By Rebecca Goldfine,Staff Writer

NORWAY – Despite its relatively small size, the roughly 113-acre peninsula on Pennesseewassee Lake holds a lot of history.

To prevent the stories from washing away over time, a lakeside resident has written a 240-page book about the tract of land.

“We had people come and buy property on our lake who were looking for nothing more than property on any lake,” the book’s author, Joy Moll, said Tuesday morning while drinking coffee on her cabin porch. “I thought it was a shame that they had no history of this area, this lake.”

Though the book offers a magnifying-glass treatment of the peninsula, which is located around Crockett Ridge Road, extending from Kal Shore Road over to Whit’s swamp and down to the island, its appeal is greater, the book’s copy editor said.

David Sanderson, who lives in Waterford, proofread Moll’s book, “Ties to a Maine Lake.”

“It documents a piece of history that is very typical in this area, in that the events that began with the first settlements that ended up with the situation we see today are common at least in all of southern Maine,” Sanderson said Tuesday. “In that sense, it is a useful documentation, a useful history that is an example of something that is more widespread.”

“It just typifies what life is like on a freshwater lake,” Moll said.

Moll said if she had worked on the history of the entire lake, it would have taken her a lifetime to write. As it is, her book was completed in seven years.

In brief, the story of the land chronicled in the book begins with its first owner in 1787, Henry Rust, a wealthy sea captain from Salem, Mass. The peninsula passed eventually to the Crocketts and then to the Freemans, both farm families, and eventually to the Shepards, after whom the lane Moll lives on is named.

The Shepards over time turned the farm into a resort with small cottages near the lake and a dining hall where diners could get fresh butter and milk during the rationing years of WWII. And eventually, the cottages becamee private homes on long lots that ensured privacy.

The passage of property from farmland to private, seasonal plots is typical for many lakes in Maine, according to Sanderson. And the people who traveled here from away to enjoy the idyllic spots by cooling lakes came to shape Maine’s lakeside cultures.

“What happened in that case is what is typical of shorefront property,” Sanderson said. “The role of nonnatives in that process is something that is very common and very important. The summer residents assume an importance in the history of the land uses.”

Moll said the cottages were sold primarily to people who came back to the lake year after year, generation after generation.

She said her family is on its fourth generation. Her husband, Andrew, a retired engineer, was brought to Norway by his mother when he was a boy. And he introduced Moll to the lake when the couple honeymooned there in 1954. They bought their lot in the early 1980s.

Moll was an information and computer science professor at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey for 16 years. Her previous book is called “The Professor Business.” It’s now out-of-print.

Moll said her second book is unusual because no examination of Norway Lake has been done, and as far as she knows, very few histories focusing on lakes have been written.

“There is hardly anything about lakes at all,” she said.

If Moll had not captured the history when she did, much of it would have disappeared with the people who carried it in their memories. About a third of the 50 or so people Moll interviewed while researching her book have since died.

“My point is other people should do the same thing,” she said.

Moll has printed 500 copies of her book – to give them more value in about 20 years, she said – and they’re available at Books n’ Things in Norway, the Norway Memorial Library, and at www.tiestoamainelake.com.