BATH

W hen they moved to

Maine from Massachusetts in 1965, Tom and Judy Barrington wanted to be involved in making their community a better place.

Now after nearly 50 years serving on city committees and with area organizations, the Bath couple’s names are synonymous with the word volunteerism. In recent years, Bath’s annual Independence Day Parade committee chair Sherry Owen said, the city has received several recognitions for its downtown, one most recently in the May/June edition of Yankee Magazine’s Special Travel Guide, which selected Bath as best Victorian downtown.

In light of all this recent recognition, the parade’s theme this year is “Back to the Future — A Red, White and Blue Tribute to Main Street, USA.”

And the Barringtons have been instrumental in making Bath’s downtown wonderful, Owen said. The dynamic duo, whose interests and volunteer work have often overlapped, will be honored Friday as grand marshals of the Bath Heritage Days parade.

The couple came to Maine because Tom, a marine engineer, wanted to build ships and got a job at Bath Iron Works, where he worked 30 years and then continued on as a consultant on special projects. He started out as a procurement engineer, righting specifications for equipment, working closely with the purchasing department and Navy. He spent a year in Washington, D.C., with a contingency working directly with the Navy on the early phases of the design of the Arleigh Burke class of guided missile destroyers (DDGs) built at BIW.

Judy couldn’t go because they were building their house, had an 8-year-old daughter, three horses and a steer, but Tom came home weekends.

Judy, also with a distinguished career, is a retired medical and scientific illustrator and photographer. Around 1970, Maine Medical Center became a teaching hospital and she worked there for 25 years, and later continuing on a freelance basis. With pen, ink and airbrush, she did everything from graphic design to medical and surgical illustrations, and interpretive graphics for journals and patient education, a skill she has applied many times over in her volunteer capacity.

“I think basically we’re both problem-solvers,” Judy said. “We like that challenge. So in our retirement we couldn’t sit still.”

She got involved from the start in the Sagadahoc Preservation Inc., formed in 1971 to save the Winter Street Church on Washington Street. An art major and biology minor, her second love was architecture. She volunteered for SPI, serving as its president after she retired. She then served as a trustee and is now the preservation chair. SPI hasn’t been able to sell the building so decided to make it a community center, she said. It repaired the parish hall but the sanctuary portion remains un-restored until funds are secured.

Asked if she knows how old the structures are, she said the sanctuary portion was built in 1843 and the parish hall in 1864.

“Are you kidding? There’s nothing she doesn’t know,” Tom chimed in.

Last year Judy, now 75, received SPI’s Lifetime Friend of Preservation Award, accompanied by a two-page summary of her contributions to the organization.

She did the survey photography for the initial building survey SPI did between 1974 and 1979 and the conceptual drawings for the Downtown Bath Restoration Project in the 1970s, earning SPI, Maine Maritime Museum, the Bath Area Chamber of Commerce and the city a prestigious President’s Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1977.

She also helped start SPI’s annual House Tour fundraiser held every June, doing the graphic design portion of the tour booklet — a 36-page program for this year’s tour held in Phippsburg.

“This is all volunteer work. This whole area has an incredible number of people who donate their time and expertise and don’t ask for anything in return. And you have to do that when you have a small population and not much money,” Judy said. “I think Maine and New England are known for that.”

There is nary a green space in the city Tom, now 78, didn’t have a part in establishing. He only recently stepped down as chair from the Bath Community Forestry Committee he’s served on since 1995 and is still a member of Kennebec Estuary Land Trust.

“We took our interests and wanted to be part of where we lived in the city,” Tom said.

He calls himself a “terminal tree hugger.” He did a stint on the city’s Board of Assessment Review more than 20 years ago.

Tom said he “became associated with people who were interested in conservation,” who in 1989 asked him to participate in the founding of a conservation land trust, giving birth to Kennebec Regional Land Trust now the regional Kennebec Estuary Land Trust. He became the land trust’s president and then its treasurer. The land trust raised $450,000 and during his presidency bought in 2000 what is now the nearly 100-acre Thorne Head Preserve.

In south Bath, KELT also recently preserved 146 Lilly Pond Community Forest. The roughly 130-acre Butler Head Preserve easement was granted to KELT by the city of Bath earlier this year.

The city chartered the Bath Community Forestry Community in 1992, “and I said to myself, ‘Listen stupid, you’ve got enough to do now. Now you stay away from that.’ That lasted for about three years until 1995 (when) I joined the forestry committee.”

Forestry committee members help water trees planted by the city, working with city employees. The committee also decided to become the administrators of Butler Head, cleaning up junk cars in the former dumping place, maintaining trails and hosting flower walks.

So what motivates him to work so hard preserving green space?

“Well why do some people like chocolate cake?” Tom says. “I like trees and the natural world around me.”

Judy serves on the Main Street Bath Design Committee, the Historic District Architectural Review board advising the planning Board on projects seeking building changes within the Historic District, and is with the Bath Garden Club. Both she and Tom are members of and support the Maine Maritime Museum.

Judy grew up in an old, old house on the south shore in Plymouth County, south of Boston, “and half the people that were in the towns around me moved here in the 18th century, so some of the names were really familiar.”

Her father fixed up an old house so Judy grew up thinking “this is what you do.” But when they got to Bath the city was tearing down many of its old buildings.

The Barringtons live in a more-than-200-year-old house off North Bath Road that originally stood along Leeman Highway behind Halcyon Yarn, quite a historical preservation feat itself. As the Maine Department of Transportation was talking about widening the causeway leading to the Carlton Bridge, MDOT said many houses would be torn down to make way. The Barringtons bought the house and hired Steve Weston to move it in 1980. Weston was meticulous, labeling every brick and board so the home could be taken apart and put back together. The Barringtons moved into the house in 1984.

Although they’ve stepped down their volunteering, they remain very involved.

“We have this interest in the community in which we live and we think this is a good way to make it a better place to live,” Tom said.

dmoore@timesrecord.com