'Oh no, they're both gone': Beloved fishing cabins in Maine tumble into the bay

The fishing shacks that once perched on the rocks of South Portland's Willard Beach were part of a childhood that Maureen Connolly described Monday as “quintessentially Maine.”

The huts, with lobster buoys on the walls, had served as a backdrop for photographers and painters, inspired by the rocky coastline, with sailboats drifting by and dinghies bobbing in the water.

The huts, which were at least 150 years old, are no longer there. On Saturday, the last of them were swept into Casco Bay by gusts of wind and water from a powerful storm on the East Coast.

Ms. Connolly and others with a connection to South Portland learned of their destruction in a widely shared video of them falling into the water.

Ms. Connolly, now 61 and living in North Carolina, remembers riding her bicycle to the beach, with views of distant islands and tankers at sea. She climbed down the steps of the huts to look for crabs or to dangle her toes in the water at low tide.

“We took pictures there. You sat on the steps of the fishing huts, or took walks with friends,” she said in an interview on Monday. “Pack a brown bag. That was the walk you took. That's what we did.”

Not anymore. The water level in Portland Harbor was a record of 14.57 feet the National Weather Service said Saturday, as Michelle Erskine captured the footage video of the last two cabins fall into the water.

“Oh no, they're both going,” you heard her say. “Oh no.”

“It was like history disappeared before your eyes,” said Kathryn DiPhilippo, executive director of the South Portland Historical Society.

But South Portland residents refused to let go on Sunday. Mayor Misha Pride took a walk along the cold beach. He estimated that about fifty people were present. Some were busy recovering shards of wood, metal or other wreckage. One woman erected a small memorial in front of the huts. Online, others shared photos of the cabins in the background of family gatherings.

“They meant so much to so many people — milestones, weddings, people growing up playing by the ocean, school trips,” Mr. Pride said in an interview. Not much remains, he added. “The only impression they leave on people is a mental one. There is very little evidence that they were there.”

The fishing huts at Fishermen's Point, a rocky ledge at the southern end of the beach, represented the maritime history of the community, which is located about 60 miles south of the capital, Augusta.

In the 1870s and 1880s, Willard Beach and Simonton Cove flourished as a base for about a dozen schooners. Wooden huts were built to store nets and fishing gear, Ms. DiPhilippo said. Over the years their numbers decreased as they were lost to storms.

After the snowstorm of 1978, which marked the previous water level record of 4.47 meters, two huts remained. They were destroyed on Saturday.

“These last two cabins are the ones that stubbornly held on and that our community cherished and cared for,” Ms. DiPhilippo said. “Videos showing the huts being washed away are heartbreaking to watch.”

In 2022, after years of increasingly powerful storms, the Historical Society contacted architects who measured the two cabins and drew up plans in case they were ever destroyed. The Historical Society plans to raise money in an effort to rebuild them.

After his walk on the beach, Mr. Pride said, his 10-year-old daughter Lucy asked him how the beloved shanties that had existed for so long could finally be gone. Why now?

“The wind was bad,” he told her. “And the ocean rose.”