MILLINOCKET, Maine — They want their horn back.
Close to 50 vehicles each carrying at least two people drove around a few blocks in the downtown area with their horns blaring at 9 p.m. Tuesday to protest the silencing of the fire horn located at the Millinocket fire station.
It was the second straight night that a protest parade wound its way through downtown. The first parade of honking horns drew about a dozen vehicles. Co-organizer Jennifer Murray said the performance would repeat at 9 p.m. Wednesday “until we get the horn back.”
Since the 1950s, co-organizer Dawn Boyington said, the booming fire horn blew twice a day. It sounded at 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. — and during daylight savings time, at 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. The horn’s programmers used a kind of code to announce school cancellations and the location of fires until two years ago, when the town’s callbox system was dismantled, firefighters said.
The horn went silent on Aug. 12, Boyington said, when in response to a noise complaint, Town Manager John Davis ordered the horn shut down. Boyington said Davis erred by not discussing his decision with the Town Council and that the horn was an artifact of town history that should continue to be used.
Davis did not return telephone and email messages and was unavailable for interview at the town office. Council Chairman Richard Angotti Jr. did not return a telephone message on Tuesday.
The issue is drawing attention. Created about 6 p.m. Monday, a Facebook page titled “Bring Back Our Horn,” had 463 members on Tuesday night.
And ironically in a debate on preserving a traditional means of communication, several councilors and protesters used postings on their own and on the protesters’ Facebook pages to air their views.
Councilor Bryant Davis — no relation to the town manager — said the debate was misguided, while Councilor Anita Mueller said it reflected a council and town manager that make too many unilateral decisions.
The town has a “29.66 mil rate and you’re up in arms over the horn,” Bryant Davis said in a social media posting. “I’m glad we got our priorities straight.”
“Millinocket’s authoritarian culture is killing the town both literally and figuratively,” Mueller said. “It is the old industrial paradigm. It worked fine when things were good or at least no one complained. But just in the short time I have been on the council it is apparent that the too few making decisions for the many is alive and well.”
The horn is rotting away but can still be used, Councilor Michael Madore said. Shutting down the 9 p.m. sounding makes sense with the town no longer having a teen curfew. The 8 a.m. sounding informed students that they risked tardiness, he said.
“Both [soundings] serve no real purpose or are part of a functioning municipal operation,” Madore said. “This is not judgmental, just informational. Doesn’t make it right or wrong, just informed.”
The fire horn was as comforting as a lighthouse in the fog, said Tricia Cyr, one of the protesters.
“This is more tradition than need at this time but it is a part of what makes Millinocket Millinocket,” Cyr said. “We sit on my porch most of spring until fall and watch the kids play. When the horn blows at 9 the kids all say, I have to go home. And that’s a small token of what makes us the town we are.”
Other posters said the horn was a nuisance.
“Can’t say I won’t miss hearing it blast out the fire locations for our emergency crews and town gossips alike, but I won’t miss being jumped out of my skin from being downtown at precisely the wrong time. I’d rather hear chimes in the late afternoon like a lot of college campuses do,” former Town Councilor Bruce McLean wrote on the Horn page.
“Enjoy the community spirit that comes from a valiant fight for a just cause,” McLean added. “Maybe one request though: While you’re tooting your horns and other things, hold up a sign supporting the library, education and the hard work people are putting in at playgrounds and other worthwhile endeavors around town. Things have dwindled far enough.”
The fun of the protest didn’t mask a serious point, Cyr said. The town’s paper mill closed in 2008, ending more than a century of manufacturing pride and profit — enough to give the town one of the state’s highest per-capita income levels at the time.
Millinocket’s population has been nearly halved over the last decade to around 4,400. The town’s young people have fled, and the town’s library now has to be run by volunteers because town finances are so tight.
“We have lost our jobs, our mill and most of our people,” said Dawn Boyington’s husband, Donald Boyington. “Why take it away? This is a simple thing. It is symbol, and it doesn’t have to go.”
The horn “is just one more in a growing list of things taken away where people feel they have no voice, no way to retain what is for so many of us — a piece of who we are,” one poster wrote.