In the 10 years since I started at the Wiscasset Newspaper, Wiscasset, Westport Island and Alna have gotten into a school unit together, and Wiscasset has gotten out and gone from three schools to two.

Wiscasset Middle School has become Wiscasset Elementary again and Wiscasset High is now Wiscasset Middle High, graduating Wolverines.

With federal aid U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R – Maine, helped get, the state has replaced a scary bridge from Dresden to Richmond with one only scary if you look down.

Wiscasset Newspaper reporters have gone fully mobile, with phones and laptops to record, write and publish on. The business office has moved to Boothbay Harbor and our sister paper the Boothbay Register. In these same 10 years have come new websites and a third sister, the online-only Penobscot Bay Pilot. The sites and staffs have won state and New England awards on all fronts, from advertising to our supplements and one of my favorite advances in local news, video reporting. It’s not just for TV anymore. 

Juniper Hill School has opened in Alna, the town has made over its fire station, changed its treasurer from elected to appointed, decided to replace its town office, and has given the Maine State Museum a hearse the museum had on loan since 1979. A curator said the hearse was believed to be the oldest American-made, horse-drawn one at any museum in the U.S. 

Artifacts thousands of years older in Dresden have changed the story of how archeologists believed Native Americans traveled north.

Wiscasset has gotten a historic preservation ordinance and then rejected its repeal. The state has stopped seeking a Wiscasset bypass and has started to make over downtown traffic, walking and parking.

The local public and private sectors and the state, sometimes with federal help, have gotten all of these things done, whether you like some of them or not, in 10 years.

All the while, Maine Yankee's nuclear waste has sat in casks in town, while the nation decides where to take it. Planning its storage needs to take a long time, for it must not go wrong. But there is taking time and then there are stalling and passing the political buck. I hope by 2028 we can report the waste is at least close to leaving town for someplace planned, designed, and built to withstand natural and other threats of all kinds.

Our towns have also had a lot of fun, from the advent of Nightmare on Federal Street for Halloween, to the fun and beauty of the Wiscasset Art Walk, and the fun and pride of Wiscasset’s March 7, 2014 win of Portland television station WGME’s Spirit Challenge. With the community’s help, the school raised 58,662 pounds of food for Good Shepherd Food Bank. The school’s contingent returned from the win under Wiscasset police and fire escort, sirens blaring and lights flashing. Then Logan Grover emerged from the van, ran along the crowd and up into it, climbed the steps and hoisted the Spirit Cup overhead. It was a “Rocky” moment. And Wiscasset was Rocky.

Then there were horrors, some we are getting past, like last year’s windstorm, and others we must always remember, including the 2017 death of Wiscasset’s Kendall Chick at 4. Shawna Gatto was charged with murdering Chick.

That was one of the lowest points in reporting the past 10 years’ local news. One of the best was confirmation from authorities on May 10, 2012, the 12-year-old boy they’d been looking for by land, water and air survived his cold, snowy night along Dresden’s Eastern River.

Among the oddest were the June 2014 landslides at Donna Wallace's home in Alna, and a beachcomber’s 2017 find in Ireland of a tag from the famed Hannah Boden that survived the 1991 storm that claimed its sister ship Andrea Gail and her crew. When the tag’s find made news in Ireland, Westport Island’s Jon Williams, owner of Hannah Boden’s owner, Atlantic Red Crab Company, heard from a lot of people about it, and then from me so I could tell you.

These 10 years were like any, full of hope, grief, laughter, tears, success, controversy, surprises good and bad, and change. Thank you for reading about it all on these pages and online. May the coming years bring few rocky moments to report and more “Rocky” ones.