Small Maine Port City Could Serve as Model of Revival for Rural Areas : Economy: Local people pulling together with some help from government attract new shipping, aquaculture. Tourist dollars add to recovery.

A decade ago, this historic port, the easternmost city in the United States, was a picture of desolation. One Maine tour guide said it had “a haunting, end-of-the-world feel.”

Most storefronts downtown were boarded up, and a Maine humorist joked that Eastport’s biggest event was its empty-building festival. The once-thriving sardine industry was virtually dead, its canneries crumbling. Eastport’s largest employer had laid off 175 workers, and panic set in.

But today, this community of 2,000 people along the Canadian border is enjoying a renaissance that some state and federal officials believe could be a model for revival in other rural communities.

Although half a dozen buildings remain vacant, most of the once-derelict downtown has been refurbished. It now boasts eight restaurants, including Italian and Mexican eateries, and money from tourism makes up 20% of the local economy.

The city’s port has been revived, its shipping volume growing from 15,197 tons and six ship calls in 1981 to 168,813 tons and 40 ship calls in 1990. Eastport now is the second busiest port in Maine, behind Portland, and city officials hope to expand shipping further by building a new $20-million cargo pier by the mid-1990s.

Eastport is in the midst of installing a $12-million sewage-treatment system and spending $1 million to expand its airport.

The city also has become a hub for the largest concentration of salmon farms in the United States, creating an estimated 225 jobs and putting a modern spin on Eastport’s fishing heritage.

Located on Moose Island, Eastport is classified a city despite its sparse population. It is flanked by Cobscook and Passamaquoddy bays, where the tides are the highest in the Lower 48 states, and bordered by Canada’s Campobello and Deer islands.

Off Moose Island’s northeastern tip swirls “Old Sow,” the largest whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere, created by the St. Croix River emptying into Passamaquoddy Bay. Eastport also has a rich fishing tradition and today is the only place left in the country where people in small boats catch cod and mackerel with hand lines.

“It’s very remote and far removed from everything,” says City Manager Rosemary E. Kulow. “You have to want to be here. . . . I think what makes a difference is Eastport has this vast array of natural resources available.”

The city has parlayed those resources into the two major reasons for its economic revival: shipping and aquaculture, or fish farming.

But the key to Eastport’s turnaround was a new attitude among local leaders and residents, says Mary Follis, director of community development and planning.

Eastport’s ability to build a coalition of community leaders and private business interests, coupled with its aggressive use of government grants, may hold lessons for other rural towns trying to revive, say state and federal officials.

In many ways, the city’s present success also is an extension of its past.

Before the War of 1812, it became the busiest port on the East Coast when smugglers evaded an embargo on imports of British goods by bringing them into Eastport from Canada.

In 1873, the first sardine cannery in the United States opened in Eastport when supplies of popular French sardines were limited by the Franco-Prussian War. By the turn of the century, Eastport was a center for Maine’s sardine industry. The city’s waterfront was lined with 24 canneries, and its population grew to 5,000, Follis says.

In the 1930s, Eastport residents hoped to benefit from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposed Quoddy Dam project to harness Cobscook Bay’s tidal range of up to 27 feet to generate electricity. The granite base of the causeway linking Moose Island to the mainland was built as part of that project.

But the tidal project never was completed and, over the years, the city’s port activities and sardine industry dwindled to virtually nothing.

“It just got poorer and poorer,” Kulow says.

In the early 1970s, some Eastport residents saw the possibility of renewed prosperity when the Pittston Co. proposed building an oil refinery and supertanker terminal on Moose Island. But the proposal drew fierce opposition from environmentalists and divided Eastport between residents who wanted the refinery’s jobs and those who believed it would ruin the island.

Pittston finally withdrew its permit applications in 1983 and the refinery was never built.

As the problems worsened, many Eastport residents developed a fatalistic attitude, Follis says.

“We speak about the Quoddy Dam syndrome,” she says. “People had the feeling that it didn’t matter what you did it would fail.”

But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Follis says, community leaders plotted how to bring Eastport back. “We got smart and started making use of federal dollars.”

The city first put together a $1.15-million waterfront redevelopment program. It built a pink granite seawall and walkway as part of a park overlooking the harbor and tore down dilapidated buildings.

In 1984, the city used an estimated $2 million in state money to widen its 410-foot cargo pier and dredge the harbor in an effort to expand the port to serve the forest products industry in timber-rich eastern Maine.

Today, about 90% of the port’s business involves shipping wood pulp from Georgia-Pacific Corp. to England, northern Europe and Japan, and logs to Japan, South Korea, China and Turkey.

The increased shipping has created a $1-million annual payroll for longshoremen, giving 43 people part-time jobs that pay $12 to $15 an hour.

But the port has outgrown its existing pier, and city officials want to build a new 1,500-foot floating cargo pier along Estes Head, a 43-acre section of the island owned by the Port Authority on the outskirts of town.

The new pier could handle two ships at a time, and a city-commissioned study estimates that it could initially increase the port’s volume to 300,000 tons a year.

As a side benefit, the Port Authority could use the existing pier to attract cruise ships and expand Eastport’s tourist economy.

“I’ve talked to the cruise ships and they would love to have some delightful little Down East town to come to, but they don’t have any place to dock,” says port director Brian C. Nutter.

The planned site for the new pier overlooks a cove lined with salmon pens--the second source of Eastport’s revival.

In 1982, city officials used $1.5 million in federal grants as seed money to help local entrepreneurs launch Ocean Products Inc., Maine’s first salmon farming company, and take advantage of Cobscook Bay’s tides.

Since then, raising salmon and sea trout has grown into an estimated $50-million-a-year business in Maine with 20 companies. Thirteen fish farms are based in Cobscook Bay and are raising an estimated 2.8 million fish, says Colin McLernon, president of Maine Pride Salmon Inc.