SPRINGVALE, Maine — Harland Eastman removes the lid of the solid cardboard box on the table before him and starts looking through the envelopes packed neatly and single-file inside. He pulls one of the envelopes free from the pack and sets it on the table.
The envelope has a date written on the front: May 30, 1987.
Eastman, the president of the Sanford-Springvale Historical Society, opens the envelope and removes a stack of black and white photos.
Some of these photos from that spring 32 years ago show snapshots of the Annual Town Meeting in Sanford. In one picture, we see former state rep. Mona Walker Hale, standing with an impassioned expression on her face, speaking against a proposed increase in the school department’s budget. In another, we see Jim Drummey, then the chair of the town’s Warrant Committee, also speaking about one of the evening’s pressing issues.
Another photo shows 10 local children whom the Sanford Kiwanis Club had honored as part of its “Terrific Kids” program. The children are students at the Roosevelt School, the once-white building on River Street that is now a new apartment complex. The students, now well into their 30s, are Brian Smith, Shelly Fogarty, Joseph Michaud, Ashley Hanson, Shawn Kimball, Dakota Gagne, Melissa Vachon, Candace Byrnes, Kenny Johnson, and Michael Pelletier.
Yet another photo is an out-of-town one of adolescents performing “Hamlet.”
There are more photographs, by the way — way more than are in that envelope marked May 30, 1989. There are thousands of them, spanning from 1983 through 2001, enough to fill 22 boxes. Most of them appeared in the Sanford News during this 18-year stretch. And most of them were taken by photographer Kevin A. Byron.
“These pictures, as you can see, are very high quality,” Eastman said. “He’s a good photographer.”
The Sanford News published its first issue on March 19, 1980, and its last one on Sept. 8, 2017. The weekly newspaper had its first office on School Street, directly across from Central Park, on an upper floor of a building that caught fire and burned in 2005. (The newspaper staff had relocated by then.) The newspaper’s last office was in The Townhouse on Main Street, in the space now occupied by Town Square Realty.
At one point during its 37-year run, however, the Sanford News set up shop in a former funeral home in a brick building on Main Street, north of the downtown, directly across from the corner of Lincoln Street. It was here that all these thousands of photographs were stored – packed away in storage and gathering dust.
The Sanford News moved out of this building and into The Townhouse in the summer of 2015. Eastman said the landlord at this former location contacted him last summer and asked him if he’d be interested in accepting the photos and adding them to the organization’s vast collection of local items from yesteryear.
Eastman reported to the former Sanford News office, took one look at the piles of photos, and immediately felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume.
“I almost said no,” Eastman said.
But Eastman’s a true historian. Of course he said yes. And he’s glad he did.
The landlord had all of the photos delivered to the Sanford-Springvale Historical Museum. Eastman and Thomas Gagne, also of the Sanford-Springvale Historical Society, sorted the photos, which were in envelopes marked with the dates of the weeks on which they were published in the newspaper. Most photos had a slip of paper attached on the backs of them; on these slips were the ol’ who-where-what-when-and-why, the building blocks of captions.
“They’re well-documented,” Eastman said of the photo collection.
As mentioned, there are 22 boxes of these photos. Boxes 4 through 19 are all filled with Byron’s pictures, ones he took for the Sanford News from 1986 through 1998, a period that spans roughly one-third of the newspaper’s entire run in the community.
The photos are not on public display. They’re privately stored on the second floor of the Goodwin House, next door to the historical museum, on shelves built and installed by members of the Sanford-Springvale Rotary Club.
“It’s quite possible that there are pictures here that never appeared in the Sanford News,” Eastman said.
Anyone who is interested in seeing a photo that appeared in the Sanford News between 1983 and 2001 is encouraged to contact Eastman at 207-324-2797.
The boxes of photos add to the historical society’s preservation of all things Sanford News. The organization has every issue of the newspaper available to the public in the research room at the Sanford-Springvale Historical Museum at 505 Main St. The historical society has a back-up collection too – bound volumes of the newspaper that the Sanford News editor donated to the organization when the paper folded in 2017. Those bound volumes also are stored in the Goodwin House.
Contacted at his home in Arundel on Thursday, Byron said he feels “quite good” knowing his Sanford News photos are now preserved by the local historical society. He added that, on a personal level, he regards the photo collection as part of his legacy.