Linda Bean’s death and rising seas raise challenges as Maine fishing village rebuilds - The Boston Globe (2024)

But Bean’s promise to rebuild “as soon as possible” looks less imminent than it did last fall. Epic storms in January, fed by rising seas and increasingly violent weather, repeatedly flooded the peninsula where Port Clyde sits, forcing planners to confront the need to raise or relocate the building.

The outlook further clouded in March, when Linda Bean died at 82.

Representatives of Bean’s estate and local residents say they remain determined to rebuild. And there has already been considerable progress in getting things back to normal, with shops and cafes that serve both locals and tourists open for business for the busy summer season. The Monhegan Boat Line’s office building, which was heavily damaged by the fire, has been rebuilt and opened a few weeks ago. Amy Barstow, who with her husband, Andy, runs the daily ferry service to Monhegan Island, said getting the building back felt like a huge step forward for the village.

But architects are still working on plans to replace the signature green clapboard building that housed the General Store, the Maine Wyeth Art Gallery above the store, and the adjacent Dip Net restaurant, where the fire started.

After the January storms, Veronika Carlson, president of Linda Bean’s Perfect Maine Hospitality group, told town planners that the company hoped to begin construction on the new building in September and finish next May. But Carlson told the Globe recently that the timeline has since changed, as “we are still in the design stage.”

“We do not have a start date as we are not permitted yet, but will most likely be the spring of 2025,” Carlson said.

The village and its businesses, meanwhile, have had to adapt to the temporary absence of the General Store building.

The General Store is leasing space in the renovated ferry building, giving both locals and visitors a place to stock up on provisions in the only grocery store.

The Dip Net restaurant recently began selling food from a bright-red Linda Bean’s Maine Lobster food truck on the adjacent landing. The Wyeth Gallery, dedicated to showcasing art of three generations of the family of artists, has been relocated to the dining room at the Ocean House, an inn in the village that Bean owned. Three original paintings by Jamie Wyeth, who owns a home on Monhegan Island, and an illustration by his grandfather, N.C. Wyeth, were among the artworks destroyed in the fire.

Karan Cushman, a Port Clyde resident who runs a marketing company and serves on the Port Clyde Strong committee, said one challenge is to get the word out that the village is open for business.

“Port Clyde really is largely driven by tourism in the summer, folks from away,” she said. “Hopefully, they’ll still come this year.”

But, she added, something as simple as the resumption of the Sunday breakfast at the Ocean House boosted the spirits of locals who patronize it.

“It’s not just about getting back to normal for tourists,” she said. “It’s about getting back to normal for us.”

As for the hole in the waterfront, now fenced off, “There’s a visual hole, and it feels like our heart is missing,” she said.

How that hole is filled will be up to the Bean company planners, and the town of St. George itself, where the village of Port Clyde is located.

Town Manager Rick Erb said the biggest issues to resolve are elevation and pedestrian access.

“It’s right on the shoreline, with rising sea issues,” Erb said. “That said, we can address issues we couldn’t before. Everyone will miss the old General Store, but the plans we’ve seen so far are true to the old one.”

Raising the building two feet, as Carlson suggested to the Planning Board, would be easy enough. Raising it more than that, which can’t be ruled out, will mean a much more complicated development, members of the board said.

Sally Crusan, director of development at the Herring Gut Coastal Science Center in Port Clyde, said adapting to the environment is something that local people are used to. She wakes up before dawn every day to the sound of lobstermen starting up their engines. For generations, fishermen there have had to adapt to regulations and a changing climate.

“It’s a new story,” she said of the challenges of rising seas, “but an old story all the same.”

Sarah Oktay, the science center’s executive director, is an ocean scientist and member of the town’s resiliency committee, which has secured a grant to assess infrastructure vulnerabilities to rising seas and propose solutions, which will influence how Port Clyde finishes the rebuilding process on its waterfront.

Crusan and Cushman enlisted the services of Cheryl Clegg, a photographer from Massachusetts who owns a home in Maine, to capture the resiliency of Port Clyde residents in the wake of the fire. Clegg had previously documented the challenges facing lobster fishermen throughout Maine.

Beginning in July, Clegg’s photos of locals will hang in the Monhegan ferry building all summer, visual testimony to the determination of Port Clyde people to rebuild.

“Their resiliency is striking,” Clegg said. “It’s the moving forward, the not dwelling, and not waiting for someone else to do something. It might take longer than they’d like to get things back to where they were before the fire, but when you talk to these people, you have absolute no doubt they will stick with it.”

Linda Bean did much to raise the profile of Port Clyde, buying businesses and houses that provided jobs for locals and places for tourists to spend money. She acknowledged that some people thought she bought too much, and some didn’t like her conservative politics. But there’s no denying she was a huge influence, and the company that survived her is determined to see her wishes to rebuild the General Store fulfilled.

Shortly before she died, Bean told The New York Times that keeping the Port Clyde waterfront open for fishermen was her number-one priority.

After her death, Bean’s family and close friends gathered for a private service at her home on Teel Island, just west of Port Clyde. In a show of respect, about a dozen lobster boats from Port Clyde formed a half circle around the island.

“It was very moving,” said Cushman, whose husband is a lobster fisherman and was on one of those boats. “Linda was a good friend and very devoted to Port Clyde. Some people criticize, but everything she touched, she and her team made better. Her imprint on Port Clyde will be forever.”

Kevin Cullen is a Globe reporter and columnist who roams New England. He can be reached at kevin.cullen@globe.com.