Jasper Stahl’s Emotional History of Waldoboro

A lecture by Michael Amico, on the occasion of opening day of Emotional Currents: Between Survival and Freedom at Open House of History in Waldoboro, June 19, 2026

A few weeks ago there was an opening day celebration for the Waldoboro Inn, two buildings down from here on the other side of the theater. They had a full day of programming, and around six o’clock, a queer line-dancing class taking place on the lawn. It was packed with people.

As I walked around the building and looked up the street toward where AD Gray high school once stood, I found myself imagining another building that stood there before the school but is now also gone: the Old North Church, the Congregational Church of Waldoboro. I won't go into much historical detail tonight, but broadly speaking it was the church of the town's elite—the wealthy Federalist families. They opposed many forms of public recreation, including dancing. They controlled much of the town's political and economic life and played a major role in shaping Waldoboro during its nineteenth-century economic rise.

There was also a great deal of conflict within that church. Religious disagreements, factional disputes, and personal animosities all played out there. As I stood looking at the empty site, I found myself wondering how a building that once seemed to define the entire community could disappear so completely and be replaced at this present moment in Waldoboro’s history by a queer line-dancing party. It is a reminder of how quickly things can vanish.

Yet I also found myself wondering whether there might be a deeper connection between the people who once worshipped there and the people dancing on that lawn today. The people who ran that church might seem very different from those gathered at the Waldoboro Inn, but perhaps they shared something fundamental: a desire to belong and yet a resistance to being told how to live.

In many ways, the question of that inheritance lies at the heart of the Open House of History. What are the deep commonalities between people whom we normally imagine as having nothing in common or even being opposed to one another?

Much public history today, whether on YouTube, social media, or even among professional historians, tends to fall into a familiar pattern. They argue that there are the good guys, representing reason, rationality, and enlightenment, and there are the bad guys, supposedly ruining democracy. I think that division is far too easy.

The oppositions between good and bad people are also not particularly useful. There is no such thing as a purely good person or a purely bad person. You might reply that the real distinction is between reason on one side and emotion on the other. But that’s not quite right either. Every side is motivated by feeling. Every side, like every action in life, is driven, at a foundational level, by how people feel.

History reveals that, regardless of political, religious, or social identity, all people are ultimately after the same thing. They’re trying to survive and be free. At root, those pursuits are emotional. We may become angry, defensive, or destructive in our efforts to survive and secure freedom, but we are all pursuing those same basic things.

This means that explanations rooted solely in economics, politics, religion, or some other ideology never fully answer the question of why people behave as they do, or why things are the way they are. For me, the more interesting and important question is: How do people differently express their feelings in response to similar circumstances?

That is related to what I have been calling the deeper emotional currents of this town and this region—currents that continue to shape how we live, relate to one another, judge one another, withdraw from one another, and act in the world.

Of course, emotional currents exist everywhere. There is nothing uniquely special about Waldoboro in that regard. But they always take shape through the conditions of a particular place. They are formed by the specific history of a community and continue to influence who people become in that place.

What I am trying to do through Open House of History and through all of our activities this summer is model a way of doing history that brings those emotional currents into view and opens up a common emotional space for us all to inhabit together. Over the next two months, you'll hear contemporary voices interwoven with historical voices in an effort to reveal those emotional currents and reconnect us with our own emotional lives in this place.

To that end, a group of residents from Waldoboro and neighboring towns has spent the past year meeting monthly to read Jasper Stahl's two-volume history of Waldoboro. It has been the perfect introduction to this project because Stahl was also trying to understand how a place can change dramatically on the surface while still somehow feel the same. He believed he could recognize traces of earlier generations in the people around him. He sensed a continuity of spirit.

Throughout his books, Stahl often rooted that spirit in ethnicity. He tied certain qualities to Germans, others to English settlers, and used terms such as feudal, teutonic, puritanical, reformist, and even savage, to describe indigenous people but also the poorer Germans.

Yet Stahl's deeper concern was not ethnicity itself. He believed that art, education, and history, completed with critical skill and acumen, could elevate and civilize a community. For him, history was a form of education capable of helping people understand themselves and their place in a larger story. His goal in the 1950s was to move residents beyond living memory and nostalgic stories about Waldoboro's economic heyday. He wanted to expand historical consciousness outward and backward so people could understand how the past continued to shape the present in ways they might not be able to see but could feel.

He also believed that Waldoboro's story was inseparable from larger stories. Economically, it played a significant role. At one point, Waldoboro ranked second only to Boston in the United States in total shipping tonnage. But for Stahl, its importance was not simply economic. The local is always national, global, and universal. Like every town, Waldoboro contained a world.

