Kim Smith, the grant writer and public information officer for Presque Isle, Maine, is not the kind of person to do anything halfway.
When she began leading themed tours of Presque Isle, a small city in the northeastern corner of Maine near the Canadian border, she did not offer one or two routes, but 15. When a team of ghost hunters came to town to evaluate a single city building, she persuaded them to visit more than a dozen others.
So when it came time to plan Presque Isle’s celebration of America’s 250th anniversary this year, Ms. Smith approached the assignment with a commitment that bordered on obsession. As other small municipalities around the country beefed up their July 4 celebrations, or cobbled together a weeklong jubilee, Ms. Smith, 68, set about organizing 12 full months of festivities.
“A quarter of a millennium felt too significant to cram into a day or a week,” she said.
Something in Ms. Smith’s maximalist approach — her unflagging enthusiasm; her meticulous attention to detail; her refusal to be deterred by shrinking attention spans, budgets and population — feels wholly, unapologetically American. By sheer force of will and raw ambition, she believes she can prove Presque Isle capable of semiquincentennial greatness.
At 7:30 one spring morning, as the temperature outside inched past 40, Ms. Smith was at her desk in City Hall, wearing rubber gloves as she counted piles of glossy, striped feathers and stashed them neatly in Ziploc bags. The feathers would not be needed until September, for a quill-pen-making workshop, but she was determined to stay on top of the preparations.
“I need to make sure I have enough,” she said, before turning to count a stack of embroidered handkerchiefs that she had been collecting and stockpiling for another autumn tutorial, this one on crafting colonial-era dolls.
Masterminding a year’s worth of 250th anniversary events for her remote city of 8,000 people was not Ms. Smith’s only job. She was still responding to media inquiries for the city, overseeing programs to help aging residents and writing its grant applications. She also holds leadership roles with the county tourism board, the local air museum and the Presque Isle Historical Society.
To stay on track, she periodically popped open a plastic storage box filled with neatly labeled file folders, which functioned as her semiquincentennial control center. “Revolutionary Women, Part 4,” one of the folders said.
While many cities its size had yet to stage a single 250th event by late May, Presque Isle (pronounced “presk aisle”) was already in deep. The celebration had kicked off on Jan. 12 with Ms. Smith giving a free lecture on Margaret Corbin, a little-known hero of the Revolution and the first American woman to earn a military pension.
Since then, the city had presented a monologue by an actor portraying Betsy Ross at a downtown hotel; a reading of Longfellow’s Paul Revere poem at the library; an exhibit on the history of the American flag at the hospital; demonstrations of 18th-century children’s games; a live Revolutionary-era teaching demonstration in a historical one-room schoolhouse; a Zoom class for older residents on the Penobscot Expedition of 1779; and a show of artworks inspired by the semiquincentennial.
All in a city that was founded in 1828, a half-century after the Revolution, in a state that was part of Massachusetts until 1820.
Some events had been well-attended. Some had not. Still, Ms. Smith kept adding to the schedule.
On a Monday night in May, she stood at the front of a meeting room in the Mark and Emily Turner Memorial Library, a block from City Hall. A dozen people had assembled — a decent turnout, considering the competition from a spring band concert.
Up front was her friend Craig Green, 55, a longtime city councilor known for his dad jokes and large collection of antique Cadillacs. Ann Cushman, 73, a library volunteer and genealogy enthusiast, was there, too. She had hung the city’s semiquincentennial schedule on her wall at home, checking off each event that she attended.
On this night, Ms. Smith would talk about another little-known Revolutionary hero, Lydia Barrington Darragh. She had eavesdropped on British soldiers in Philadelphia in 1777, and then risked her life to deliver details of their planned attack to military leaders.
First, though, she cued up a short YouTube video about the origins of the national anthem, which had been inspired by the bombardment of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812.
“I cry every time I see that,” Ms. Smith said afterward.
Before she could press stop, the video cut to a laxative ad.
“Way to break the mood,” someone quipped from the audience.
Ms. Smith had spent months researching the subjects of her lectures, distilling their histories into relatable, bite-size vignettes. Most were women, a choice that felt important.
“There are so few female names we know,” she told her audience that night. “But so many women played a role.”
Ms. Smith attended Presque Isle High School, and then held jobs around the country before returning to Maine in 2005. She had found in her own career that competent women were sometimes seen as a threat — or underestimated, as Lydia Darragh had been.
She kept her talk brisk and action-packed, wrapping it up after 40 minutes. “So that is our story for tonight,” she concluded, like a mother tucking her children into bed. Attendees stacked chairs as Ms. Smith reminded them that the one-room history museum up the road would open for the season on May 30. Every visitor — there had not been enough lately, to her frustration — would receive a small American flag.
“I have 144 of them,” she said. “So I think I should be safe.”
Ms. Smith spent her childhood in Florida, moving to Presque Isle only as a teenager. She was living in Virginia, at a crossroads in her life, when she decided on a whim to attend her 30th high school reunion. “Move back home!” her former classmates urged.
She was nervous about adapting to rural life, and harsh winters, again. But the warmth of their welcome drew her in.
Aroostook County is a sparsely populated expanse roughly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, 400 miles north of Boston. Residents of “the County,” as it is known, take deep pride in its rolling potato fields and French Canadian heritage, but can be defensive about its declining population and relative obscurity in a state best known for its coastline.
There is a hint, in Ms. Smith’s go-big approach, of an underdog hellbent on proving itself.
When the state sifted through 110 applications for grants to fund 250th events, and chose 14 recipients, Presque Isle’s application stood out, said Sarah Hansen, director of the Maine Semiquincentennial Commission, for its “extraordinary” scale. It mattered, too, that the activities Ms. Smith was planning would unfold two and a half hours from the nearest Target store, where geographic isolation “makes it all the more meaningful when people come together,” Ms. Hansen said.
As for Ms. Smith, “she’s a badass,” Ms. Hansen said admiringly.
Susanne Sandusky, one of Ms. Smith’s close friends in Presque Isle, expressed wonder that a go-getter like Ms. Smith considers her — “a regular person” — worthwhile company.
Ms. Smith is quick to point out that she cannot manifest a celebration befitting a semiquincentennial all by herself. It takes a village, and the village has heeded her call: the local radio station that lets her share historical fun facts in a recurring segment called “Semiquincentennial Moments”; the nature lovers who had collected feathers for the quill pen workshop; the high school band director, who had promised to teach his musicians colonial-era music to play at a cider-pressing demonstration in September.
“We’ll get the band parents; we’ll get the people who love cider,” Ms. Smith said with glee, imagining the fusion of passions. “We need to appeal to different interests, to engage as many people as we can.”
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