What’s black with yellow spots and looks like a dinosaur? A spotted salamander, Ambystoma maculatum, of course. And on the first warm rainy night of spring, usually in early April here, you can see them in hundreds crossing the roads of the Island. It’s a wildlife spectacular of sorts.

At six to nine inches long, these gentle animals—actually amphibians, not reptiles— look something like a cigar or pencil when you spot them in your flashlight beam or car headlights. The stretch of Oceanville Road just before you get to the Settlement Quarry is perhaps Deer Isle’s premier spot for salamander watching, but any place where you can see an alder swamp from the highway is a likely spot.

The salamanders don’t make any noise. They don’t bite. Males and females look alike, at least to us. Except for the breeding period in spring when they gather to mate, we rarely see them. They lead their lives of quiet seclusion in the forest litter layer. It was discovered that the biomass of our most common salamander, the red-backed salamander, was equal to the biomass of all songbirds in a New Hampshire forest study. We may be unaware of salamanders in our midst, but you can be certain they play a significant part in the forest ecosystem.

The term vernal pool has been given increasing media attention lately. What’s a vernal pool? Strictly speaking, it’s a body of fresh water large enough for salamanders to lay their eggs in, but small enough that the pool will dry up before summer’s end. That means would-be predators like bullfrog tadpoles, which take two years to mature, cannot colonize the pool. Here on the Island we seem to have avoided bullfrog invasions, so any small pool of water will do for our salamanders.

After dark, take your flashlight and peer into such a pool and you will likely see it writhing with salamanders on their Big Night. Such a salamander Rave is called a congress. Next morning you will see globs of round eggs the size of bb shot attached to twigs in the water. Over the next weeks, tiny gilled salamanders will develop in the eggs. By summer’s end, they will have hatched, grown mature enough to have those feathery external gills reabsorbed, and off they go into the forest to burrow down into the rotting leaf layer.

You might even be fortunate enough to have a vernal pool in your own backyard. Some of our preserves have no vernal pools. Where IHT has been given adjoining conservation easements that do have such pools, you can be fairly confident that unseen, unheard, beneath your feet, the surrounding forest is well-supplied with salamanders.

By Bill Haviland, IHT Trustee.

One of the Island Heritage Trust’s more popular preserves is the Reach Beach at Gray’s Cove. But Gray’s Cove wasn’t always called that; originally it was Campbell’s Cove and the land to the south, now Oak Point, was called Campbell’s Neck.

The original name comes from John Campbell (1730-1820), a native of Arglyshire in Scotland who came to Deer Isle around 1780 and settled on the Reach. He was not the first to do so for as early as 1753, just before the start of the last of the French and Indian wars, William Greenlaw (also from Scotland) with his family moved onto 500 acres that stretched between what later would be called Torrey’s Mill Pond and Campbell’s Neck. Because the Greenlaws had Tory sympathies during the American Revolution, they found it expedient to flee to New Brunswick in Canada after the war. Not until some years later did some of William’s descendants return to the island, and then to Oceanville.

John Campbell acquired some of the Greenlaw lands and then some; large for the time, his holdings took in Campbell Island (on which IHT has an easement) all of what is now called Oak Point, and the lands north to beyond the junction of the Fish Creek and Reach roads, and west nearly to the junction of Fish Creek and Greenlaw District Roads.

In all, this amounted to something on the order of 460 acres. His homestead stood until nearly the end of the 20th Century at Poplar Point at the end of a private road now called Alberta Lane. By then, it had fallen into such disrepair that the Deer demolished it and the Deer Isle Fire Department used it as a means of practicing firefighting.

Campbells continued to occupy the old homestead well into the twentieth century, the last being John’s great grandson, Arthur. He is listed in the 1910 census as a farmer and lobster buyer. Arthur’s mother, Diana Campbell Hardy Campbell, was herself a granddaughter of John Campbell’s daughter Sarah. Diana’s husband, quite a bit older than she, was the son of her father’s mother’s brother. After Arthur’s death in 1951, what was left of the Campbell holdings, including the old homestead, passed to the Hutchinson descendants of Diana’s daughter May, who was fathered by her mother’s second husband, George Hatch (Hutchinson was May’s married name). Thus, the place continued to be occupied by John Campbell’s descendants until recently.

John Campbell’s daughter Sarah married Peter Hardy, Jr. (1770-1863), a master mariner who, over the course of his life, served several times as selectman and two terms in the state legislature. Although he already had a 100-acre farm – the fourth one north of Campbell’s – John deeded to his new son-in-law a 100-acre parcel running from the northwest shore of Campbell’s Cove westward along the north shore of Fish Creek. Peter and Sarah never lived there, however. Instead, they traded this parcel for the farm of Benjamin Weed (on the south end of Little Deer ) from Weed’s Point (east to the end of Weed Point Rd.). Peter and Sarah’s homestead stood where the McWilliams house now stands.

Eventually, Josiah Gray of Brooksville, who had married a daughter of Benjamin Weed, acquired the farm that his father-in-law had gotten from Peter Hardy. Together, the Grays raised thirteen children, one of whom married Silas Hardy Gray. He was the

son of Isaac Gray who settled on Little Deer Isle some time after 1800. Among Isaac’s neighbors were Peter Hardy and Jonathan Hardy, whose farm was where the bridge now lands on Little Deer. Both Jonathan and Peter had sons named Silas so obviously a close time must have existed between these Hardys and Grays.

After Josiah’s death, Silas lived in his father-in-law’s homestead until his own death in 1882. The house still stands not far from the cove; it is the first one on right-hand side of Oak Point Rd., south of the intersection of Fish Creek Rd. Either Silas’ wife’s mother and father are said to be buried behind the house. With Josiah and then Silas in residence there, the cove lost the original name and became Gray’s Cove as we know it today.

Before its acquisition by Nathaniel Scott in 1784, what we now know as Scott’s Landing belonged to Major William Eaton, one of Deer Isle’s earliest English-speaking settlers.

Born in Massachusetts, he worked his way down east and in 1742, we find him in York, Maine where he married Meribah Wardwell. Her father was an Abenaki Indian, her mother a colonist who, near the start of Dummer’s War (sometimes called Lovewell’s War (1721-1726) was carried off into captivity by the Indians. When later repatriated, she had little Meribah in tow.

Not until 1762 did the Eatons settle on Deer Isle, building their house a short distance south of where the Inn at Ferry Landing now stands. Its cellar could still be seen as recently as 1940. Like the other early settlers, Major Eaton came here to farm raising both crops and livestock. And therein lies our story, as told by Verna Powers Billings in a brief manuscript in the archives of the Deer Isle-Stonington Historical Society. Vera was a descendant of William Eaton of Dr. Moody Powers who was a daughter of William Eaton, II. Vera’s story was recorded in 1947. It goes like this:

My grandmother Lucinda (Gray) Powers told my mother about the Indians who were living at the northern end of the island near Little Deer Isle bar. Major William Eaton had a bull that the Indians were much afraid of. They called it “All One Devil” and because of it moved away from that part of the island.”

Short though it is, the story is important for establishing that Indians were still living here when early “white” settlers arrived. Evidently, they camped somewhere on Scott’s Point (where the causeway now begins), a locality that we know was important to them for at least 3,000 years.

This importance derived from the abundance of marine resources nearby as well as for the proximity of a major transportation artery that passed between Deer Isle and Little Deer. This was the Deer Isle canoe route – still in use well into the 20th century – that ran from the Bagaduce through the middle of Deer Isle to the islands to the south.