Peter McPheeters: Biddeford Pool, Maine
- Brick + Tides
- Feb 25
- 8 min read
The flagpole snapped in the dark.
The wind came hard through Biddeford Pool on Monday — snow moving sideways, drifts building against the harbor-facing buildings, the kind of February storm that reminds you who owns the coastline. By Tuesday morning the blizzard had moved offshore. The sky was hard blue. The Pool lay exposed at low tide, sunlight striking the mudflats and turning the harbor silver.
At 18 Yates Street, Peter McPheeters was already inside. He sat in a burgundy sweater and brown corduroys at his desk, amused that anyone would think his story is worth telling.
“For the record, Peter McPheeters is rolling his eyes ,” he says, into my recorder.
Behind me, three men hang on the wall.
At the top, in an oval wooden frame, his great-great-grandfather — long beard, sharp collar, gaze turned slightly away from the camera. He never set foot in Biddeford Pool.
However, below him, in a rectangular frame, Peter’s great-grandfather and grandfather on his mothers side sit side by side in dark suits. They came from Saint Louis to Biddeford Pool for several summers.
Peter visited too, but one year, he never left.
He arrived in 1953, a couple of months old, on a train from St. Louis. Summers meant trunks, station wagons, two overnight stops, and then the turn down Pool Street when the air shifted and salt came through the windows. One of his earliest memories is asking his father, “Where are all the trees?” The fire of 1947 had stripped much of southern Maine. Wood Island had been cleared during the war. The place he loved had already been altered before he understood what alteration meant.
His wife Eve’s history runs deeper still.
Her family traces to the mid-1600s — to Pendleton Fletcher and the early colonial settlement of Fletcher’s Neck. Through the Evans family, her lineage connects directly to the land that once held the Evans Hotel, later sold to the Sisters of the Presentation of Mary and known locally as The Nunnery.
One of her ancestors was killed during the French and Indian Wars. His widow returned after the land had been abandoned and rebuilt her life here. There is still a gravestone near Evans Road that marks that story.
When Peter later helped preserve that convent land, he wasn’t preserving open space in the abstract. He was protecting ground that carried his wife’s name.
At eighteen, Peter came north to Biddeford Pool for the summer and “neglected to go home.”
He found work with Rocky Roberge, a carpenter who moved from house to house repairing what winter had loosened. “I wasn’t a particularly well-behaved young man,” Peter said. “He had the patience of Job to put up with my shit.”
He learned the feel of cedar in his hands. The way a coastal house shifts after February. The way salt air works into trim and shingles.
For a short period of time, he laid granite curbing in Kittery. “I was making $2.50 an hour,” he said. “They made me foreman and gave me $2.60. At which point my paycheck went down.” The extra $.10 put him in a different tax bracket.
He came back to work at Biddeford Pool.
He and Eve bought a sagging barn on Yates Street for $15,000. They did not have $15,000. “We went and borrowed it,” he said. “Bought it.” The barn had once been used to build boats. La Madeliana was built there. The beams still carried the memory of hulls and ribs before they held sawdust and ladders.
The first time he tried to join the volunteer fire department, they told him no. “You’re not one of us.” Belonging here was not automatic. Later, he was accepted. He stood beside the men who had measured him — fishermen, mechanics, tradesmen who fixed doors in February and hauled traps in April.
“When I was a kid here,” Peter said, “there was a group of men and women who took care of things around here.”
Many of them are gone now. Others were taxed out as property values rose. “The last school bus that came down here was ten, fifteen years ago,” he said.
He doesn’t linger there.
He remembers Andy Lindsay, who taught him to sail sixty years ago. Andy once said that even then, Biddeford Pool had “gone to hell.” Peter smiles at that memory. “I keep thinking to myself, I almost say that,” he said. “But it’s still paradise in its own way. It’s just a different version of it.”
Construction came first. Real estate followed.
In the mid-80’s, Peter took real estate licensing classes at night at Biddeford High School. He sold a house on the beach for $200,000 and earned a $6,000 commission. “Oh, that was cool.” Over time, real estate became the primary work. He bought OceanView Properties in the mid-1990s and spent decades guiding transactions in a place where houses are rarely just houses.
He estimates he has worked in or helped buy or sell nearly ninety percent of the homes in Biddeford Pool.
