As his third work of history, Maine author Earl Smith has written Water Village, the first history of Waterville, Maine, to be published since 1902. Like the stories of many river places in the American northeast, this book tells of determined early settlers who found promise in the power of the water and whose descendants built a city that flourished with industry and mercantile trade throughout the Second Industrial Revolution and for a half-century beyond. It is also the tale of the hundreds of immigrants, welcomed from Canada, the Middle East, and Europe, who enriched the city when they came to work in the mills and who remained as partners in the community's long struggle to reinvent itself when the mills were gone.
