This article originally appeared in The Mountain Ear’s Sept. 28, 1984, edition and profiles the work of Helen Leadbeater, who died Dec. 5, 1988, at age 86, and Eve Barbour, who died in 1990. The Mountain Ear newspaper was an award-winning weekly lifestyle publication co-founded in 1976 by Jane Golden Reilly and the late Steve Eastman (1949-2008). Eastman sold the paper to Salmon Press in 2005. Its last edition was in 2014. Many stories published prior to the paper’s sale are now posted at mtearchronicles.com.
FRYEBURG, Maine — Come to the Mount Washington and Saco River valleys, get away from it all and enjoy a bountiful life. That is what is luring many people to the area, what lured the early settlers in the 1700s and what may have lured the earliest inhabitants of the valley, the Native Americans, as many as 10,000 years ago.
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