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JONESPORT, Maine — Taxpayers at the annual town meeting Monday voted to stop all work on 46 Main St., a run-down building from the 1800s that the town bought in early 2025.
The building sits on one‑tenth of an acre at the southern edge of a 90‑acre parcel that the town owns.
The Board of Selectmen received a $25,000 grant from the Maine Redevelopment Land Bank Authority to stabilize the building, patch the roof and remove the chimney while the town conducts an environmental assessment and looks for additional funding to rehabilitate the structure for community use.
The town has spent about $14,000 so far, leaving $10,857 remaining.
At the March 9 meeting, the Board of Selectmen asked residents to allow the remaining funds to be used for “necessary maintenance, upkeep, insurance, security or related property preservation costs until a final determination on the property’s future is made by the townspeople.” Voters rejected the request 40-28.
It was a small showing in a town of more than 1,200 residents.
The general sentiment at the meeting was that the building was not worth further effort and the town should explore adding parking in that area.
“It’s been a sore spot on my butt for a long time,” Fire Chief Boyde Crowley said. “The roofline looks like an accordion. It has no foundation, just cribwork. There is no room for septic, no room for a well. You can shine a turd all day long and it’s still a turd.”
That cribwork, which keeps the building from sliding off its concrete posts, was part of the stabilization done last year.
Longtime Selectman Harry Fish Jr. said he hoped the remaining funds would be used to patch the roof and further stabilize the structure until taxpayers could decide what to do with the building.
“The building looks like if you blow on it, it’ll fall down,” Fish said. “The clapboards on the outside are falling off, and the window casings are rotting out. But when builders crawled around underneath it, they said it was structurally sound.”
Because of the building’s location in front of the Jonesport Fire Station and next to a busy garage, some voters said the town would be better served by knocking it down and using the space for additional parking.
Parking “only seemed to make sense because the building is in such disrepair,” Paul Farnsworth Jr., who rents the building next to 46 Main St. for his auto repair business, said. “Who would want to fix it?”
Farnsworth said the area around the building sees a steady flow of traffic, from trucks crossing the adjacent Beals Island Bridge to the crowds that come for the large community fundraisers hosted by the Fire Department.
But while grant money is available to Maine towns trying to preserve historic buildings, Fish said, there is none for parking lots — meaning Jonesport taxpayers would bear that cost.
“You can’t just go knock it down with a backhoe because it’s got power lines and data lines. It’s too close to the other buildings to do that,” Fish said. “It costs a lot more to make a piece of land into a parking lot than just dumping gravel. We don’t have that money. And no one’s going to give us a grant.”
Not everyone thinks 46 Main St. is a lost cause.
Cynthia Beauvais, chair of the Jonesport Economic Development Committee, said she spent more than 65 hours with a group of volunteers clearing out the inside of the building with the goal of turning it into a community center.
“It has the most gorgeous woodwork, huge boards,” she said. “It’s 2 1/2 stories inside and it’s just all wood.”
Beauvais said she and her committee are taking their cues from the Jonesport Comprehensive Plan, compiled a few years ago with significant community input.
The Board of Selectmen plans to call a special town meeting to decide the building’s next steps after it receives the results of soil tests scheduled for early April and explores additional funding options.
“I hate to see the history of the town disappear,” Fish said. “That was one of several buildings that was kind of the West Jonesport commercial center in the late 1800s, early 1900s. It’s the only one left. All the others have been torn down.”