Much of what we know about the history of Ervin Bean (1876-1940) comes from the narrative he told a summer visitor to Belgrade Lakes in 1923. That man, Edward Mott Woolley, lived in New Jersey and was a popular author and journalist who, from 1923 to 1925, wrote a series entitled “Romances of Small Business” that were syndicated weekly in newspapers. In the BHS archives, we have a copy of the one he wrote about Ervin Bean. This copy originally appeared on p. 6 of New Brunswick, NJ’s The Central New Jersey Home News for November 14, 1923. According to Mott, everywhere in that vicinity [Belgrade Lakes region] I heard people speak of Bean’s store … No matter what anyone wanted, he went to Bean for it— from groceries and patent medicines to bait. Bean seemed to dominate the business of the place. So, it looked as if Bean was worth a story—and he was. Mott ‘interviewed’ Ervin Bean and wrote his story by quoting him directly in the article. Here is what Bean had to say: “I was born in Maine on a farm. My father and mother died and were buried on the same day, and I, the second youngest, was sent to live among strangers on another farm.

A Judge, a Cottage and an Ominous Departure

Crater had been vacationing in Belgrade during the summer of 1930, seeking respite from city life at a lakefront cottage. Belgrade, then as now, was a sanctuary—a place of still waters, pine trees, and summer solitude. Locals remember a man who appeared anxious during his final days at the lake. He cut his trip short, telling his wife and friends he had urgent business back in New York. Just days later, he vanished into history.

His abrupt departure from Maine left behind more questions than answers. Did he know something was coming? Was Belgrade a last attempt at peace—or a temporary hiding place?

Belgrade’s Quiet Role in a National Mystery

Though the headlines belong to New York, Belgrade, Maine, played its own quiet part in the Judge Crater saga. His time here—his final known retreat—anchors the story in our community’s history. Locals continue to tell stories of the judge at the lake, his sudden departure and the questions that followed.

Could the woods and waters of Belgrade still hold clues to America’s most famous missing person? Probably not. But as a footnote in this enduring mystery, Belgrade offers a window into the man behind the myth—a reminder that even the most powerful figures sometimes seek refuge in the humblest places.

Do you have stories or family recollections of Judge Crater’s time in Belgrade?

The Belgrade Historical Society welcomes your memories as we continue preserving our town’s unique place in American history.

Reed’s love for the Belgrade Lakes region was profound and abiding. She once remarked that only the theater held a dearer place in her heart than the beauty of this part of Maine. “The ride from the Belgrade Lakes region to Waterville,” she often said, “is the most beautiful scenic ride I have ever taken.” Her connection to the landscape was not fleeting — Maine was not simply a seasonal escape; it was home. Each year, as her train crossed into the state, her thoughts would turn immediately to the lakes and woods she so adored.

Though the demands of the stage would call her back to New York each fall and winter, Florence Reed’s spirit remained anchored in Belgrade. Her love for Maine was so deep that she once said, “Only the theater can take me back to the city where I enjoy my life’s work during the winter months.”

Her Wawa Yanda Lodge, the scenic roads, the friendly townsfolk, and — yes — those cherished coconut almond bars were central to her identity. As much as she belonged to the American theater, she also belonged to Belgrade. And each summer, when she returned to Great Pond, she brought with her a touch of Broadway and a heart full of gratitude for the place she called her true home.

While White eventually made his permanent home in Brooklin, Maine, on the coast, he held a deep and formative connection to Belgrade, Maine, where his family spent many summers during his youth. Nestled among the lakes and rolling woods of central Maine, Belgrade became a sanctuary for the young White—a place of natural wonder, adventure and introspection. The rhythms of lake life, the quiet mornings, the wildlife and the simplicity of country living all made a profound impression on him.

This connection found one of its most poignant expressions in White’s celebrated 1941 essay, Once More to the Lake. In it, he recounts returning to a lake (Great Pond) in Maine with his young son, retracing the footsteps of his own childhood. The essay explores the nature of memory, the passage of time, and the powerful sensations of nostalgia and continuity. As White watches his son experience the same joys he once did—fishing, boating, swimming—he confronts the deeply human realization that time passes, yet somehow remains suspended in these cherished places.

Once More to the Lake remains one of the most anthologized essays in American literature, not only for its lyrical prose but also for the quiet emotional truth it conveys—something deeply rooted in White’s experience of Belgrade.

E.B. White’s connection to Maine, and to Belgrade in particular, was not merely geographic—it was spiritual. Maine offered White the clarity, humility, and quiet that so deeply informed his voice. In both his essays and his fiction, the essence of places like Belgrade lingers: unhurried, enduring and quietly beautiful.

