NON-FICTION
Water Village
The Story of Waterville, Maine
by Earl H. Smith
The Story of Waterville, Maine
by Earl H. Smith
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Water VillageHardcover 222 pages, 54 images ISBN 978-1-943424-43-6 As his third work of history, Maine author Earl Smith has written Water Village, the first history of Waterville, Maine, to be published since 1902. The book will be released Thursday, November 15, with a launch party and book signing from 5:30-7 p.m. at the Waterville Opera House, sponsored by the Mid-Maine Chamber of Commerce, Waterville Creates!, and the City of Waterville.
Like the stories of many river places in the American northeast, this book tells of determined early settlers who found promise in the power of the water and whose descendants built a city that flourished with industry and mercantile trade throughout the Second Industrial Revolution and for a half-century beyond. It is also the tale of the hundreds of immigrants, welcomed from Canada, the Middle East, and Europe, who enriched the city when they came to work in the mills and who remained as partners in the community’s long struggle to reinvent itself when the mills were gone. |
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Maine State Historian Earle Shettleworth has said Water Village “skillfully recounts Waterville’s story on the context of state and national events and the city’s close relationship with Colby College,” and has called it “Maine local history at its best – diligently researched, engagingly written, and thoroughly readable and informative.”
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Earl Smith is retired as Dean of the College at Colby. He is the author of Mayflower Hill, a history of Colby College (2006 - University Press of New England), and With the Help of Friends, a history of the Colby Museum of Art (2009 – Colby College Press). He has also written three works of fiction: The Dam Committee, More Dam Trouble, and Head of Falls (2011, 2014, 2016 – North Country Press).
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