A Place Called Unity
Welcome to the unlikeliest college town in Maine.
By Virginia Wright, photography by Kip Brundage
It ought to be called Independence, this central Maine town whose citizens gather monthly to share a meal prepared with foods grown on local farms. Whether meatloaf and potatoes or turkey with all the fixings, the community supper is delicious, fun, and powerfully symbolic. Here, tucked into rolling hills thirty minutes from the nearest center big enough to have a supermarket, hums a hamlet of just under two thousand people. Its village is neat and polished, the storefronts are open for business, and there is no trace of the decay that mars other rural communities whose self-sustaining economies have evaporated.
