Backwoods Blog .155

Mansur Block

Backwoods Blog;

in the woods and on the road…

New Clock on the Mansur Block in Houlton, Maine

There is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens…Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise to another idea: they will disappear. For the genius that created it creates now something else. The new continents are built out of the ruins of the old planet; the new races arise out of the foregoing. New arts destroy the old.

In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No truth sublime but it may be trivial tomorrow in the light of new thoughts. We do not guess today the mood, the pleasure, the power of tomorrow, when we are building up our being. Universal movements of the soul are incalculable…It carries all the energies of the past, yet is itself an exhalation of the morning. I cast away in this new moment all my once hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain. Now, for the first time, seem I to know anything rightly. The simplest words, – we do not know what they mean, except when we love and aspire.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

from his essay “Circles”

Houlton has a new clock on the corner of the Mansur Block in Market Square, which is the town’s second new clock this year. (For the story on the clock in Houlton’s Monument Park go to Backwoods Blog #138) This is the third clock that has been installed on the building since it was built in 1905, and like the clock in Monument Park, it too, looks like it has been there since the early 20th century. When you look at old photographs of downtown Houlton you notice how the familiar buildings we have now, came into place after (sometimes dramatic) fires removed their wooden predecessors. And while the appearance of the downtown buildings in Houlton have not changed significantly in the last one hundred years, their usage and the businesses that have come and gone certainly have. Two notable tenants of the Mansur Block were The Houlton Trust Company Bank and F.W. Woolworth Company dating back to the 1940s. The First National Bank took the place of Woolworth’s and then Key Bank purchased First National, which is still there today. This is the story of just one building, but you get the idea. Linda also had a yoga studio on the second floor of the building at one point which is currently being renovated into downtown apartments. Nothing stands still for very long.

In his essay Circles, Emerson says, “In Nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred.” As we start the new year we anticipate changes will come but we don’t know what they are; political, personal, cultural, environmental, technological. The nature of everything is change. That is about all we know and the incessant movement toward the new will win out in the end. Watching the gradual (or abrupt) changes in a downtown over the years is one example of such time-driven innovation. The new and different will come. Expect no less.

You may have noticed that the time on the new Mansur clock is 9:27 in each of the photos. It’s not because I took all four photos quickly, it’s because the clock has not been wired as of yet. (If you look closely, you will see the wire coiled and hanging on the right hand side of the clock.) Time may be standing still for the moment, but that will change too. Just you wait. Happy New Year everyone!

In the woods,

Dave

January 3, 2023