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Joe Feely, another Highland Green resident, has volunteered with Maine Maritime Museum in its boat shop in a number of capacities: providing support for a children’s boatbuilding program, building Adirondack chairs for sale in the museum shop, and helping with scaling on the Mary E restoration project. Kurt Spiridakis, Maine Maritime Museum’s director of watercraft and traditional skills, has worked closely with volunteers on the Mary E. HG’s support, he says, has been invaluable to the restoration — and he suspects they’ve come away with something too. The volunteers now have a deeper appreciation for the 19th- and early-20th–century shipyard workers who worked in the Percy and Small shipyard, where the museum now sits,” he says. And the fun’s not over — there will be plenty of maintenance in the years ahead as the museum preserves Mary E for the next hundred years.

To come up with our 2016 list of Maine’s best places to live, we launched an online tournament bracket seeded with 16 of our favorite towns, selected by Down East’s editors using benchmarks like home prices and median income, along with subjective criteria like natural beauty and local businesses we admire. Then we turned things over to you