Fraternity Village

Fraternity, Maine, is a town that Ben Ames Williams knew well. It is little changed today from what it was more than 100 years ago when he wrote his first short story about it.Ben Ames Williams gunned for birds in the surrounding village with Chet McAusland and shot black duck on the marshes. He swapped stories with the best of them around Will Bessel’s big stove.These stories about Fraternity were originally published in the Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, and the Country Gentlemen, magazines once renowned for their literary leadership. The Union Historical Society feels sure that people of this generation reading these stories for the first time will find them as enjoyable as people of an earlier generation found them when they were first published.The Union Historical Society has undertaken the reprinting of Fraternity Village to ensure that this important historical novel remains available to readers. Many of the sites mentioned in this story still exist. We are committed to sharing this history through preservation and education.