"We know you are here because you care deeply about the Harbor Park, the Megunticook River and the waterfall at the head of the harbor."
That's what Natalie Travia, president of the Camden Public Library Board of Trustees, told the crowd that packed the library's downstairs lobby and Jean Picker Room on August 11. Camden residents who show up for the Windjammer Festival on September 4 and 5 will be looking at the same waterfall Travia was talking about, the one at the head of the harbor where the Megunticook River drops over the Montgomery Dam and spills into the bay. They should look closely. This year's fleet and next year's fleet are the last two that will sail in against that exact backdrop.
What's Actually Happening This Weekend
The mechanics of Windjammer Weekend haven't changed, and that part is worth knowing regardless of what happens to the waterfront behind it. The fleet gathers at Camden Public Landing Friday, September 4, with the schooners making their way into the harbor between 2 and 4 p.m., narrated by Captain Jim Sharp of the Sail Power and Steam Museum, who walks the crowd through each vessel's history and lineage as it comes in. Friday evening carries on with a Formal Welcome to the Fleet, live music from the Bay Winds North Ensemble, the Schooner Bum Talent Show, and a set from the rock cover band Creatures of Habit starting at 8 p.m. Tom Rush plays the Camden Opera House the same night, for anyone who wants their music indoors.
Saturday is the fuller day, and it starts early:
- Camden Rotary Club Pancake Breakfast and the Camden Fire Department 5K Fun Run kick things off
- Captain Kid's Corner, maritime exhibits, local artists and crafters, and a festival-wide treasure hunt run through the morning
- The West Bay Rotary Club Lobster Bake and the Maine Model Yacht Club's Chadwick Cup start at 11 a.m.
- The Lobster Crate Race, the event most people actually come for, goes off at 2 p.m.
- Windjammer Open House Tours and live sea shanties from Shank Painters close out the afternoon
None of that is new information if you've been to the festival before. What's new is the reason to pay closer attention to where you're standing while it happens.
The View Everyone Photographs
Harbor Park, the strip of green between Main Street and the water where most of the festival's foot traffic lands, wasn't just landscaped at some point and left alone. It was designed by the Olmsted Brothers and given to the town in the 1930s by Mary Louise Curtis Bok. The deed that came with that gift put the Camden Public Library Trustees in charge of the park permanently, which is why it's the library, not the town's public works department, that has spent the last several years running public meetings about its future. The park is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which is part of why every version of the redesign keeps getting checked against Olmsted's original intent rather than against a generic parks template.
The Montgomery Dam sits at the base of that park, one of seven dams on the Megunticook River and the one closest to the harbor, tucked just below Main Street and the storefronts above it. It's been there for more than a century, and the falls it creates are the exact shot in half the postcards and phone photos taken during Windjammer Weekend. It's also, by the town's own account, the reason the seawall next to it has been breached three separate times, most recently during a November 2023 storm that flooded the shoreline at high tide.
What the Library Showed On August 11
The August 11 meeting was billed as the Harbor Park Revitalization and Dam Removal Public Engagement session, and the turnout matched the subject. More than a hundred residents came through, working their way past five staffed information stations covering design, history, the river itself, flooding and resilience, and how the park gets used day to day. Jennifer Gromada chaired the Working Group station. Blake Sanborn, a landscape architect with Richardson and Associates, and Tyler Smith, an engineer and Megunticook River Citizens Advisory Committee member, staffed the technical tables. Alison McKellar represented the Downeast Salmon Federation. Henry Sweets, the library's Parks Director, and library director Kristy Kilfoyle rounded out the group.
The centerpiece was landscape architect Eamonn Hutton, of Tandem Landscape Architects, walking the room through what's now being called the "90 percent" design, the version that's essentially locked except for plantings, pathway details, and historical interpretation. It replaces the current continuous seawall with roughly 500 linear feet of stepped shoreline, granite and reclaimed stone leading down toward the water in layers instead of one hard drop. A new path from Main Street will be ADA accessible, something the current steep grade isn't. The plan also adds educational tidal pools and an amphitheater-style seating area angled toward the water, built with an eye toward exactly the kind of event Windjammer Weekend already is, boat arrivals and fireworks watched from a spot that's currently just a narrow strip of grass.
Kristy Kilfoyle called the funding that makes this possible a step toward ensuring flood resilience at the base of Harbor Park and repairing what she described as a beloved property. That funding is a $5.933 million grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation's Coastal Resilience Fund, part of a $78 million package the foundation distributed nationally, with Camden's application built around removing the dam, restoring the river channel, and reworking the seawall as one connected project rather than three separate ones.
The Two-Summer Clock
Here's the part that changes how residents should think about this year's festival specifically. Camden voters approved dam removal back in June 2025, by a 1,391 to 995 margin, with the condition that the cost couldn't fall on property owners through local taxation. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant covers the shortfall, and the Select Board formally accepted it in April 2026. According to the project's own timeline, work to actually remove the dam and reshape the river channel is set to begin at the end of summer or start of fall 2027, deliberately scheduled for after Labor Day so it doesn't interfere with the town's high season or, notably, with next year's festival. The full landscape is expected to be finished by the 2028 summer season.
That means this year's fleet arrival and next year's are the last two that happen with the Montgomery Dam and its falls still standing exactly as they've stood for a hundred years. Construction starts within days of the 2027 Windjammer Festival wrapping up. By the time the schooners come back for Labor Day 2028, the stepped granite shoreline should be in place, the dam gone, and the waterfall that's anchored every Windjammer photo for a century replaced by an open, tidal stretch of river that Hutton's renderings show as more of a cascade than a spillway.
None of this touches how the festival itself runs. The Lobster Crate Race will still happen at 2 p.m. Saturday. Captain Jim Sharp will still narrate the fleet coming in. What's changing is the ground everyone's standing on while they watch it, and the two-year runway between now and that change is short enough that it's worth noticing on purpose, not after the fact.
For residents who've watched the dam-removal debate unfold since the citizen advisory committee's 2025 recommendation, or who are only catching up now, the project's own site at camdenharborparkproject.com has the current renderings and a plain-language rundown of what the 90 percent design actually includes. The town's Megunticook River Watershed Project page carries the underlying engineering reports for anyone who wants the technical version.
Camden changes slowly most years. This is one of the two Septembers where it won't.
If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of the harbor is worth once the shoreline work wraps, or just want a local read on how Camden's waterfront is likely to look and feel over the next couple of years, Mary Libby knows this town well enough to talk through it honestly. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready.
