Things to do in Brooksville
Holbrook Island Sanctuary
The scenic natural area of upland forests, rocky shores, and an offshore island provide opportunities for hiking, nature appreciation, and cross-country skiing in winter. Picnic tables are available, along with an area to launch canoes and kayaks. Bordering Penobscot Bay in Brooksville, Holbrook Island Sanctuary protects many different ecosystems, which visitors can explore and enjoy. From the beaches, mudflats, and rocky coast to the tops of steep hills that are actually old volcanoes, the sanctuary hosts a great diversity of plant and animal life. Stands of spruce-fir, pine, and mixed hardwoods, together with wetlands and meadows, encourage a multitude of colourful wildflowers that bloom from early spring until late fall. Down through these forests and old fields and around the marshes and ponds, alert visitors can see abundant signs of deer, fox, muskrat, beavers, otter, porcupine, bobcat and coyote.
Bagaduce Music Lending Library
preserves and lends printed music and provides music education programs. It is a national resource center for choral, instrumental, vocal and keyboard music, both popular and classical, and for teaching and reference materials. The Bagaduce Music Lending Library is a non-profit organization funded through memberships, small lending fees, and private fundraising. The heart of the library’s existence rests with an intrepid crew of volunteers.
Oakland House Seaside Resort
Shore Oaks Seaside Inn (c. 1907) and 15 family-size cottages are sprinkled along a half-mile of tree-studded shorefront. The 1767 family homestead houses dining rooms where 5-course dinners, fine wines, and breakfast are served daily in season. On-site features include a sandy lake and ocean beaches, a dock, moorings, rowboats, trails, lawn games, lobster picnics, and has among the best views (lighthouse included) Penobscot Bay offers.
Bagaduce River and Restaurant by Bagaduce Falls
watch as the tide changes the river flow direction. Kids will enjoy watching the huge amount of Horseshoe Crabs. Flows off of Penobscot Bay from Jones Point. Restaurant a real treat, order at the window and sit at a picnic table and watch as a fish jump in the reversing falls.
Wescott’s Island
Is a 3-acre gem set in a sheltered cove, ringed at low tide with an impressive 24 acres of salt marsh and tidal mudflats. It lies in the Bagaduce River, a scenic tidal estuary that winds through fields, woods, and salt marshes before emptying into Penobscot Bay. The collage of habitats along its shores makes the Bagaduce a prime wildlife corridor, especially for wintering American black ducks. According to Stewart Fefer, Project Leader of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Gulf of Maine Program, “Black ducks that summer in inland Maine and Eastern Canada depend on the Bagaduce for relatively undisturbed migratory and winter habitat. Its shallow, open waters and strong tides resist freeze-up, helping to provide food for migrating and wintering waterfowl, migrating shorebirds, and bald eagles.”
The Good Life Center
The Good Life Center is the last hand-built home of Helen and Scott Nearing, located in Harborside (Brooksville), Maine on five acres of forested land overlooking Spirit Cove.
Who Were Helen and Scott Nearing?
In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, Helen and Scott Nearing moved from their small apartment in New York City to a dilapidated farmhouse on 65 acres in Vermont. For over 20 years, they created fertile, organic gardens, hand-crafted stone buildings, and the practice of living simply and sustainably on the land. In 1952, they moved to the Maine coast, where they later built their last stone home. Through their 60 years of living on the land in rural New England, their commitment to social and economic justice, their numerous books and articles, and the time they shared with thousands of visitors to their homestead, the Nearings embodied a philosophy that has come to be recognized as a centrepiece of America’s “Back to the Land” and “Simple Living” movements.
Mission Statement:
The mission of The Good Life Center is to perpetuate the philosophies and lifeways promoted and exemplified by Helen and Scott Nearing, two of America’s most inspirational practitioners of simple, frugal and purposeful living. Building on the Nearing legacy, The Good Life Center encourages and supports individual and collective efforts to live sustainably into the future. Guided by the principles of kindness, respect and compassion in relationships with natural and human communities, The Good Life Center promotes active participation in the advancement of social justice, creative integration of the life of the mind, body and spirit, and deliberate choice in living responsibly and harmoniously in an increasingly complicated world.
Brooksville, Maine
is a rural community located on Smith Cove near Little Dear Isle on Penobscot Bay in Downeast Maine. This is a very pretty area of the state, where one can photograph the fields of wildflowers in the spring, explore tidepools in the summer, pick blueberries in the fall and cozy up to a warm fireplace in the wintertime – each season as picturesque as the next. Recreational activities in Brooksville include kayaking and canoeing, fresh water and saltwater fishing, boating, sailing, golf and hiking. Brooksville is nearly an island, with just two slim land bridges to the rest of the mainland. It has 53.75 miles of shoreline.