RECORD KEEPERS Rather than in tomes, Portland’s history is preserved in the minds of a select few dedicated souls BY SARA DONNELLY

One afternoon in the summer of 2000, Robert Quatrano, the caretaker of the Congress Street house that Neal Dow called home more than a century ago, decided to try on Dow’s Civil War hat. The hat is an especially prized artifact in a house filled with historically significant, irreplaceable items. There’s the portrait of the aged Dow in the parlor, looking wise and Quaker and straight-edge. There are the hundreds of books in the library and back study, on topics which the former mayor of Portland had held dear — the history of early America, sonnets by Wordsworth and other great American poets, treatises on the benefits of Prohibition. There is even a death mask, circa 1897, mustard-colored and smooth, in a simple white cardboard box tucked inside a library cabinet. The death mask is almost as special to Quatrano as the brigadier general’s hat. When the caretaker looks at the death mask, he feels almost like he’s looking at the man himself — a man he believes he was destined to learn from.

Quatrano is like hundreds of other Portlanders who spend their free time in the past, pouring over events and names which are part of the city’s history. These history hobbyists are individual enthusiasts like Quatrano, part-time historians, academics, and volunteer docents, and they all share a common desire to know where they, and the city, came from.

Though Portland as a community has a long and dramatic history starting in 1632, when British fur traders settled the mainland, the city does not have an up-to-date, comprehensive book of history. The last person to attempt to tell Portland’s story was historian William Willis, who published The History of Portland from its First Settlement in 1833. The book was re-released, virtually unchanged, in 1970. The history of the city has since been preserved only in an occasional, focused anthology like 2004’s They Changed Their Sky (on the Maine Irish) or the upcoming Visible Black History (on blacks in Maine), in a handful of local magazine articles, and in the memories of Portland’s history fanatics.

"It’s in chunks," says Bill Barry, a local historian and a librarian at the Maine Historical Society. "It’s in historic houses, it’s in different books, it’s in articles, but it hasn’t been brought together."

Most of Portland’s amateur and semi-pro historians gather, appropriately, in the Maine Historical Society’s library on Congress Street. If you wanted to write that comprehensive history of Portland, this is the place you’d hang out. Since many of Portland’s historians hold full-time jobs, Saturdays here at the library tend to be the busiest. On any given Saturday, about a dozen Historical Society members (there are roughly 2500 all total) and visitors spend their daylight hours in this old brick building, sitting at communal tables and sifting silently through piles of pictures, letters, and manuscripts related to their individual projects. The stillness of the place betrays the seriousness of the work — most of the people here are experts in aspects of the city’s history and therefore curate the true stories of people who are long gone. That responsibility is considered sacred, even if it’s not exactly lucrative.

Gary Libby, a Portland lawyer, has labored over 1000 Saturday hours researching Chinese immigrant families from the last two centuries; George Hillman, a retiree, is researching black history; Stephanie Philbrick, an academic, is researching Maine’s failed 1984 Equal-Rights Amendment. All projects here have a Maine link, if not a Portland one. Occasionally, historians here sell an article to a magazine or trade journal. Some have even published books. But, mostly, they take the time because they love the work.

If the narratives churning in the head of each of these amateur historians were compiled, the city would have its history book.

But no one’s taken that job on yet. Matt Barker, the youngest in what MHS librarian Barry says is a long line of elite Portland historians "stretching back to eternity," has considered it, but first he has to finish his latest book on Portland’s Irish. Barker, 31, joined the society when he was 11 years old. He learned how to study Portland’s history from Barry, who learned from Earl Shettleworth and the late local history master Frank O’Brien of O’Brien’s bookstore on High Street. During O’Brien’s lifetime, Barry says he and other Portland historians would gather at the bookstore to quiz him about local history.

"[O’Brien] had this incredible, bottomless reservoir of information," says Barry. "He didn’t go to college, but he was interested in history. He always read."

Barker’s specialty, like O’Brien’s, is local Irish history. And, like O’Brien, he did not complete college and is largely self-taught. Barry calls Barker a history "romantic" with some of the best instincts around.

"Matt’s a divvy," he says. "He can look at a newspaper and find more information in there than anyone else. There are just a handful of people who are very good at it, who just love what they are doing."