A veritable mansion has been constructed atop Battery Craven, which once housed a pair of six-inch guns with a 15-mile range. Here, a former army barracks has been resurrected as a summer cottage. As Kim MacIsaac’s golf cart bumps along the island’s back roads, she points out the overgrown remains of searchlights and watchtowers, generator buildings and gun emplacements. Nine hundred of those soldiers were based on Peaks, outnumbering the 700 islanders. By 1944, the US Army Coast Artillery Corps had 1,753 enlisted men and 130 officers assigned to defend Portland Harbor and Casco Bay. In 1942, military reservations were installed on Cape Elizabeth, Peaks Island, Jewell Island, Long Island, Bailey Island, and Chebeague Island. Many of the forts along the shore, from Fort Williams in Cape Elizabeth and Fort Preble in South Portland to Fort Levett on Cushing Island and Fort McKinley on Great Diamond Island, date to the late 19th and early 20th century, but they were pressed into service during World War II, often updated with new artillery and antiaircraft guns. One of the most prominent, the truncated octagon of Fort Gorges on Hog Island Ledge in the middle of the harbor, dates to the Civil War, but it was not completed before that war ended. The coast and islands of Casco Bay are encrusted with the remains of old forts meant to defend Portland Harbor and the bay against all manner of enemies, foreign and domestic. Some have become eyesores, some have been renovated for new uses, and some are treated as local landmarks, but all are present and physical reminders of a history that should not be forgotten. World War II left a heavy footprint on some of the islands in the form of abandoned buildings, bunkers, and bases. There were 58 military structures on Peaks alone, ranging from gun emplacements and watchtowers to range-finding bunkers, fire-control posts, barracks, and searchlight bases. Seven decades later, it would be hard for most people to imagine that during World War II, Peaks Island-and, indeed, all of Casco Bay-was a hotbed of military activity. My aunt told me she was making spaghetti sauce once when the guns were fired and it splattered all over the kitchen.” “You could feel the vibration all over the island. “They were test-fired with about three-quarters of a charge,” says MacIsaac. When they were fired, however, everyone on the island knew it. The great guns at Battery Steele, with a range of 26 miles, were meant to protect the Maine coast from Popham near Bath to Kennebunkport, but they were never fired in anger. “This is where we hung out, in the forts.” “This was our playground growing up,” says MacIsaac, steering a golf cart into the cavernous battery. Kimberly MacIsaac, a Peaks Island native and former director of the island’s Fifth Maine Regiment Museum, conducts guided tours of the island’s military structures. Standing forlorn and neglected in a landscape of cattail and bittersweet populated mostly by raccoons and beavers, the abandoned artillery fortification, 18-inch-thick steel-reinforced concrete with a 300-foot-long tunnel down the middle, has the look and feel of an ancient ruin. On the face of the fortification someone has painted the words “American Heartache” in garish blue and pink letters. The maw of the old gun emplacement stands dark, dank, and toothless, its 16-inch battleship guns removed a lifetime ago. The great concrete bulwark of Battery Steele on Peaks Island is covered in earth and weeds and graffiti.
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