Information about Yarmouth, Maine:
Yarmouth is a charming town 12 miles north of Portland, the state’s largest city, and located directly between Portland and Freeport, home to L.L. Bean. It is conveniently situated off of Route 1 and Route 95, with access to the Maine Turnpike only a few miles away, and only a 20 minute drive to the Portland international Jetport. It borders the ocean and Royal River, and is widely recognized as one of the most desirable small towns in the state of Maine in which to live and work. The town is known for its Yarmouth Village, one of the few real Village settings in southern Maine, its people, and it's renowned school system. Newsweek's most recent ranking has placed Yarmouth High School as number 1 in Maine, number 5 in New England, and in the top 1% of all high schools in the nation. It's commitment to high education standards has come to define the town.
Year round recreation in Yarmouth takes advantage of its unique geography. The Royal River and Casco Bay provide a popular setting for lobstermen as well as sailing and motorboat enthusiasts. The River includes secluded moorings for boaters together with numerous private and neighborhood docks along the coast. The River is ideal for canoeing and fishing, and the Royal River Park is one of the best local parks in the area. Within an hours drive, you can find several downhill skiing areas, and cross country skiing is enjoyed at Pratts Park nearby.
Yarmouth has proved to be an excellent place of business for medium and small firms who value the convenient location and quiet Village setting of the town. Often using historic buildings and even electric power from the river, both service related businesses and light industry have been successfully established in town. And each year, on the third weekend of July, visitors from all over New England come to partake in the infamous Yarmouth Clam Festival. The festival draws near 100,000 people.
Few communities are as welcoming as the wonderful town of Yarmouth, Maine.
BusinessWeek Names Yarmouth One of 50 Top Communities in the Country
Business Week is getting into the ranking business as well. Yarmouth was chosen as the best community in Maine in which to live. They recently chose one community in each state by what they call “the best affordable suburbs.” The ranking is based upon factors such as home prices, population, growth, and crime rate. BusinessWeek indicates these communities were chosen because they offer the lowest crime rates, finest schools and the best quality of life for the dollar. Yarmouth joins the following New England communities: Sharon, Massachusetts; Durham, New Hampshire; Hamden, Connecticut; West Greenwich, Rhode Island; and Essex Junction, Vermont.
Yarmouth High School - Named Silver School By U.S. News and World Report
U.S. News and World Report recently ranked the top high schools in the country. The magazine analyzed 18,780 high schools in 40 states (10 states apparently had insufficient data to analyze) and used a value added formula to rank the top 1600 high schools into Gold, Silver, or Bronze categories. The magazine indicates “a great high school must serve all of its students well, not just those bound for college and that it must be able to produce measurable academic outcomes that show the school is successfully educating its student body across a range of performance indications.”
Yarmouth was ranked among the top 500 in the country.
Information about Brooksville, Maine:
Brooksville, Maine is surrounded by some of the best scenery in the world, and is renowned for its beauty and natural setting. The following provides samples of some places that you can visit while in this area:
Acadia National Park and Mt. Desert Island:
An hour away you can visit Acadia National Park, known for its beautiful views, its rocky shoreline, its rugged mountains, and it picturesque lakes. Here you can rent bikes to ride on the Acadia carriage trails, enjoy easy to difficult hikes [including the ‘Precipice,’ which includes a portion that goes up a sheer cliff], or drive or walk up Cadillac Mountain, the first place in America to receive sunlight. Bar Harbor is near the park and has bustling summertime crowds, plenty of restaurants and shops, and excursion companies that will take you on whale-watching trips. You can also take a high speed ferry to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.
Blue Hill: This quaint New England town is about 15 minutes away and features art galleries, clothing stores, authentic country stores and casual and fine dining. Blue Hill is the home to the Blue Hill fair every Labor Day weekend, and is also the home to Blue Hill, the very large hill in town that offers a good half day hike to a fire tower on top. There are various musical events and other goings-on in town throughout the summer.
Brooksville: The Hostess House and Retreat are located in the town of Brooksville and about five minutes from the town’s ‘downtown’ of South Brooksville, also called Buck’ Harbor. Buck’s Harbor was the basis for Robert McCloskey’s award winning children’s books, “One Morning in Maine” and “Time of Wonder.” The Harbor – arguably the most picturesque in all of Maine – is a stopping point for Maine’s Windjammer fleet. On select Mondays through the summer, a local steel band plays calypso dance music in front of the general store to hundreds of visitors from the ships and the region. On Thursday evenings there is a weekly square dance at the Bucks Harbor Yacht Club each week that is open to the public. You might also stop at the Good Life Center, which is open to the public and was the homestead of the late Helen and Scott nearing, who are sometimes credited with being founders of the back-to-the-land movement after they wrote “living the Good Life” and settled here in the 1950’s. This is also the area that James Wyeth withdrew towards to do many of his paintings.
Castine: This small coastal village is about 30 minutes away by car, with a picturesque harbor and a lazy downtown where you can meander from gift store to antique shop to a restaurant for lunch or dinner on a deck on the water. Here you will find the Maine Maritime Academy, the academy’s training ship the State of Maine [which you can take wonderful tours of each day], the Castine Golf Club, Leila Day Antiques stores, The Wilson Museum, and John Perkins House, a small complex of buildings for summer visitors to explore. It is a great little town with excellent restaurants and charm.
Deer Isle – Stonington: The island of Deer Isle – only a 5 minute drive from the Hostess House and Retreat and the home to the towns of Deer Isle and Stonington – is known for its spruce-crowned pink granite ledges quiet woods and open fields, vistas of islands and sparkling waters that are Down East at its most beautiful. The island brings together artists, photographers, writers and musicians with lobstermen, fishermen, and farmers who make a living off the ocean and the land just as their fathers, grandfathers and those before them did. For more than a century artists of all types have come to Deer Isle, attracted by the scenery and the modest way of life. Haystack Mountain School of Crafts has brought many craftspeople to the area, a number of whom have chosen to live here permanently. Across the island, in Stonington, you’ll find more than 20 art and craft galleries, some of which display work produced by some of the most accomplished artists of the century. More than a dozen antique, gift and book shops invite leisurely browsing. In Stonington, you will find a large fleet of lobster boats and a smaller fleet of ground fishing boats. Maine’s world-famous granite was quarried on the islands off Stonington. Excursion companies offer cruises around the islands surrounding Deer Isle as well as trips to Vinalhaven, North Haven, and Isle au Haut. Nearby is the island Country Club, a quirky nine-hole golf course.
This is a place that you will never forget.