A Summer Haven in Belgrade Lakes

Amidst the rush of fame, Anna Held found a quieter refuge in the Belgrade Lakes region of Maine. In the early 1900s she would arrive at the Belgrade Depot with her trunks and travel by Studebaker “stage” to Belgrade Mills, where she enjoyed restful days at her cottage on the grounds of the Belgrade Hotel. There, the woman famed for bathing in milk and champagne found peace beside the shimmering lakes and wooded hills.

In 1902, the Bangor Daily News reported that Held purchased the Blaisdell Farm, just over the Belgrade Lakes line in Rome, for $2,500. Though the land was too rocky and hilly for serious farming, it was hailed as an “ideal summer home” for the actress and her circle of friends. Held and her companions stayed at the farm for two delightful weeks, during which they hosted a spirited concert for the local community, a rare treat that the townspeople long remembered with pride and joy.

Yet fate intervened: shortly after acquiring the property, Held left for Paris, and never returned to live in Maine.

So the Indians that the early explorers first saw here can be known as historic Indians, those that lived here several thousand years ago, the so-called Red Paint Indians, are prehistoric and relatively little is known about them. Only from their artifacts can conclusions be formed, artifacts deposited in their graves.

However, archaeologists working here since the Second World War seem to indicate that the Red Paints occupied part of Maine about 1500 to 2000 years B. C., about 3500 to 4000 years ago. If the radioactive carbon 14 system of dating, developed after the Second War, had been known to Charles Willoughby of Harvard, the first true archaeologist to explore here, he would have been able to ascertain close dates for the Red Paints.

He was able to find some bone and bark fragments in the cemeteries where these Indians buried their dead with red ochre; something with carbon residue must be utilized in the testing. When Warren Moorehead, an early American Indian archaeologist, from Phillips-Andover School in Massachusetts, made his archaeological survey of Maine in the years 1912-1920, he excavated numbers of Red Paine Indian grave sites. He would learn about these from persons digging cellar holes, deep plowing, or from some other excavation. 

When Moorehead systematically excavated and studied the remains, he would find fine tools accompanied with red ochre in the graves almost invariably. This led on to the term Red Paint being applied to these early Indians of Maine and nearby regions.

About 1920 the Moorehead party came to Oakland and excavated the Indian cemetery near the railroad overpass leading into the town from the west. According to John Franklin Hill (1886-1980), who was an amateur Indian archaeologist himself, and was the Model T Ford agent in Waterville at the time. Moorehead had a tent and placed a number of his uncovered artifacts on exhibit therein. Most of the artifacts from Oakland went to the Wilson Museum in Castine.

It may have been about this time (1920-) that his party came into Belgrade and accrued Luville Cook (1898-1967) to guide them about the lakes; from what Luville had been told by Amos Furbish, a much older local man, he was able to lead the Moorehead party to one or more Indian camp sites.

The compiler about 1949 found his interest excited in places where Indians might have camped in the Belgrades; he was able to locate a few of these places and examined them in some detail. The Indians would place in their wigwams a submerged pit rocked up with stone, for a small fire. Because of the building of dams at the outlet of our lakes by the earliest settlers, most of the Indian campgrounds were flooded by 1800, it was fairly easy to locate underwater the discolored piles of stones that had once boxed a fire pit.

The Indian arrow heads he found seemed to have been made on site, as the small flakes from the flint could be seen in the sand. He found a few scrapers of axe heads of stone that showed the grinding marks on the edge. His most remarkable find were the remains of Indian-made clay pots. They consisted of a large number of pieces of more than one pot with decorations visibly impressed around the top edges. For a long time he was baffled in finding black on the inside curve, not the outside, as it seemed to him it should be if they were used for cooking.

He later found that when the Indians made these pots from local clay, they air dried them sufficiently to hold together; then they turned them upside down and baked them over a small fire. That explained why the black was on the inside of the curve of the fairly small pieces that he located on a Belgrade lakes campground. These clay pots seem to have been the only ones ever discovered in the Belgrades. The Moorehead party almost certainly never saw this particular campsite, as it was probably flooded when they came here in 1920.

Francis Parkman (1823-1893) spent his life in writing his great history of this succession of conflicts, when the Maine frontier was all afire. For some reason unknown to us, Maine’s long and terrible experience in the hundred years of conflict has not become a part of the national popular historical culture. This has centered on events west of the Mississippi, an experience of much shorter duration. Only the interested student of local history in Maine will ever find much about our prolonged white and Indian conflict, with atrocities on both sides.

This conflict reached a point where some whites would systematically hunt and shoot Indians found in the woods, as they would a black bear. This might trace back to the wife or family member of such a hunter having been killed by Indians at some earlier date. Ben Pine on the coast of Maine was such an Indian killer, as was of Newcastle.

