In 1983 Ben Conley Worcester, Jr. of Southwest Harbor gave a lot of land in his Salem Towne Woods development off the Long Pond Road to be raffled off to benefit Harbor House and the Southwest Harbor Public Library. The proceeds from the raffle would be split between the two institutions.
At the time Warren R. Worcester, library trustee, and Brian Worcester, his nephew, who was a Harbor House trustee, "talked about the raffle...and decided it best to try to sell 500 tickets at $20 each." On January 17, 1983 at its annual meeting the library trustees voted to participate in the raffle in conjunction with Harbor House.
People who live in small towns often have multiple connections to one another and it would be erroneous to assume that, because of the shared surname of Worcester, the raffle was a family scheme to benefit two of Southwest Harbor's most cherished institutions.
Ben Conley Worcester was a distant cousin of Warren and Brian Worcester and the Worcester families had come at different times to Mount Desert Island from down Washington County. Their primary connection in Southwest Harbor would have been the fact that the Ben Conley Worcester family could have bought its groceries at Sawyer's Market, owned by Brian Worcester's family and the Brian Worcester family sent its garbage to the [Conley] Worcester Associates town dump.
Further, the writer of this piece, former Southwest Harbor librarian, Meredith Hutchins, (ret. 1981) grew up in the Clark Point Road house formerly owned by the Ben Conley Worcester family.
"Landing The Prize… Scott Worcester of Southwest Harbor receives congratulations from Sallie Hinckley of the Southwest Harbor [Public] Library after winning an acre of land in the recent fund-raising effort of the library and the Harbor House. The 20-year old business administration student at University of Maine at Orono says he plans to hang onto the land, which was donated by Conley Worcester of Southwest Harbor. Margo Stanley, at left, holds the copy of Thornton’s History of Somesville and Southwest Harbor that was won by the Southwest Harbor branch of the First National Bank of Bar Harbor. The second prize, a free, round-trip on Bar Harbor Airlines was won by Vaughn Marshall of Machias. The raffle raised $9,400 to be divided between the Harbor House and the library." – The Bar Harbor Times, Thursday, September 8, 1983, Sec. 1, p. 13.
“Southwest Harbor Public Library Auction,” Southwest Harbor Public Library, accessed April 25, 2024, https://swhpl.digitalarchive.us/items/show/9546.Item 13556
