Available Now! Prospects – a new novel set in historical Waterford!
Canadian miner Clarence Leslie Potter, inspired by the story of tourmaline gems found in Maine in 1820*, moves to Oxford County in 1897 to make his fortune working the pegmatite mines. He finds himself immersed in a welcoming community of native Mainers. One exception is widow, Aphia Stevens, an herbalist who is tormented by the demons of her past. She makes life difficult for Potter, his new wife from Winchester, Massachusetts and the family of successful dress maker Lizzie Millett. The story takes place with a backdrop of the Maine mining scene at the turn of the twentieth century.
*Cover image of PROSPECTS is a photograph of The Primus, first tourmaline found in West
Paris, ME two hundred years ago.
Click on the cover to read an excerpt.
Prospects, Mining Maine for Riches is now available at all five Sherman’s Bookstores in Maine
(Portland, Freeport, Damariscotta, Boothbay Harbor and Bar Harbor) as well as Bridgton books
in Bridgton, ME and The Tribune Bookshop in Norway, ME, and the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum in Bethel, Maine.
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Lizzie Millett was born in Waterford, Maine, in 1861. She and younger sister Hattie escaped from their troubled childhoods and, each in her own way, built successful lives. Lizzie’s struggles to achieve personal and professional success in “a man’s world” of business are struggles that, in some forms, continue for women today.
Robert W. Spencer 