The question for him was what revealed the complete world of the town? Where did its life come from? What feeling animated the community? What inspirited it? What temperaments and emotions began and persisted even after periods of prosperity had passed?

Later in the books, describing Waldoboro during and after the Great Depression, Stahl writes that hardship acted as a form of "shock treatment." Struggle for survival forced people to become “more courageous, more resolute, more willing to gamble for a good future, more sensitive to the values inherent in group action.” He saw in that period echoes of the experiences of the earliest settlers, whose struggles for survival had shaped a distinctive temperament. But the leading citizens of the twentieth century didn’t let that spirit, also animating Waldoboro’s economic heights, “become enfeebled, blind, and helpless when the tide of the national economy set in against it” as it did in the late nineteenth century. Then, after the Great Day, men were overwhelmed by emotional currents. The twentieth-century men were more “acutely conscious of the ebb and flow of the economic tides, able to calculate the character of these forces making for and against a good destiny, and bent on shaping such forces in the creating of a stable and strong economy.” Yet none of the businesses that defined Waldoboro then exist today.

Nonetheless, what interested Stahl is what interests us: how people respond emotionally to changing conditions. Those responses, he believed, determined the fate of communities. Although Stahl often attributed these qualities to the blood linage of Germans or English settlers, a close reading suggests something broader. He is really describing qualities that emerge under the pressures of survival: industry, temperance, resilience, contentment with simple things, and commitment to collective effort. These become part of the emotional fabric of a place. While all of New England can evince a ‘do-it-yourself’ spirit that doesn’t like to ask for help, that kind of spirit has come to have a particular expression and pull in the emotional currents of this particular place.

All of these themes will appear throughout the summer in lectures, discussions, exhibits, and events. At their core, however, we are simply interested in how all people wrestle with the same enduring questions of love, survival, belonging, authority, dignity, and freedom.

Our reading and discussion of this Stahl’s history has tried to model a way of seeing people in the past and present along these lines. Stahl himself often wrote dramatically as a way of feeling people out, calling them bad and good in the same breath it feels, almost taking on their characters like an actor, staging the town as a melodrama. Through his large swings of emotional judgement about men, and it’s mostly men he’s talking about, he is wrestling with what it is that makes a good man, the leaders here who helped the town and other people grow and reach their full potential.

Another way into those questions is through Jasper Stahl himself. As a young man, on August 14, 1916, after walking down Friendship Road he wrote:
“I could wish to fix this night forever in my memory. A gentle, northwest wind, an autumn coolness, a full moon! Every vestige of murk and vapour was out of the atmosphere. The moon its startling brightness on the earth. Everywhere light and shadow stood — a world in which night and day sought mastery. The stars were near, white clouds seemed to pass behind them, far deeper in the heavens.

As I passed the old Cole house on my way from church, it stood as a patriarch of old and what an atmosphere around its aged walls! Itself an epitome of New England life, births, child voices, marriages, deaths, and a mass of daily joys and woes of humble people.

Such nights fill me with a sadness I do not understand. I stand speechless and thoughtless in the presence of such beauty. I long to behold it forever. I grieve that it must pass and that with it will pass forever those personalities and scenes which in my life have given to such a night its background of meaning.”

The Cole house is the blue house on the hill across from the Hoffses House on Friendship Rd. He is writing fourteen years before he would buy the Cole house in 1931 and it would become, even later, the Stahl Farm. In Stahl’s description, nature, childhood, and the house as a figure of patriarchal memory all converge. The house becomes a certain kind of man, with its own feeling of quiet dignity and sense of refinement. It is a model of cultivated stability that contains not just his childhood but an entire cycle of life.. And overall, it holds a warm motherly glow.

His description embodies not only his past but also the future he hopes to create for himself. It is full of nostalgia, longing, self-fashioning, the question of who he will become and who else will be part of his world (and how intimate they will be), what kind of life (and lineage of men) he will join, and what role his heightened manner and intellectual finesse will play in it all. At this moment, he is returning from his studies abroad, in the high culture of European institutions.

When Stahl eventually purchases and restores the house with recreations of early American furniture and finishes, and a good amount of money, decades of time, and lots of effort, what he is doing is building the world he longed for, a melodramatically refined mix of early-settler life and artful sensibility. He finally moves in in 1947, and it is there where he will write to completion and publish his history of Waldoboro.

In many ways, his history of Waldoboro was a similar project. It, too, is an effort to build the world he longed for—a search for the feelings of the earliest people here and how those feelings shaped his sense of community.

