Founders & Followers – Gouldsboro Historical Society

A New History of Early Gouldsboro

Founders and Followers: Movers and Shakers Who Built Gouldsboro on the Eastern Frontier, by long-time GHS speaker, the Reverend Charles A. Joy, is the story of newly founded Gouldsboro, a frontier town brought to life through vivid portraits of the people who created a new settlement on the Peninsula. This dramatic tale is peopled with flesh and blood actors whose plans, ambitions, and struggles for survival made it possible for this infant town to live through two wars and near-starvation to reach ultimate success as a vital part of the new state of Maine.

Published by the Gouldsboro Historical Society and released in April 2020, this 160-page illustrated and indexed history of our town’s founding is now available from Amazon in either paperback ($20) or Kindle edition ($9.99).

Purchase on Amazon

What our readers are saying:

Founders and Followers paints a vivid picture of the frontier town and features colorful portraits of the people who established a new settlement on the Schoodic Peninsula. …[Charles Joy’s] carefully researched details of life flow and bring to life local folks in the 18th and 19th centuries….In his writing, Joy also shows sensitivity for his subjects’ humanity and powerfully conveys how they and their history evolved.

Letitia Baldwin Ellsworth American, May 14, 2020

Congrats, hats off, three cheers and all that, to many volunteers at the Gouldsboro Historical Society who spent countless hours required to publish a new history of Gouldsboro, Founders and Followers, a series of historical lectures over recent years by the Rev. Charles Austin Joy. Each is exhaustingly researched and well-written, as is the included essay by Allen Workman…. Anyone interested in the historical, political and commercial development of Gulf of Maine communities from Bangor to Calais will find the book intriguing. Best $20 I spent all month.

Tom WalshGouldsboro science writer, journalist, and novelist

This collection of narrative episodes is the kind of resource that any local historical society would envy…. Each of the ten lectures is thoroughly researched and notes the connections between local, national, and international events. A helpful list of sources will supply the Gouldsboro Historical Society and future historians with the means to expand the work that Reverend Joy has started.

Tim Garrity MDI Historical Society Historian
Editor of Chebacco history journal

There is some great material here. I really appreciate the work of the Gouldsboro Historical Society. Local history is crucial to meaningful engagement with the past. It is terrific to have a volume like this, and, as was noted, it’s been too long since [the last history of Gouldsboro].” Professor Liam Riordan, U Maine Orono — Early American historian

Professor Liam RiordanUniversity of Maine, Orono
Early American historian