“If I hammered a nail in it and that counts,” he said, “then yeah.”
He has sold some properties three times. One of those homes, four times.
But what matters is not the percentage. It is that he knows the stories behind the walls.
“You don’t go to the funeral just to pass out your card,” he said. “You go because you care about the people.”
One morning he might be trading barbs with lobsterman Randy Desmarais near Stage Island — arguing about who rows faster, who knows the tides better. The next afternoon he might be walking shoreline with an attorney from Washington DC, explaining how wind stacks up against the east-facing houses, where the erosion lines run, what the winter ice does to a dock - and why you should take your dock out during the winter.
He moves between those worlds without strain.
He knows how to speak both languages.
Eight years ago, Peter was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Treatment would affect bone density. His doctor told him to exercise.
He began rowing more seriously. Every morning the wind and waves are calm, you can find Peter pushing off the dock at sunrise. He rows a boat slightly longer than he is tall. No motor. No electronics. When the wind drops and the harbor smooths out, he pushes off and circles Wood Island Lighthouse. The oars enter cleanly. The boat answers. The island grows larger, then recedes.
It is quiet enough to hear your own breathing. He stays with it because of the peace it brings.
Biddeford’s Joey Radford caught the eye of Peter 15 years ago. At the time, Radford was working in real estate with years of experience at Coldwell Banker. Peter recruited him, nurtured him, and tried to gave him the tools to succeed. Last year, he sold the company to him. “One of the smartest things I ever did,” Peter said.
Peter negotiated one thing into the agreement: the corner office where he can still look out onto the tides coming and going in the Pool. Now, he works for Joey.
When asked if he was the top realtor at OceanView Properties, he laughed and said "you'll have to talk to Joey."
At seventy-two, after more than fifty years in the trades and real estate, Peter answers to a man he once mentored. He says it lightly, but there is no edge in it. He still takes calls. Still guides buyers. Still walks properties. Still knows which house has old wiring and which foundation once shifted during a March thaw in 1982.
The title changed. The work did not.
The largest transaction of his career was not a house. It was land.
When the Sisters of the Presentation of Mary could no longer sustain the convent property — land that once held the Evans Hotel — the future felt fragile. Development scenarios were easy to imagine.
“The worst case scenario was grim,” Peter said.
The community was given a chance to buy it. There was a narrow window. “As soon as we basically made the statement that it’s going to be preserved land,” Peter said, “the money flowed in.” Roughly 350 donors. Million-dollar gifts and five-dollar checks. Every name in alphabetical order.
The building came down in six weeks. Before taking the first bite out of the building, the demolition crew gently lifted the cross off of the highest turret and set it down.
“My efforts in this project were in some ways selfish,” he said. “I live here. I enjoy these spaces as much as anybody else. I don’t want it getting mucked up.”
Now his focus is the Stage Island Monument, built in 1825. Bushes grow from its mortar. Roots widen cracks. “It’s something that’s been a presence in our lives forever,” he said. “I think we’d miss it if it was gone.” There is seed money. Permits. A short construction window between nesting seasons. Roughly $300,000 needed to steady it.
McPheeters' flagpole snapped about fifteen feet up, the storm finding its weak point and taking it clean. It has stood in the middle of his property for over 80 years, fifty-five feet tall when whole. It will take more than a ladder to put it right. It will take time. It will take steady hands. It will take a calm day and maybe a crane.
Inside his office at 18 Yates Street, the tide moves back through the gut and out toward the open water, just as it did when the Evans Hotel stood above the shore, just as it did when he was a boy asking where the trees had gone.
On the wall in front of him, his great-great-grandfather — who never saw this place — hangs above two generations that spent time in Biddeford Pool.
Peter did more than that.
He stayed.
He stayed long enough to learn the grain of the houses and the pitch of the roofs. Long enough to be told he wasn’t one of them, and long enough after that to belong without question. Long enough to help keep thirty acres open that might have been divided. Long enough to pass a company forward and keep walking through the same door each morning.
Storms come and go.
The land endures.
Many thanks to Peter McPheeters for his time on February 22, 2025 and a year later on Tuesday, February 24, 2026.
To learn more about Peter, visit OceanviewProperties.net.
To learn more about Biddeford Pool in photos, visit https://www.bpoolphotos.com.
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Photos and interview by Cy Cyr. Contact him at info@bricktides.com
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