WILLOW CREEK — For eighty-three years, the history of the Willow Creek Ice-Out has existed in fragments: entries in Ezra Homan’s spiral notebook, mentions in bound Gazette volumes, memories passed down through families. This week, Doris Kim and the Willow Creek Free Public Library began the work of assembling those fragments into a single, definitive record.
The Ice-Out Archive Project will index every Gazette article mentioning the competition by date, winner, prediction margin, ice-clearing time, and number of entries. The project will also collect oral histories from longtime competitors, scan photographs from private collections, and compile a complete list of every champion since 1927.
“The Ice-Out is the longest continuous tradition in Willow Creek,” Kim told the Gazette. “It has been running since 1927. It survived the Depression. It survived the war. It survived the mill closure. It deserves a proper archive.”
The project, funded by a small grant from the Maine Historical Society, will take approximately three years to complete. Kim is working with a team of three volunteers, including retired town clerk Martha Hollis and Jed Thorne.
“This is the kind of project that makes me grateful to be a librarian,” Kim said. “The Ice-Out is not just a competition. It is a record of the town’s relationship with its environment, its economy, and its sense of humor. We are preserving a piece of Willow Creek’s soul.”
The Gazette ran a front-page story on the project under the headline “The Ice-Out, By the Numbers” — a headline that would take on new meaning when Kyle Dubois built his statistical prediction model fourteen years later.