The following article by Laura McCandlish is being released as part of a series offered by Lincoln County Historical Association (LCHA) on the Women Writers of Lincoln County.

Though less renowned than Damariscotta’s late Barbara Cooney of Miss Rumphius fame, prolific poet and writer Elizabeth Coatsworth (1893-1986) penned an estimated 127 total titles while living for decades in an early 19th-century house at lakefront Chimney Farm in Nobleboro. There Elizabeth and her pioneering nature writer husband Henry Beston (contemporaries of close friend Rachel Carson and Anne Morrow Lindbergh) raised two daughters, Meg and Kate (Beston) Barnes (1932-2013), Maine’s first poet laureate. In 1931, Elizabeth won the Newbery Medal for “The Cat Who Went to Heaven,” practically her sole work still in print.

After marrying relatively late in life in 1929, Elizabeth and Henry first spent an idyllic season on an unspoiled Damariscotta “Pond” (no motorboats, fewer waterfront cottages then) living among loons on a friend’s rustic boat. She wrote that adventure into another admired children’s book, Houseboat Summer (published by Macmillan Co. in 1942, illustrated by Marguerite Davis). Transcending genres, Elizabeth’s books ranged from poetry to memoir to a Random House four-book adult fantasy fiction series set in Maine. She penned young adult novels about Vikings coming to North America, Native-Americans in the Southwest and the Away Goes Sally children’s historical fiction series featuring an ox-sled-drawn log cabin in a family’s wintertime move from Massachusetts to Maine just before the War of 1812 (see image of LCHA collections object). A geography primer taught in 3rd grade classrooms, at least around Rockland, featured a young girl riding cross-country with her parents, from Maine to California. Elizabeth reviewed her own rich life in Personal Geography: Almost an Autobiography (1976).     

“There are certain figures in 20th century literature that disappear, and shouldn’t,” said poet Gary Lawless, who with his wife, Beth Leonard, owns Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick. “Kids books are timeless.”

In 1986, when Elizabeth died at age 94, daughter Kate invited Gary and Beth to caretake her late parents’ (Beston died in 1968) 90-acre property, effective immediately, furnishings and books left onsite. Once hayed with oxen who waded into the farm’s 6,000 feet of shore frontage, Elizabeth kept horses Beth and Gary replaced with two cheery donkeys, named Clementine and Mavis, who inhabit the barn. The couple inherited the farmhouse plus three acres when Kate, who phoned Beth and Gary almost daily, reciting poetry at all hours day and night, died in 2013. The rest of Chimney Farm’s almost 87 acres remain permanently protected under Midcoast Conservancy easements. Coatsworth’s civilized, sociable spirit still infuses the property. Neighbors recalled her inviting the mailman in for afternoon tea, or more likely, sherry.

Upon graduation from Vassar College during the first World War, Coatsworth journeyed to Asia, including the Philippines, Japan, China and Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. Those travels inspired her first book of poetry, nominated for both the Yale Younger Poets and the Borzoi prizes, Lawless recounted. (As a teenager prodigy, protégé daughter Kate had had her first poem published in the New Yorker, of all places.) Coatsworth later traversed Morocco and Tunisia on camel back (Cooney’s illustration of a young “Ms. Rumphius” comes to mind) and Guatemala on a donkey. Then she took her young daughters throughout Europe.

“They loved to travel, and when they did, she’d gather material for a kid’s book,” Lawless said.

Now, with  the recent release of the novels of Mount Desert Islander Ruth Moore, Islandport Press and others told Lawless of their interest in reintroducing readers to Coatsworth Someone, even a high school student, should also write a proper Elizabeth Coatsworth biography, Lawless urges. Husband Henry Beston has one, but not her.

As an elderly Elizabeth grew ill, daughter Kate left four children and a husband in California to come back to Maine, living by herself up on Appleton Ridge. Before Elizabeth’s death, Kate asked Lawless to republish her mother’s prize-winning chapbook of poetry. “So her first book was her very last, too,” he jokes. And at the end of Elizabeth’s funeral in the pasture next to the farmhouse, Kate asked Gary to read two of her poems “so that she had the last word.”

“I have always hated to wait for things,” Lawless read from Personal Geography “I think I will go to meet whatever it is.”

Visit the gravesites of Coatsworth, Beston and Barnes in the family cemetery at 617 East Neck Rd., Nobleboro. UNE’s Maine Women Writers Collection maintains Coatsworth’s voluminous correspondence, photographs and books. Reporting here based on an interview with Gary Lawless.

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LCHA will host lectures and programming related to the topic this summer, including presentations from award-winning Maine mystery writer Kate Flora, New York Times #1 Bestselling author Elizabeth Letts, and celebrated poet, bookstore owner, book editor, and publisher Gary Lawless, among others. An exhibition on Women Writers of Lincoln County will open at LCHA’s Museum at the Old Jail in Wiscasset in June. LCHA’s summer calendar will be available in coming weeks on the organization’s website.

In a collaborative effort, Skidompha Library in Damariscotta is displaying books by Elizabeth Coatsworth and Kate Barnes by their adult check out desk this month.