The Indians committed atrocities, especially on their prisoners. John Gyles, who was captured at Pemaquid in 1689 and held by the Malecite Indians on the St. John for many years, later wrote his memoirs and described the cruelties to which the Indians subjected their captives.

Probably the most cruel Indian in Maine history was the terrible Asacumbuit. He became so famous among the French that they sent him to France where this sadistic killer claimed to Louis XIV that he had killed 300 people with his own hands; of course this might have been an exaggeration. At one time Asacumbuit was holding a young girl prisoner at Farmington Falls, where he would occasionally strike at her; apparently, he enjoyed her screams.

After the end of this conflict Indians no longer had support from the French to the north. They became a kind of nothing class of people subject to attack in their camps by white renegades. John Neptune, a famous Penobscot chief, was trapping out of his camp on Lake Moxie above Bingham in 1830s. During one of his absences, whites stole his great catch of furs and burned his cabin.

Although there were European fishermen off our coast in the later 1500s, the century from 1600 to 1700 is epochal for our Maine Indians. At some date around the beginning of this period they saw the first white men’s track on the beach and were as astonished at the differences from their own moccasin imprint that they were still talking about it 300 years later.

They had several ways of making or obtaining fire. They knew the spindle method and they sometimes found fire where lightning had struck a still smoldering tree. They carried fire on their long treks in a quahog shell lined with blue clay. Yellow birch punk carried inside this container would be ignited; this they could carry for many hours.

When the whites first came on these shores before and after 1600, it was to the advantage of both parties to engage in friendly trade and explore their diverse cultures; the whites learned a great deal from the Indians and the reverse was true. By the middle of the century the Indians were well acquainted with firearms and traded furs, iron pots, and other objects and for cloth.

A number of trading posts were established on the Kennebec, at Clark & Lake at Ticonic (Waterville) establishment on Arrowsic Island, at Augusta, and other places. Besides these permanent establishments, the occasional trading boat would come in the River to deal with the Indians. From time-to-time even in the earlier decades, there were hostile incidents and events. It was not until King Philip’s war in the 1670s that the war path was generally resorted to by Maine Indians. A combination of local international factors now led on to nearly 100 years of war, War in Europe between the French and English, with French Quebec to the north and the English colonies to the south, the intrusion of English white settlers upon Indian lands, the supply center at Quebec made available to them, ransom money as a reward for surrendering prisoners, all led on from King Philip.

By the remaining groups of rocks from their fires, it has been possible to find in the Belgrades a limited number of localities where the Indians set their wigwams. Apparently, in historic times, our Indians had no permanent camps in this locality. Their temporary shelters were constructed of four poles tied together at the top, with the bottom set out in a square about ten to 12 feet apart.

The walls were covered with bark. The hole at the apex of the pyramidal structure let out the smoke from their fire. Our Indians appear to have been transient and may have spent the winter in Norridgewock or other places. About 1706, carpenters came up from Boston and built permanent and comfortable houses at Norridgewock called “Moss houses,” probably so-called using moss for chinking between the logs. These were the structures they were living in at the time of the massacre in 1724.

When the whites first came here, they found that the Indians had invented a device for winter travel on deep snow, the snowshoe. An Indian snowshoe can be identified by the fineness of its weave. They wove the rawhide closer together than the whites, and this can be noticed in museums where their snowshoes are on display.

For summer travel they had invented the birch bark canoe. When our own amateur Indian archaeologist, John Franklin Hill, was a young boy, living on Chebeague Island in Casco Bay, in the 1890s, the Passamaquoddy Indians came there in the summer and lived in tents, selling their handicrafts to summer people. John became acquainted with them and made Indians and their remains a lifelong hobby; his collections were given to the Bates Museum at Good Will Home, and a Hill Memorial Room has recently been established there. As late as the 1960s, John was corresponding with an aged Passamaquoddy woman on the method of making a birch bark canoe.

When Edward E. Bourne wrote and published his history of Wells in 1875, partly based on his father’s researches earlier in the century, he was able to describe the relationships, friendly and hostile, of the settlers and the Indians. When the local Indians were in a friendly mode they would place their wigwams near the garrison houses in Wells.

Nearby their wigwams they would set up a pile of rocks. According to Bourne, when they planned to leave and go on the warpath, they would always signal their intent by taking down the pile of rocks. Because they had no system of logistics, their campaigns were of short duration, a few weeks. But during this time they could burn buildings and scalp settlers and kill settlers and take prisoners.

Wells was the eastern bastion of the New England settlers. In their desperation swift couriers would be sent to Boston requesting medical supplies, armed men and supplies to assist in holding out. “Everything has gone east of Wells,” they would report. “Rally to us now.” These noble defenders are little remembered today.

This history is attribute to, yet not confirmed to be written by Sturtevant