What is now Durr’gan Island Maine was once just an uninhabited island off the coast of America. Settled by the wealthy Bloobury family in the early 1700s, the island mostly was meant to be used as location for their manor built away from the rest of what was then the northern half of the Massachusetts colony. The Atlantic ocean being a nice buffer between their part of the new world and the rest of the colonists who were setting up for fishing, trapping and logging livelihoods. As some time went on, small parcels of land on the southern coast of the island were sold to fishermen who wanted to have docks and houses farther out into the sea. This would be start of the settlement that would become the island’s town, Rockside.

During the revolutionary war the Bloobury family did not actively assist either side, though no boats or soldiers attempted to make landing on the out of the way island. Still when the war was over, the then Governor of Massachusetts visited the island to see where the families loyalties laid. To ensure continued ownership of the southern part of the island, the family sold all but the southern rocky lands of the island to the state at a heavily discounted price as a sign of allegiance to the newly created nation of America. This would be the biggest transfer of land when it came to the island’s ownership until after the war of 1812 and Maine’s succession from Massachusetts into its own state, thus taking the sea side island into the territory of Maine where it was put into Handcock country’s jurisdiction.

After the war of 1812, due to ships crashing into the rocky shore of the island at night, a lighthouse was built on the coast near the Durr’gan family Manor as it was on the highest outcropping of rock on the island. This land was not taken from the Blooburry family but loaned from them by the government of Maine. The family would be compensated for tending to the lighthouses needs such as replacing oil and later lightbulbs to keep the coast line safe for sailors.
By 1890, most of the remaining land was sold to various citizens and interests on the southern part of the island. Leaving just the far south eastern rock out cropping in the Blooburry family hands, which included the Manor and the lighthouse. The small dwellings on the southern front grew as more houses were built, followed by a diner, a town hall, a church and later in the nineteen thirties an auto garage with a single gas pump for vehicles. In 1905 the area officially incorporated into the hamlet of Rockside. Meanwhile the northern wooded half of the island stayed under state ownership and was never developed due to a lack of interest or reason to develop it. Leaving the land a healthy untapped northern rocky forest where animals and plant life were able to continue to live as they had since the beginning of time.

It wasn’t until shortly after the development of the National Park Service in 1916 that the state moved to make the lands into a national park so that it wouldn’t be spoiled by development and as an added bonus the state wouldn’t have to worry about directly having to use funds to take care of the land themselves as it would become a federal matter. Congress agreed to put the lands under Park Service control in 1920 and soon the second floor of the town hall was converted into a ranger station for monitoring the grounds.

Since then the only other major changes to the island was the introduction of phone lines in 1944 as a way for the citizens to keep in with the mainland in case of sighting of enemy ships and then the building of a watch tower and supply garage close to the middle of the northern part of the island in the year of 1970 after lighting started a small forest fire which threatened the inhabitants and was luckily put out due to a heavy rain before reaching the populated southern portion of the island.

Today the island is populated with eighty people who live there year round. Most who work fishing or catching lobster. A ferry service twice a day to shuttle people to and from the island. If you miss the trip you’ll have to leave by your own boat. There is no cell service on the island due to it being too far out for a tower to reach it and the island’s small population not being worth the cost of putting a tower up. If you want to make a call and you’re not the owner of a home there, you either use one of the three payphones still on the island or two way radio. Other than the Forest Preserve employees who double as a makeshift fire department in case of emergencies, the island has a single Sheriff’s deputy who comes in the morning and stays till the return ferry in case of emergencies. Normally they tend to assist the older folks on the island and tend to the occasional drunken disturbance. The basement of the town hall being the Sheriff’s annex where two cells were put in for drunk tanks. Every few years the county talks about removing the officer from the island due to costs and every time the town writes letters and shows up to the county meetings to demand that their one police officer stays and the matter gets tabled.

The Blooburry family exists there still. Lipidro Blooburry, the last of the line, lives in the Manor which he rents out to two others. The lighthouse, while no longer in use due to GPS on most ships, is still up kept by him and fully considered a part of his private property. Mainly he keeps to himself, the stories being that his family wealth allows him to be a man about town. He has stated to his few friends that he does not intend to keep the family line going past himself and that he intends to donate the Manor and lighthouse to the Park Service as a historical set of buildings to go along with the park on the northern part of the island.

The island’s history has its darker parts of course. The natives for instance didn’t settle it due to it being seen as a place of great turmoil where wild cries could be heard at night. While the Blooburry family’s records do not state anything like that when they settled and built their home, the sudden change of heart to allow others on what they intended to be their own private slice of the new world does confuse most local historians, with one even writing that it seemed as if they wanted more people close by. There is also the matter of people disappearing. While earlier records are spotty, it is known that since the year 1925, twenty people have gone missing in the vicinity of the Northern Woods. Three of the missing were from the local island population but most were tourists who either decided to camp or hike off the listed trails. One of the missing was even a forest ranger who had gone off to do a controlled burn by themselves and never radioed back to the town hall at their designated time, thus leading to a rule that all rangers must have teams of two when going into the woods for work.

Every time a person goes missing, the coast guard sweeps the area and the Forest Rangers call in the Sheriff’s department to help scope the area out for any signs of bodies or animal attack. Only one body was been found in those searches and that was in 2014 when a young teen hiker had apparently fallen off a tall rock and broke his neck when trying to take a selfie. The media will write about a person going missing and the work to find them being fruitless and the locals will mumble about the dangers of nature but otherwise little is done or looked into other than the park service putting up a new sign about not leaving the trails and the Sherriff’s department putting up a missing person’s poster on the town hall board.
While no one talks of killers or cults, the island is an oddity for small town America, as except for the church and the town hall, all doors are normally locked at night. With only one street light near the town hall and the blinking red light of the watch tower’s radio antenna far away, the island is always just pitch black at night so few people go out even if it almost the perfect location to see the stars from the lack of light pollution.
In the end though, if one does wish to visit Durr’gan Island, the locals will nod and say that the Island is more than happy to have them.Map drawn by the talented  MazingSand

The Durr'gan Island is mine.