COA: Fire, earth, air, water, and community
Old Kaelber Hall, formerly a 100-year-old summer estate before becoming the central facility at College of the Atlantic, consumed by flames in 1983.
Excerpted with permission from “From the Ashes: The College of the Atlantic Fire(s) of 1983” (Chebacco: The Journal of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society, 2024), by COA President Darron Collins '92. The full story is available in Chebacco: MDI Inspired.
For the first decade+ after the founding of College of the Atlantic in 1969, the institution celebrated a time of collaboration, creativity, and sacrifice for a cause—the creation of an entirely new, experimental approach to higher education. But between 1982 and 1985, there unfolded a series of events that challenged the very existence of the college, perhaps none more so than the fire of 1983, which destroyed old Kaelber Hall, known as "the main buiding," which housed the school's library, dining hall, natural history museum, faculty offices, and teaching spaces.
College of the Atlantic buildings and grounds head Millard Dority awoke to a phone call at 4:45 a.m. on the day of the fire. “Millard—this is Paul Dubois, you should know there’s a fire on campus, but it seems under control.”
Dority could smell the smoke as he left his home and, as he arrived on campus it was clear that the fire was anything but under control. “I could see and smell the black smoke rising in the east. After an irate exchange with the police at the bottom of Prospect Ave., I was let through. The old building was completely involved. There were offices on the third floor with skylights—flames shot 30–40 feet in the air from those openings. The roar was unlike anything I’d ever heard. Marie Stivers (then Marie DeMuro, the secretary for internships, records, and career services) was sobbing. Her mascara stained her cheeks and chin.”
July 25, 1983 was the worst day in Dority’s career.1 “When Ed Kaelber hired me in 1970, he gave me a chance, and I’d never been given a chance before then. I have no idea where that day went, but once there was nothing left at the site but smoldering embers, I made my way home and said to my wife, Kathy. I can’t do this. The chances Ed gave me just ran out.”
But when Dority woke the following day and met with COA President Judith Swazey, he was a different man. Swazey gave him a direct order, without council or committee approval in any form: “We have six weeks before the start of the academic year. Get us ready for that day.”
Dority became a man possessed and it was that sense of determination that provided lift under the college’s wings—that and the generous response from the MDI community. Dority had access to that support even though most locals still hadn’t quite figured out what the college was or what it did.
The first evidence of such support came from Dick Higgins, who managed the debris pit near the Hillside Cemetery. “Dick didn’t skip a beat: Millard, haul the debris there and, don’t worry, you won’t get a bill from me.”
Next came books. The old Kaelber Hall was many things to many people COA, but its most important function was as a library in a time before digital archives and when a college’s worth was measured by the number of volumes in the library. By that standard, COA wasn’t worth much. “I’d been tasked to collect volumes for the library,” noted founding COA faculty member Bill Carpenter. “I had only worked through the As, Bs, and Cs. We were fortunate that our collection emphasized Aristotle over Plato.”
Books drying from water damage.
Regardless of the number of volumes, the space was sacred. In an important sign of trust, the library was never locked, and students, faculty, and staff worked in that library 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But that sacred space and the entire early-in-the-alphabet collection was either destroyed or completely soaked, as was everything in the personal collections of the faculty who had offices in the building.
Nothing unites librarians more than a library fire. The most urgent piece of help came from the Northeast Document Conservation Center, which instructed COA Librarian Marcia Dworak to freeze whatever water-soaked books remained, otherwise they would mold. “All of our wet books went into the freezers at Allen’s Blueberries out in Ellsworth,” Dworak recalled. “We weren’t charged a dime.”
With the debris gone and whatever remained of the Aristotle-heavy collection frozen and protected from mold, the support from local and distant libraries poured in. The Maine Library Commission sent a van and two librarians to campus who dug in to help. Colby College donated more than 3,000 volumes. Sherman’s Bookstore, the Jesup, and the other island libraries came together to help get the Thorndike Library back on its feet with donations and free labor.
The University of Maine sent an enormous amount of material to COA and opened their library to any COA student, staff, or faculty, an agreement that stands to this day. The university also helped facilitate COA’s participation in the Online Catalog Library Center, which helped launch the college into the computer age with an online cataloging system.
Students Anna Hurwitz '84 and Pam Wellner '84 were interning with the Library of Congress. When their supervisor connected the dots between the two interns and the COA library fire, he instructed them to, “Go into the bowels of the Library of Congress and cull from the massive piles of duplicates in the national collection.”
By November 14 of that year, Dworak reported that COA had received and cataloged 9,145 books as gifts, had restored and rebound 200 fire-damaged books, had thawed and processed 885 books, and still had 483 volumes in the freezers at Allen’s Blueberries.
Founding Trustee Les Brewer then approached the town about the municipal garage on the corner of Eden Street and Mount Desert Street.2 The town agreed to give that space to the college as its temporary library and it served that function for nearly six years until the new Thorndike Library opened its doors in January 1989. Anna Durand '86 noted that, “The temporary library smelled like fire, and we were frustrated that it had official hours and would not be available after those hours. That said, we made the place our home.” Trustee Betty Thorndike3 continued the process of thawing books—the temporary library would also always be associated with the hum of electric hair dryers.
Dority and his crew of Les Clark, Jim Perkins, Johnny Mitchel, and a team of summer work-study students toiled every day of those six weeks between the fire and the 1983 convocation. With the rubble cleared and a temporary library established, Dority brought in two white trailers that became the primary classrooms for the foreseeable future. The 1983 convocation took place in the low-slung meeting hall that had connected the old building to the carriage house and that had narrowly escaped the fire. The day before the 1983 convocation that started the '83–'84 academic year Dority and his crew slathered the walls with a fresh coat of Kilz primer and the smell of oil hung heavy in the air during the ceremony.
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As traumatic as it must have been to see the building destroyed by flame, there was little sense among the college community that the fire spelled the end of the college. Where trustees, administrators, and accreditors certainly questioned the viability of the college, 20 COA staff, faculty, and alumnx who were asked, Did you fear for the college’s survival and consider finding another institution? in preparation for this article felt differently. All 20 answered No to the question and most of those responses were more emphatic: Not at all. Carpenter summed it up nicely: “COA was not about buildings; it was about ideas, which are much more resistant to flame.”
1 Millard Dority was the third employee at COA. He was hired in September 1970 at age 17 and dedicated the next 52 years of his life to the institution.
2 Today, this building is Kids’ Corner, a community-based childcare center.
3 Just several weeks before the fire, on July 9, the Thorndike Library had been named in honor of husband and wife Robert Amory (1900-1972) and Elizabeth (1908-1992) Thorndike in recognition of their support and contributions to the college.
