I was aware of a lot of history here when I painted this scene on the banks of the Union River in Ellsworth Maine. The tidal river was the site of a thriving lumber and shipbuilding industry in the 1800s. I had seen a photo of the very place I was concentrating on, taken in 1880. It showed a lot of new buildings and almost no trees shading the dirt road and what was a wooden bridge then. The red brick building did exist and was then, as it still is, a restaurant on the ground floor. The place where I sat had been piled high with drying lumber.

Somehow thinking of the history, gave the scene a special significance of time passing and things changing. I imagined the people living and working there more than a hundred years ago.