Local History

We answer lots of reference questions at this library on a wide variety of topics. Some of the most interesting questions are local history questions. We may be asked to locate photos of local spots or businesses long gone, help find the history of a house, search for an obituary, locate gravesites, search old census records, or review old maps to determine the growth of a section of the town over time.

We use a variety of resources to answer these questions such as Maine Memory Network, our Maine Collection and local history collection, microfilm of old newspapers such as the Star Herald, census data, atlases, Maine Registers, oral histories, scrapbooks, city directories, City of Presque Isle Annual Reports, and our Genealogy collection. We also talk to people who visit the library and see what they have to share on a given topic. We have wonderful local resources such as the Presque Isle Historical Society, records at City Hall, Special Collections at University of Maine at Presque Isle, our local historian Dick Graves, Voscar, and many other people who write local history in the Star Herald, Echoes Magazine, Crown of Maine Website, and several others who have published books and articles on local history.

We have many books that have been published by local authors and the recent book by John Llewellyn Hone, A Long Time Forgotten, about the Presque Isle Opera House and the history of Presque Isle is just one of the excellent books we can consult.

If you have a local history question, or any question, call us, write us, email us, fax us, IM us, stop in, visit our library in Second Life, reach us anyway that works best for you and we'll do the research and get your question answered. We are here to help. The very best part of all this is that we all learn something new along the way and contribute to preserving local history.