Baby born on Maine island for 1st time in more than 90 years

A woman has given birth to a baby on Maine’s Little Cranberry Island for the first time in more than nine decades. Born two weeks ago, Azalea Belle Gray is the sixth child for Aaron Gray and Erin Fernald Gray on Islesford, which is also known as Little Cranberry Island.

The Grays had contingency plans to go to Mount Desert Island — the largest island off the coast of Maine — for the birth if they needed to. But everything went smoothly Sept. 26, the Bangor Daily News reported. Ellen Fernald Gray said she didn’t set out to be the first woman to have a home birth in Islesford since Calvin Coolidge was president. She said she didn’t realize how long it’d been since the last island birth: her own grandfather, Warren Fernald, in 1927.

It was only after Azalea's birth that she learned that the lifelong lobsterman who died in 2005 had previously been the most recent birth on Islesford.