This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2023--San Antonio

This Other Eden by Paul Harding is a sad story based on some true events.  It takes place in the early 1900s on an island off the coast of Maine.  I group of freed blacks and mixed-race people had come to the island in 1866 and settled there. Seven generations had continued living there in one-room shanties with no conveniences at all and cut off to a great extent from life on the mainland.  At the time of the story, the group consisted of about a dozen people with some of them shows signs of inbreeding.  Their daily lives were still lived much like those of all their ancestors in the previous decades.  Their clothing was warn and patched.  The only change of significance was that a school had been built on the island and a man who spent his summers on the mainland came to preach on Sundays and to teach on 3 other days of the week.  He managed to get assistance from the people on the mainland for building the school, providing supplies, and also supplying aid to the residents of the island.  But that resulted in the mainland people becoming more aware of the conditions on the island and to consider the situation to be a "problem" that needed fixing.  Eugenics was a topic throughout the world at the time, so men from the mainland came with calipers, and other measuring devices plus a camera to get photos of the inhabitants of the island.  They observed and wrote a record of the lifestyle there--people living in filth, children born of incest, trash everywhere.  They felt they had to "rescue" the people which would include putting the children in homes or asylums.  They also observed the potential of the island being developed with a hotel that would draw tourists to the area.  The book is a sad description of what happened to the lives of those living there and how the actions taken were a disgrace with significant consequences.  I found it hard to read the book at times because of the actions occurring.  But it is well written and is fascinating to read, too.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.