On the Island
April 02, 2015
Star Island, an historic island off the Maine and New Hampshire coast, seeks an intern to assist our seasonal Museum Curator in operating and organizing the Vaughn Cottage Museum and Library during the summer of 2015. Duties may include any of the following: Complete projects relating to record keeping and PastPerfect Transfer paper data to… Read more >
History
February 10, 2015
The middle of the 20th century saw a bit of a building boom on Star Island. Buildings went up made of stone, wood, or both. Some were meant to last, some designed as only temporary. All of these buildings still remain and are put to good use. The year of 1953 saw three buildings completed… Read more >
History
February 05, 2015
Sour cream. On Star Island, that’s not just a condiment for the chili lunch. Sour cream is also the name of the paint used in guest rooms and meeting spaces throughout the island’s 32 buildings. The rooms, often painted by volunteers during the spring, have not always been so uniform. The photos below, shared with… Read more >
History
January 29, 2015
On July 2, 1969, a letter was sent to Shoalers seeking their opinion regarding a proposed addition to the Star Island grounds. That addition being a salt water pool. This pool, let’s be clear, never came to be, but it did provide ample opportunity for people in the Star Island community to think about such… Read more >
History
January 22, 2015
Every year we publish a catalog providing a description of the upcoming summer programs on Star Island. With the 2015 program catalog currently at the printers, getting ready for a mid-February arrival in your mailbox, we decided to take a look back in our archives at earlier program catalogs, once called the “Blue Book” for… Read more >
History
January 13, 2015
We recently came across a pile of work request notes that guests filled out in 2008 and, for a reason we’re not too sure of, were kept in an envelope in our office. Granted, not as exciting as the recent opening of the time capsule left by Samuel Adams in 1795, these almost seven-year-old notes… Read more >
History
January 08, 2015
Before the recent holiday break we sent our latest winter newsletter to the printer. This newsletter will be arriving in your mailboxes before the end of the month. As we prepared the masthead of this latest newsletter, which involves figuring out roman numerals once a year, we discovered that we’ve hit a milestone — 40… Read more >
History
October 16, 2014
Maybe your favorite Star Island softball team will never make it to the World Series because, well, that’s for professional baseball. But it’s fall, baseball is on our minds, and we’ve uncovered a little bit of Star Island history in the office today as we are going through some of the Vaughn Cottage archives to… Read more >
History
September 21, 2014
Star Island is the recent recipient of a $1,000 Community Preservation Grant from Historic New England. Click here to learn more about this grant program from Historic New England. Star Island will use this grant money to digitize old films in the Vaughn Cottage collection that depict old Shoalers like Unlce Oscar. The films, which… Read more >
Shoaler Voices
March 19, 2014
by Martha Burnham, Laity Family Weekend I first set foot on Star Island in 1958 when our family decided to take a day trip out of Portsmouth to see where my brother would be attending a church conference later that summer. We went aboard the Kiboko, and I remember the passenger pigeons that were let… Read more >