Lubec, Maine - The Gardner Lake Tragedy

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The Gardner Lake Tragedy

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Miriam Kelley as a young woman

Images from the family of Miriam Kelley Doherty

Research and text by Seth Doherty, Emma Page, Ronald Pesha, Austin Serrato, Robert Wallace, and Stephanie Wright. Seth, Emma, Austin, Robert, and Stephanie became interested in the story related below as fifth grade students under Mrs. Molly Avery at Lubec Elementary School.

Twelve Lubec school children drowned that day, June 19, 1936. A summer day, after school ended for the year, created for picnics and the usually placid waters of Gardner’s Lake, east of Machias in far Washington County.
They gathered from Ridge, Split Hill, McCurdy, and Straight Bay, rural schools all, with teachers and some parents and friends. And Calvin London, a good man giving his time to the kids as in preceding years, with his dinghy and its outboard motor.
Fifteen gleeful youngsters, only three of whom would live.* Including nine-year-old Miriam Kelley, sometimes known as Mimi (pronounced MIH-mee), the last living survivor who tells the story in her own voice.

Voice of Miriam Kelley Doherty 2 min 10 sec

“The boat was gunwales down, and as she turned on her heel, rolled in the water, and sank beneath them.”1 Confusion bore conflicting accounts in the rush to rescue. The Lubec Herald says that “”Miss Stella Burhoe plunged in and succeeded in saving Miriam Kelley” along with Leah Wilcox.* The Portland newspaper published photos of Miriam along with high schooler Wyman Ramsdell who “managed to grasp Miriam Kelley...by the hair just as she was going under. The Kelley girl was eventually carried to shore by Miss Stella M. Burhoe, Ridge School teacher...”

Miriam Kelley & Wyman Ramsdell

Miriam Kelley adds the vital role in survival played by her father in this recorded account.
Coincidentally, the calamity occurred on the 125th anniversary of the state legislature acceptance of the Charter to establish the Town of Lubec; the burials two days later 125 years after the Governor approved the Charter on June 21, 1811.
Washington County remembers the tragedy, the anguish, the helpless torment. An heirloom of horror, handed down even unto the schoolchildren of today.

Transcription of oral recording
“He took a dory out, a dory, to give kids a ride there although thirteen got in the boat and he said there’s too many and some’s got to get out. He took it out to give the kids a ride. It’s something, lot of ’em had never been in a boat. Well my sister got in, and, Ellen, and she got out, she was the thirteenth person to get in, so she got out. and we went out, up to Gardner’s Lake And either the waves came in over the boat or that he went to turn to take it back to shore and it flipped right upside down and everybody was dumped out right in the water. And two, two came up beside the boat, Leah Wilcox. she lived up over the hill from us, and Barbara Tyler saw a brother and sister drown. So she swam up to the boat, she could swim, and grabbed ahold the side of it, and Waldo Raleigh and Macky Knowles swam up and got the two of them, they pr...they must have been high school age, and Wyman Ramsdell gr...I had...I was so far gone that I just wanted to go to sleep and dream of a book that I had read about the sea babies or somethin’ I had read in school. I was nearly dead. ’Course I’d swallowed so much water, and Wyman Ramsdell who lived right there across the field from where I live now, he grabbed me by the hair of the head, and, but I would have drowned him because I was so far gone that I just wanted to go to sleep. I’s nearly dead, in other words, and so, they, my father, then the trucks, were, had sideboards on, in sections like three on each side of the truck, it wasn’t one straight thing. And the men were all down at the spring after water, with drinkin’ water. When they came back my father floated one of those sideboards out and they put me on that and brought me in. And then the Ridge minister Mr. Cassens gave me artificial respiration.”
Audio recorded November, 2008