I found in his papers in Orono, at the University of Maine archives, notes for a short lecture on the life of his house over time. He uses that life to say something about the modern mid-twentieth-century world he saw pass before him. Yes, at the time, the leading men of the town were helping bring in new business. The Sylvania lightbulb factory would be built right across the street from his house soon after he moved in. But it was the emotional currents of speed, myopia, and forgetfulness, embodied in the cars passing by at the bottom of the hill, that continued to rankle him.

This brings me to the question of conservatism, let’s say the conservatism of the Federalist puritanical elites of Old North Church who disapproved of dancing. Stahl was, in his way, conservative, but not in the simplistic sense of reactionary politics or fundamentalism. His conservatism was rooted in the belief that the materials of a good, kind life, all that is needed for social cohesion and happiness, including the pursuit of knowledge, as Jefferson understood it in the Declaration of Independence, already exists around us, in family and friendship, education and religion, practical skills and trades, stories and traditions. They must simply be found again. And that is the job of the historian.

How exactly the preservation of a good life is what allowed people to remain open to others, to new ideas, new feelings, new possibilities—that was the question of history.

It is very much an American history. That tension—between feeling settled and remaining open—is a deeply American question. How do communities remain rooted without becoming closed and hierarchical? How do they remain free even when just trying to survive on the frontier of an ever new world? How do they preserve what matters while moving with the emotion currents of life?

To what degree was this achieved in the “hybrid strain of our common American culture” that Stahl felt was embodied by the people of Waldoboro? Over time, I believe Stahl became more and more aware, and I have as well, how a community can cohere more strongly by opening itself up within the conservative terrain of life, and one with qualities specific to Waldoboro.

Geography and historical circumstance play a role. Waldoboro has long occupied a protected position, tucked slightly away, and sheltered from the open ocean and, in the earliest years of settlement, from the further front lines of the garrison at Thomaston. I wonder how that physical sense of distance has shaped the emotional life of the community over time. We might think about how Waldoboro still wants to exist slightly off the map, sheltered and enclosed. Such conditions can produce caution, suspicion, and narrowness. But they can also foster a resistance to external control, to being told what to do, believe, or feel. They can cultivate a firm, conservative grasp of oneself.

Which returns me to the Old North Church and the queer line dancers. Beneath their obvious differences may lie a shared emotional inheritance—the resistance to outside authority and a desire to live freely.

Stahl called the abandoned Old North Church a “ghost church,” left to decay through internal squabbling and animosities. The outside authority people resisted here was sometimes part of the community itself, and included friends and family members. When people in those situations try to speak and be heard, it is out of loneliness as much as spite, out of a desire to belong but on one’s own terms. As I stood there looking at the empty church lot and hearing the queer line dancing, what I felt was the spirit of the conservative elites of the church alive in the dancers—a complex play of emotional currents. The generative conservation of community continues.

The spirit of community does not belong to any one generation, political identity, social group, or community leader. It exceeds all of those categories. People who move here can feel it just as strongly as people whose families have been here for generations. That is the proof of its existence and power. At our final reading group discussion yesterday, someone who grew up here and someone who had recently moved here described their connection to the community in almost identical terms.

The practice of history, reading, conversation, and community engagement is ultimately a way of reopening what has come before us and rediscovering that common ground. It is a way of recognizing that culture and the highest attainments do not have to be imported from elsewhere. The seeds of it exist within every place and within every self.

Stahl himself says that history contains feelings and everyday thoughts that matter every bit as much as events and famous people. It seems to me that his deepest project, in life and in writing, was how to traverse the terrain where thought and feeling meet—where intellect and desire, not least his own, are inseparable in the growth of community. But how fully did he allow himself to traverse that terrain? People who knew Stahl called him “eccentric,” said that he held himself above others intellectually and kept to himself.

He did not quite possess the framework we have today for thinking explicitly about emotions as at the center of life and history, but he was already moving in that direction. Everything I am doing at Open House of History is moving that way, too. And because we live in a moment where lots of people, from management consulting to childhood education, like to talk about emotion, I need to be clear that when I talk about emotions, it is not for better emotional regulation, emotional management, or self-help techniques. It is to approach what happens in a great work of art, particularly the theater: a heightened space where people encounter one another more fully, where hidden feelings become visible, and where we gain access to dimensions of experience that ordinary life often conceals. It is a state akin to my feeling of the interpenetrating spirits of Old North Church and the queer line dancers.

The challenge is how to continue to create and share in those spaces—through the exhibits in this building this summer, and then, as always, person to person in our conversations here, at our public events, and in our everyday interactions. Spaces where the instinct to defend can coexist with the capacity to meet, and we can feel one another more deeply.

Stahl titled his chapter on the American Revolution “Family Differences.” The relationships always come before the politics. That, ultimately, is what Open House of History is here for. So bring on the melodrama!