Stanwood Homestead Museum and Birdsacre Sanctuary

Cordelia Stanwood spent 50 years studying the birds around her modest Cape-style homestead outside Ellsworth, teaching herself ornithology and building an avian field-notes and photographic collection that outlasted her. After her death in 1958, community activists — led by Chandler S. Richmond — acquired the property and opened it as a museum and sanctuary in 1960. An arsonist's fire in 2014 destroyed much of the historic fabric and artifacts, including her camera and typewriter, though her field notes survived. The sanctuary now covers 200 acres of trails, habitats, and an orchard, with a nature center housing mounted specimens and a collection of eggs and nests more than a century old.