A Story of My Grandfather's Life, a '68 Chevy and Me

Downeast Maine is fairly rural today. Imagine trying to eke out a living 240 years ago in an area where there were no roads, no towns, no stores, no hospitals, no amenities whatsoever. This is the world into which my family settled into during the post-Revolutionary War era. Maine was simply a province of Massachusetts until 1820, and even then, the area of Hancock County, east of the Penobscot River, was lightly settled.

By the time my grandfather Ellis Hollis Saunders was born in 1895, civ...