves the three downtown buildings that make up the former OJ Farwell & Sons store and grain mill, a complex that the group of seven local writers, artists, craftspeople, builders and historians purchased in the summer of 2015.
They formed a nonprofit organization, Timelines Community Inc., to aid them in their quest and have brainstormed ideas of what to do with the buildings once they’ve swept away the decades of pigeon droppings and other accumulated detritus of time.
Prizio said that the plan is to create a “storytelling museum” and a store that will supply what she calls “products for a healthy homestead” to the community, such as seeds, hand tools, hardware, pottery and fabric. Additionally, the group wants to create workshops where people can come and learn new skills or use skills they already have to make things.
“I really do think the town could come back to life,” she said.
Thorndike really could use a little help, the kind of help that late storekeeper Oscar J. Farwell used to give to his community more than a half century ago, she said. Farwell, a lifelong Thorndike resident, ran the store for many years and sold “everything from needles to plows,” according to a Down East Magazine article from 1965. The still-intact grist mill, which used to grind as many as 10,000 bushels of grain a year, is attached to the store.
When Farwell died in 1960, his store was one of the few left in the state where farmers could buy goods such as buggy whips and horse collars.
In his life, Farwell had a reputation for being a bit of a skinflint. One newspaper article published after his death described him as being “tighter than the bark on a tree,” and friends remembered that he saw no reason to get a new suit of clothes when the old one still worked fine. But after his death, it was revealed in his will that Farwell was, in fact, uncommonly generous. For one thing, he held large mortgages on a number of area farms, and after his death, he forgave the farmers their debts and gave them free tenancy for their lifetimes. He also established a scholarship fund for area students, left money to groups such as the Red Cross and astonished his neighbors when he bequeathed a fund with nearly half a million dollars to Thorndike — a sum that would equal nearly $4 million today.
After Farwell died, the store closed. Although it has had other owners in the last 50 years, including a couple who ran part of the space as an antique shop, Prizio and her friends found that little had changed in the complex of buildings since his death. Despite broken windows and the mess of all those pigeons, the old stove and antique cash register still take pride of place in the former store area. Shelves on the walls function as a kind of accidental time capsule, showcasing antique bars of Fels Naptha soap and boxes of Dic-A-Doo paint cleaner, among other offerings.
And the grain mill still features most of its original parts, which date back to 1873 or so. It is unusually intact, according to Christi Mitchell, the assistant director of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission.
“It’s a remarkable example of the type of vernacular structure that was found in so many communities across Maine and which played such an important role in early 20th-century economies,” Mitchell said. “I think it’s a fantastic building. We want to see somebody who understands and recognizes its value become the stewards of that building.”
She said she is encouraging the new owners to pursue getting the structure listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Prizio said her group isn’t planning to make huge changes to the building beyond cleaning it up and repairing the foundation.
“We want to keep it so it feels like you’re in an old store,” she said.
They are actively trying to raise $45,000, to pay the balance of the mortgage, and then another $50,000 to fix the foundation. A yard sale of objects gleaned from the structure netted $1,000 last fall, and another is in the works.
Jimmy Stewart of Freedom, a woodworker and artist who is part of the nonprofit organization, said that he is looking forward to having functional performance spaces that will benefit the community.
“Preserving places is interesting,” he said. “And the mill is fascinating — one of a kind.”
Prizio said that the group is hoping to have the mill building ready for tours by mid-June, and that the homestead store will be open for business by the Common Ground Fair, by far the busiest weekend of the year in Thorndike.
“I feel really excited,” Prizio said. “I just feel really inspired. Everybody who comes in is really enthusiastic about it and that really helps.”