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For some Mainers, encroaching commercial development isn't enough to drive them away from longtime homes.

By DIETER BRADBURY Online Reporter February 13, 2008

BRUNSWICK — About 31,000 cars a day whistle past the front door of Kathy Wilson’s home on outer Pleasant Street, a four-lane strip of car dealerships, fast-food restaurants and convenience stores.

In the summer the sound of crunching metal echoes through the living room two or three times a week, as customers at a nearby McDonald’s make the mistake of attempting left turns across the busy highway.

Traffic is so thick the Brunswick Planning Board turned thumbs down on a recent proposal to put another drive-through restaurant on the street. State transportation officials are even pondering a bypass, among other remedies, to ease the congestion.

But Wilson, whose family may be the last to maintain a home in this commercial area, doesn’t mind the delays getting out of her driveway. She doesn’t hear the noise. She even sees an upside in the exhaust fumes that blanket her front yard, snuffing out most insect life.

“I can leave the door open all summer and never have a fly or a mosquito,” she says.

Count Wilson among the hardy band of Mainers who resist the tides of change that sprawl and commercial growth bring to major state and local highways. When rezoning, changing land use patterns or increased traffic erode residential neighborhoods, most people abandon ship and seek out a quieter place.

But a few stay behind. Most are longtime residents with deep roots in the place where they have lived for decades. While some would call them stubborn, others might admire their persistence.

Either way, they know what they like and would rather stay put than yield to the forces that are transforming the community around them, leaving them surrounded in a sea of commerce.

Pleasant Street, which is part of Route 1, is a good example of a changed road. When Wilson’s father built the family home at 144 Pleasant St. in 1938, the street was just two lanes wide, with a few gas stations and a Howard Johnson’s restaurant, next to an apple orchard.

Today the street is four lanes, a major traffic artery that links downtown Brunswick and the flow of coastal traffic with Interstate 295 on the western edge of town. The Wilson family lost part of its front lawn when the street was widened, and now the house is only 30 feet from the sidewalk.

But Wilson, 64, loves it. She walks to the grocery store and to restaurants, and she has adapted to the noise.

“There’s a lot of traffic, but it does die down at night,” she says. “Even in the summer, it’s deserted.”

Wilson shares the family home with her sister and their 91-year-old father, and when they want peace and quiet, they retreat to their fenced backyard, where lilacs and birdfeeders offer an oasis of calm.

Les and Barbara Rogers have an oasis of their own on Main Street in Westbrook, a part of state Route 25 west of the intersection with Larrabee Road.

They’ve got an acre of land out back, a gazebo, swimming pool and many perennial beds. When they built their home in 1946, nothing but open fields stood between them and the old city hospital in Portland, now the Barron Center nursing home, about half a mile to the east.

Today that half mile includes the Maine Turnpike, two car dealerships, a shopping center, a McDonald’s and several office buildings. Across the street is another restaurant and car dealership, and an office building to the west has been converted to Westbrook City Hall.

“People say we’re crazy to stay but it’s our home,” says Barbara Rodgers, 85. “I’m sure that if something happens to one or the other of us, this will be sold to some business. But not until I’m gone, I’ll tell you that.”

Rodgers says many people over the years have sought to buy their home, where they once ran a roadside perennial stand called Blue Hen Gardens....