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« on: September 25, 2024, 12:36:16 PM »
I first heard about the museum in the spring of 1990 when I was 14 years old from a Dick Andrews column in Narrow Gauge and Shortline Gazette which mentioned that someone named Harry Percival had purchased the remaining assets of the WW&F and wanted to rebuild the railroad, and was looking for members for his new organization. I was able to convince my parents to pay for my membership, and then further convinced my dad that we should visit Sheepscot on family vacation to Maine that July. So my dad phoned Harry and got directions, which brought us to what was literally just a clearing in the woods on Cross Road (I don't remember Percival house being there), but which Harry grandly referred to as "Sheepscot Station" - something my dad found amusingly eccentric. We spent a Saturday there with Harry and a couple of other volunteers helping to frame bay 1 of the shop, which was then referred to as "the enginehouse" (with a hopeful eye on No. 9) despite there being no rolling stock on the property yet.
Life intervened after that, I let my membership lapse sometime in the late 1990s when I was in college, and I didn't return to Sheepscot for many years and so obviously missed a lot of significant developments in that time. When I rejoined the museum as a life member in 2014 after I finished graduate school, Mike Fox generously put "Member since 1990" on my membership card which I appreciate.