Colby’s Island People
Island Fellows program gives students the opportunity to live, study, and work on Colby’s Island Campus
Last summer, when Catrin Carey ’25 worked in Boston, her commute from the suburbs took an hour and a half—on a good day.
This year, though, she traded up. The global studies major was chosen to be one of several Island Campus Fellows, students who live and work on Allen Island over the summer. To get there from the mainland, they ride in a boat for five miles over the gray-green waves of Muscongus Bay, catching glimpses of seals and seabirds rather than getting caught in traffic jams.
Once on the island, Carey lived in a cottage overlooking the sea and spent half the week working as a boat hand, caring for flower and vegetable gardens, greeting visitors, mowing lawns, and doing countless other island maintenance tasks.
The rest of the time she spent in a cool, quiet underground vault, archiving and organizing thousands of artifacts that had been collected nearby during several archaeological digs commissioned by former island owner Betsy Wyeth, wife of American artist Andrew Wyeth. For the history-loving student who has worked in Special Collections at the Colby Libraries since her first year, it has been a great fit.
“I need to just breathe some life back into these artifacts and maybe start making people aware of them and of the full history of the island,” Carey said. “Many people only know about the Wyeths, or at least that’s the initial context. But the total history goes back thousands of years. There is ample evidence and ample proof that people lived out here for a long period of time. I think it’s so cool that we’re able to have this collection. I don’t think any other college really has an opportunity like this.”
Scholarship and stewardship
Allen Island, which along with neighboring Benner Island makes up Colby’s Island Campus, has a rich history. For many centuries, the island was home to the Wabanaki people, who came to fish in its waters. In 1605 British explorer George Weymouth and his crew spent two months there. Later, the island was home to a thriving community of fishing families, who had long since migrated to the mainland by 1979, when Betsy Wyeth purchased it. She spent decades shaping the environment and restoring vernacular Maine architecture on Allen, an effort that inspired some of her husband’s best-known paintings.
In 2022 Colby acquired Allen and Benner from the Up East Foundation and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art with the intention of preserving these extraordinary areas and utilizing them as centers for learning, research, and creative inspiration through the creation of a dynamic island campus.
The fellowship program started in the summer of 2022. It’s already clear that it has become an important opportunity for both students and the College, said Whitney King, the Dr. Frank and Theodora Miselis Professor of Chemistry.
“It’s totally unique compared to most summer jobs. It’s this mix of scholarship and stewardship, where they’re helping to share this place with other people,” he said. “Because you’re on an island, you’re part of a community, and you rely on each other. You are helping to do problem-solving on a regular basis. They all seem to enjoy the logistical aspects of it, and being part of the team.”
The program is supported by donors, and there is still room for it to grow. This summer marked a milestone: the creation of its first endowed fellowship, which was established in memory of Peter Bryan ’80, a French and Western civilization double major whose curiosity and enthusiasm resonated in the Colby community. Carey was named the first Peter Bryan ’80 Island Campus Summer Research Fellow. Next summer, King hopes, the program will be able to grow to six fellows.
“The fellows take ownership. It’s like it’s their place,” he said.
Striking a balance
Previous Island Fellows have spent the summer working independently on projects that run a gamut, including tracing financial connections between Maine’s cod industry and slavery in the West Indies, producing a podcast focused on Allen Island’s deep history in Maine, building an ecological soundscape of the island, and studying parasites in the intertidal zone.
This summer Fiona Powers ’26, a data science major, helped build a weather station to support the research of Stacy Doore, Clare Booth Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science, who is creating an Allen Island open-source research database. Annika Bjorklund ’26, a chemistry major with a concentration in environmental science, spent the summer working to expand the autonomous sensor network on the island. And Nick Smits ’26, a mathematical sciences major, helped study bumblebees on the island.
Powers learned about the fellowship program by diligently reading the College’s daily campus email digest, Colby Now. For her, spending the summer working and living on the island has been an extraordinary experience.
“It’s been an awesome summer, and definitely there’s a good balance to it,” she said. “Today I had a research day, so I rolled out of bed, had some coffee and fruit on my porch looking at the ocean, and now I’m just going to work and look at my data and figure out what’s wrong with the weather station today while I look at the ocean.”
The inspiration for Carey’s research project came when she and her mom visited Allen a couple of years ago and caught a glimpse of some prehistoric artifacts on display in the Sail Loft.
The collection includes many Indigenous artifacts such as stone and animal bone tools and ceramics, some of which date back thousands of years. There are also more recent artifacts that date to when European colonists first visited and lived on the island.
“We have to be very responsible for these artifacts. We inherited them with the island, and we take our stewardship very seriously,” King said. “I think there’s going to be faculty and Wabanaki scholars interested in this collection. Now it will become accessible for scholars, which is exciting. This is going to be a resource for students and faculty for a long time.”
Although the artifacts have been kept safe on the island in storage, it’s likely that most haven’t been taken out of their bags and boxes for years if not decades. Carey’s work has helped to give the College a sense of the magnitude of the collection, King said.
Carey spent the summer creating a master inventory or database to make them easier for researchers to locate in the collection. It’s a big job, and she’s motivated to keep going even after the fellowship is over.
“There is a good chance that I’ll come back, honestly, because I want to do more with this archive,” she said.
‘A great place to be’
For Jake Ward, the Island Campus manager, the fellows are indeed a crucial part of the team. The students bring energy, enthusiasm, and a willingness to pitch in where needed; all qualities that he and the other full-time island staff members appreciate.
“Our crew, we’re a family, we really are, and the fellows always become part of that family,” he said. “As far as the actual job goes, it’s everything. We teach them what we can, and they work with the crew every day. We want them to leave feeling more confident they can tackle the world than when they arrived here.”
Life on an island can be unpredictable, something that was underscored this spring when a storm severed the underwater electric cable. It wasn’t repaired until late May, after the fellows arrived and the busy summer season of visitors to the island had begun.
Ward said the students rolled admirably with that and other challenges. The nature of an island community means the people there must pull together to figure out solutions to problems that range from the quotidian, like a group of visitors forgetting to bring food with them, to the dramatic, such as when a minke whale that apparently had died of natural causes washed up on Betsy’s Beach.
“Our crew, we’re a family, we really are, and the fellows always become part of that family.”
Jake Ward, Island Campus manager
“This crew has to be able to pivot a lot, and the fellows help us so much with exactly that,” Ward said. “They’re young, and they have great attitudes. At the base of all of it is that they’re just wonderful young people and we love having them out here.”
For the students, the separate strands of life on Allen weave together to make something greater than the sum of its parts. In addition to their island work and their research projects, they find the time to hike, swim in the cold ocean, go on adventures with the other fellows, learn about the island’s ecology and history, and simply marvel at the darkness of the night sky.
“On clear nights, you just lie out and the stars are phenomenal. I don’t even know how to describe it,” Carey said. “One of the reasons I took this job was the thought that when else in my life am I going to be able to live on an island for a summer off the coast of Maine? It’s awesome. It’s a great place to be.”
