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Patent Attorney Parker “Pack” Dodge was among an early crowd of mostly Washington DC families with the means to remove themselves to picturesque—if rustic—environs on the Maine coast during the sweltering summer months in the southeast. These early 20th century urbanites named their emergent community the Haven Colony. It was a place to do what all rusticators love to do: picnic, sail, explore, and play while the quiet workaday world of the countryside went on around them.
Dodge was an enthusiastic snapshot photographer who played with a number of camera formats throughout his many years at the Colony and back at home. Perusing these photos, one sees a dedicated amateur with a casual eye for composition and a relatable love for family, landscape, adventure, and the intoxicating freedom of leisure time.
The cluster of cottages forming the Colony still exists in Brooklin, Maine today, and the descendants of many original families still occupy them. Pack’s grandson John Dodge found his grandfather’s trove of pictures in a shoebox while sorting through his late parents’ belongings in Nebraska in the early 2020s; he and his cousin Paul Gagliardi approached PMM with the negatives, intuiting that our museum would be a good permanent home for what is essentially Pack’s story. The negatives have been digitized, and a team of volunteer catalogers has gone digging for information, including Pack’s descendants and PMM volunteers Dave Ruberti, Louise Seekins and Maynard Bray. Selections from the Dodge collection will be published with the rollout of the Museum’s new digital museum in the coming months.
Many thanks again to Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors, who featured this collection in an article for their July/August edition this summer.
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