THIS TIME THE APPEAL IS FOR REAL! Our poor old Town Hall refrigerator is well and truly kaput! It will shortly be a contribution to the Boothbay Recycle Center. We need a new fridge! For public dinners, meeting refreshments, ice cubes to cool selectmen's brows... If anyone has a working but unneeded refrigerator, please let them know at the Town Hall, 822-7018, or via me, details at the end of the column.

The Edgecomb Congregational Church is holding a summer supper Saturday, August 31, from 5 to 7 p.m., this time to benefit the programs of HEALTHY KIDS in Damariscotta. Lea Wait will be at the Maine Antique Dealers Association show at Round Top Center for the Arts in Damariscotta, Sunday, August 25, 9:30 a.m., signing her new mystery book, "Shadows at the Fair," about sleuth Maggie Summer, as well as her juvenile "Stopping to Home."

I have a correction from one of my readers: She says, "I have always thought the Folly Bridge was over Folly Bar (originally called Davis's Folly)–that is the bar that connects Davis Island with mainland Edgecomb and is on the Eddy Road. The old bridge was replaced years ago with culverts, etc. but that connection is still known as Folly Bar." Well, well. That, I never knew. She's referring to what I've always thought to be a causeway, that stretch between the salt marsh and the view of Birch Point.

But, calling on the "Islands of Mid-Maine Coast" book again, I find, p. 198, "The earliest recorded name of this island [Davis] was Folly, or Lewis' Folly, after an early 18th-century settler named Job Lewis, who allegedly began construction of a castellated house on the island, which he left uncompleted–‘a monument of the extravagance and folly of the man who undertook to build what he was unable to finish.'" The next settler was Moses Davis, a master carpenter (he built the Town Hall) who made a success of his Davis Island settlement; by 1773 was Big Man in Edgecomb and head of the Maine delegation to the Massachusetts General Court; he also represented Edgecomb at the convention in Boston to ratify the Constitution.

On the same subject, I received a phone call from Dot Brown in Boothbay Harbor who remembers the first bridge between Edgecomb and Wiscasset. It was all wood, in two layers, crosswise and lengthwise for stability, even wooden railings. One time when she was three years old, traveling across with her mother in a horse and wagon, they encountered an early automobile! This must have been 1913-1914, she estimates. Her mother set little Dot down on the wagon floor between her knees; then, an excellent horsewoman, she succeeded in calming the horse and carefully passed the unfamiliar machine.

With all this research, it is not unreasonable to give everyone an early alert: The Edgecomb Historical Society annual meeting will be Saturday, September 28, at 1:00 p.m. in the Town Hall. After a brief business meeting, we will tour the Schmid Preserve with Bob Brown, the Preserve's historian. For details, call Sophie Quinn at 882-9326.

With one hand on the past and the other on the future, I remain at 234 River Road, 633-2978, bonesukl@midcoast.com. This column appears in The Boothbay Register, The Lincoln County News, The Wiscasset Newspaper, and at www.Edgecomb.org.