This Side of Paradise

Jill's Journal: On an unexpectedly mild and exquisitely sunny day, the girls and I explored Bethel. It is billed as “Maine’s Most Beautiful Mountain Village” and they’ve got to be right. It is the cutest little town.

We’re well after the summer season, just after the foliage rush (Bethel was voted the second-best New England town for foliage by Yankee Magazine), and right before the ski season, so we’re just about the only “foreigners” at the moment in this sleepy town. And after a couple of days here, it feels like we’ve met about half the town’s population. People here are soooo friendly. The town’s 81-year-old piano player even invited us to her church’s choir practice just in case we’d like to see their lovely and historic stained glass windows. I declined, but it was awfully sweet just the same. This is small-town Americana at its finest.

This village of farming, forestry, and tourism is right on top of the Androscoggin River at the base of Paradise Hill. I’ve heard it said Bethel is “just this side of Paradise,” both literally and figuratively.

The land here was cleared by Native Americans centuries before it was founded by European-Americans in 1774 as Sudbury Canada, so named because the original grantees were from Sudbury, Mass., and fought in a campaign to conquer Canada. In 1781, it was the site of New England’s last Indian raid. By 1796 the name had been changed to Bethel, meaning “House of God.” No fewer than 39 houses, structures, and sites downtown are included in the historical society’s walking tour. That makes up most of downtown, so the whole place seems unaffected by the passing of time and harkens back to an elegant period in the 1800s.

The town is surrounded by breathtaking natural beauty as Maine’s gateway to the White Mountains. I think we could be very happy here for a very long time…happy, that is, if the 60 degree high today wasn’t such an abnormal thing. I don’t think I mentioned that Bethel already had its first snow of the season last week.