Turn off Route 127 onto Robinhood Road on a Thursday evening in August and you will likely hear music before you see the building. An acoustic set carries out through the open windows of the Robinhood Free Meetinghouse, a shingled 1856 church-turned-concert-hall the town still calls by its original name. Drive the other direction, out toward Seguinland Road, and you will find a different kind of evening entirely: a reservations-only dining room on the wraparound porch of the 1904 Grey Havens Inn, where chef Esau Crosby is plating dinner for guests who booked weeks out. The two rooms could not sound more different. They are run by the same two people.
That fact, easy to miss on any single visit, is the thing worth knowing about Georgetown this month. The island's late-summer calendar is not a random scatter of open businesses and posted hours. It runs through a small number of names, a couple of addresses, and one trail rule that only reveals itself once you have walked past the wrong sign a few times.
Same owners, two different rooms
Carlos and Ali Barrionuevo bought the Robinhood Free Meetinghouse in 2015, taking on a building that had sat empty as a restaurant for years before that, and reopening it as a music and event venue with breakfast and coffee service. The building earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016, recognized for a layout that is rare among Maine's rural 19th-century churches: the sanctuary sits on the second floor, with the meeting and school rooms below it, according to its National Register documentation. Today the calendar still carries that dual identity. Monday nights bring an open mic, and summer Thursdays are given over to a recurring concert series the venue calls Music on the Half Shell, with live music able to land on nearly any night of the week depending on what is booked, per the venue's own performance listing.
More recently, the Barrionuevos added a second address to that portfolio. They purchased the Grey Havens Inn, the turreted shingle-style hotel known locally as the castle by the sea, for $2.4 million from D&E Ventures LLC, a deal brokered with financing through Bangor Savings Bank, according to Mainebiz's reporting on the sale. The inn's restaurant, BLUE, is led by chef Esau Crosby, whose Maine résumé includes head chef at Bath's Solo Bistro and a stint at Falmouth Sea Grill before he landed on Georgetown Island. In high season, BLUE keeps its dining room open Wednesday through Sunday, narrowing to a shorter Thursday-through-Sunday schedule once the season turns, based on the restaurant's posted hours.
Put the two together and you get a single hospitality operation quietly covering both ends of a Georgetown night out: casual and communal at the Meetinghouse, formal and reservations-driven at BLUE. Neither is competing with the other. They are the same business wearing two very different coats.
| Where | What's fixed | Season |
|---|---|---|
| Robinhood Free Meetinghouse | Monday open mic; Thursday's Music on the Half Shell | Runs through the summer |
| BLUE at Grey Havens Inn | Dinner service Wednesday to Sunday | Narrows to Thursday-Sunday post-season |
What changed on Five Islands Road
A few miles south, the village of Five Islands has had a quieter kind of turnover. Five Islands Farm, long a stop for local cheese, wine, and produce, has closed as a physical market and now operates only as an online gallery for local artisans. It is a real subtraction from the corridor, even if the change happened without ceremony.
What has not changed is the rest of the strip. Five Islands Lobster Co. still runs its wharfside operation the way it always has, and the Georgetown General Store at 769 Five Islands Road keeps its usual hours, opening at 6 a.m. on weekdays and staying open into the evening on Fridays and Saturdays. That store made brief regional news at the end of July, when Maine Forest Rangers spent an evening battling a wildfire not far from its front door. Crews contained the blaze to several acres using water bucket drops, and officials said there was no threat to the public, though the cause remains under investigation, according to WGME's coverage of the fire. By the following week, the corridor was back to its normal rhythm, a reminder of how tightly the village's businesses sit against the woods that surround them.
Three trailheads, two rules
Georgetown's trail network is smaller and more layered than it looks on a map. The best known piece of it, the Josephine Newman Audubon Sanctuary, is a 119-acre preserve willed to Maine Audubon in 1968 by Josephine Oliver Newman, a longtime naturalist the community knew as Aunt Jo for her expertise in mosses, lichens, and liverworts. Its 2.5 miles of trail wind through meadow, forest, and salt marsh along Robinhood Cove, including the short but demanding Geology Trail, a 0.6-mile blue-blazed route that climbs through coniferous woods to the cove, and the easier, orange-blazed Horseshoe Trail for anyone who wants the same landscape without the grade.
Parking at the main trailhead off Route 127 is limited to about five spots, which is why Maine Audubon points visitors to a second option: alternate parking behind the Georgetown Historical Society on Bay Point Road, where a wooden footbridge connects the historical society's own trail network directly into the sanctuary, according to Maine Audubon's visitor guide. That connection turns what looks like two separate destinations on a map into one continuous walk.
The rule that trips people up is about dogs. Josephine Newman does not allow them, even on a leash, a policy Maine Audubon applies across its sanctuaries to protect wildlife. Walk a few minutes farther, though, and the rule flips. Both the nearby Berry Woods Preserve and the town's Round the Cove forest, on the west side of the Sasanoa River, welcome dogs on their trails, a distinction worth knowing before you load the car for a walk that turns into a U-turn at the sanctuary gate.
The sanctuary also asks something of residents beyond foot traffic. Maine Audubon's land steward, Liz Thibault, has been running volunteer work days there this year focused on trail maintenance and the removal of invasive Asiatic bittersweet and multiflora rose, work aimed at keeping the trail network passable and the native plant community intact, per the organization's event listings. It is one of the few pieces of Georgetown's late-summer calendar that asks you to bring loppers instead of a picnic blanket.
Reading the week
None of this is dramatic news. A restaurant group added a second address. A farm stand moved online. A fire got contained before it mattered. A nonprofit runs volunteer days most residents never hear about until a neighbor mentions it. But together these details describe how a small island actually functions in August, which is different from how it is described in a visitor brochure. The town's evenings run through two rooms owned by one family. Its trail system is really three separate pieces of land governed by two different sets of rules. Its retail corridor lost a shop and kept its anchors.
Knowing that is what separates a resident's week from a tourist's itinerary. If you are heading out this month, the shape of it is simple enough to hold in your head: Monday for the open mic, Thursday for Music on the Half Shell, a reservation at BLUE if you want the quieter version of the same ownership, and a walk at Josephine Newman if you left the dog at home, or Berry Woods if you did not.
Georgetown keeps most of its calendar close to the vest, which is part of what makes it worth paying attention to. If you already know this rhythm, or you are starting to think about what it would take to live inside it, the team at Legacy Sotheby's International Realty spends as much time on Robinhood Road as we do reviewing listings. Work With Us.
