South Bristol’s $10 million windfall makes one of Maine’s richest towns richer

At age 23, future U.S. Secretary of State and Maine Gov. Ed Muskie was confronted with a frantic dilemma. It was late summer 1937, about two weeks before he was to return for a second year at Cornell Law School. He was flat broke. Faced with the prospect of ditching his hopes for a legal career due to an empty wallet that would be unable to finance the rest of his education, Muskie wrote to one of New England’s leading philanthropists, William Bingham, asking for help.

Bingham soon summoned Muskie to Bingham’s summer home at South Bristol’s Christmas Cove where Muskie was given an interest free $900 loan. This was followed by a second one for $l,000 a year later and by the time Muskie had spent a year in the Navy a few years later both loans were forgiven by Bingham. Thus was one of the leading statesmen of 20th century Maine rescued from potential oblivion.

The home town of the aptly named Christmas Cove, South Bristol, has once again become the venue of generosity of historic proportions. However, the town is now cast in the role of beneficiary rather than that of donor when, earlier this year, this town of fewer than 900 people accepted gifts totaling nearly $l0 million from the estate of an 80-year-old summer resident from Louisiana. She thought so well of her summer home that she gave South Bristol a third of her nearly $30 million. The amount thus given is over four times the community’s annual $2.4 million operating budget. This is a figure so staggering that no other town in Maine can claim to have received an unrestricted bequest that is so large a multiple of its annual revenues.

Meet Ann Stratton. Upon her death at age 80, two years ago, she left a will that benefits a town that already has one of the lowest tax rates in Maine and whose continuation in that status is virtually assured by Stratton’s generosity.

Though the many summers in her life which she spent at her family’s home in South Bristol explains her affections for the community’s citizens, it doesn’t explain why she would want to enrich its government. For this, a look to her personal background helps uncover the roots for her unusual civic-minded temperament.

Hers was an outlook that was well framed by the time her own professional career ended at about the time she turned 50. By this time she was armed with an economics degree from New York’s Wells College, a masters in social work from the University of Pennsylvania and a 25-year career as a supervisor of foster children in Philadelphia’s public welfare department. There, she turned down offers of promotions so she could continue to deal hands-on with the orphans and immigrants for whom she felt such compassion and concern.

By the mid-l970s, Stratton had returned to her native Shreveport, La., for an early retirement that was – despite substantial wealth inherited from her coal and oil baron forebears – anything but leisurely.

It was at this time that she became the most inveterate attendant and most outspoken activist at city council meetings in a city of more than 200,000, the third largest in Louisiana. For some thirty years, in the words of Shreveport’s leading newspaper in a tribute appearing the day of her funeral, she “gave credit where it was due but often delivered sharp critiques of government officials.” She was an environmentalist even though her favorite target was the size of Shreveport city spending. It was her distaste for expensive government that may explain why it was a town in Maine rather than a city in the South to whom she gave so much.

It is thus on the score of South Bristol’s fiscal policies that town selectman and former GOP legislator Chester Rice believes led to Stratton’s decision to endow his town government. “She liked the way the town was managed. We’re a very, very conservative community,” Rice explained in a recent interview with this columnist. South Bristol indeed does have a tax rate that is one of the lowest in Maine. The number of tax dollars paid for each thousand in valuation is lower than all but l6 of the nearly 500 municipalities in Maine. (The mill rates in Auburn, Portland and Lewiston, which are among the state’s highest, for example, are almost four times that of South Bristol’s 7.3 mills.) In this sense the town is conservative.

But the town is not running on empty. In less than l0 years before Stratton’s recent gift it has built a new town hall, a new public library, and a new school gymnasium. How does a town with such low tax rates manage to do all this? A quick look at an atlas of Maine provides a clue. The town is a peninsula of pricey shorefront property. This showpiece of seacoast is one that draws summer residents who fill local property tax coffers but send their children to school elsewhere. It’s a town that has some $288,000 of property value for each year-round resident. Even the community with our highest per capita income, Cape Elizabeth, has only half as much real estate value for each of its permanent residents.

This is not to say that the year-round residents of South Bristol are wage and salary rich even though it does place in the top half of the state with its better than $28,000 per capita income. Like those in many coastal Maine towns, the citizens of South Bristol do not necessarily have the money that can pay the taxes that their highly prized property base commands of them.

What a magnificently generous benefactor like Ann Stratton and the property tax X-rays of a town like South Bristol do compel us to consider, however, is how much in some places here in Vacationland we owe to the people who join us so briefly at this time of year.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail: [email protected].