BELFAST, Maine -- Around here, there are two kinds of people: those who live in Belfast and those "from away." If you're one of the latter, the former won't mind if you stop and stay a spell. In fact, they'll be as welcoming and gracious as any visitor might hope. But compared with its better-known neighbors Bangor, Camden, and Rockland, Belfast is a quiet town, and people here, including the many artists who have made the little port their home for the past few decades, like it that way.
Holding fast to a creative edge, this port town keeps it real
"We're real artists, and we're real Mainers," says Charles Laurier Dufour , a photographer who owns the Indigo Gallery on Main Street. "We're here year-round. Belfast is a real community."
In other words, you won't find shops stacked with lighthouse-embroidered T-shirts or "galleries" cluttered with scented candles and suncatchers. And that, of course, is Belfast's appeal.
Settled by Scotch-Irish in the 18th century as a merchant port and shipbuilding center, the town by the 1960s had a blue-collar economy built around the railroad and the poultry, sardine, and potato processing plants that kept the freight trains coming. When the factories began closing in the 1970s and early '80s, depressed real-estate prices drew recent college graduates from Boston and other cities, as well as painters and sculptors who, for $20,000, could pick up a house with a barn just waiting to be converted to a studio. Two now-defunct high-end galleries moved in, but a collective called Artfellows set the tone, according to historian Megan Pinette , with "wild openings, the cheapest wine they could get their hands on, and a front door that wasn't even locked in the daytime." Those days are gone, but the creative spirit that engendered them has remained.
The heart of Belfast is its quarter-mile-long Main Street, which is set on a hillside and lined with densely packed Federal-style and High Victorian brick storefronts. Some boutiques , such as Colburn's , the uncontested oldest shoe store in America, and The Chocolate Drop Candy Shoppe, are of the old-fashioned variety, while others recall the town's more recent hippie past. Coyote Moon , for example, features natural-fiber clothing, while The Green Store goes it one better with everything from fair-trade crafts to tree-free stationery and even composting toilets. We loved the Celtic-inspired jewelry at the Shamrock, Thistle, and Rose , and the bottle-cap belts, wallets sewn of laminated old books and magazines, and handbags plastered with photographs of Hong Kong tenements at Yo Mamma's Home . And no stroll along Main Street would be complete without stops at the many galleries offering everything from Dufour's inventive nudes to traditional Maine seascapes.
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