Edward S. Allen ’76 died on December 22, 2025, in Bridgton, Maine.

(The following was provided by the Chandler Funeral Home on December 22, 2025:)

Edward S. Allen ’76

Bridgton – Edward “Ned” Stevens Allen, age 71, passed away on Monday, December 22, 2025, at home with his loving wife by his side. He was born on October 1, 1954, in Portland, the fourth child of the late Neal and Alice (Gamage) Allen, Jr.

Although born in Portland, he grew up in Schenectady, NY, where his father was a professor of history at Union College. The family spent the 1960 – 1961 academic year in Scotland, where his father was on sabbatical teaching history at the University of Aberdeen. It was here that Ned attended first grade and learned to read. This instilled a love of learning and an interest in the field that continued throughout his life.

He graduated from Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, with a major in history in 1976. In 1988 he began his career in this field at the Maine Historical Society’s Wadsworth-Longfellow House (boyhood home of the poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) in Portland, Maine. In 1991 he became the Society’s education coordinator, overseeing the development of programs for schoolchildren and the general public. He enrolled in the New England Studies Program at the University of Southern Maine and earned an MA in 1992. In 1995 he became the executive director of the Bridgton Historical Society, and was responsible for all aspects of operating a local historical society with a museum and historic house, Narramissic.

Building on his prior professional experience, he and Carol moved to the Berkshires in 1999, where he served as the curator of collections as well as the education coordinator of the Berkshire County Historical Society at Arrowhead, where Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick.

Missing life in Maine, they returned home to Bridgton where Ned continued to pursue his career at the Portland Harbor Museum in South Portland, then on to the Freeport Historical Society as the collections director, and finally coming to rest at the Bridgton Historical Society in 2008 as the executive director, where he retired in 2020. He was particularly proud of the partnership created between the Society and Loon Echo Land Trust in the effort to protect the historic Peabody-Fitch Woods surrounding the Narramissic Farm. During these years he also wrote and published two books: Bridgton – Images of America (2008) and later The Sebago Lakes Region – A Brief History (2013).

Ned enjoyed other interests as well. He and Carol gardened every summer, raised sheep on Woodside Farm, the Allen homestead in Sebago, their first home; and then chickens in Bridgton, where they finally settled. He loved photography, even learning how to repair cameras at a school in Denver, where he and Carol resided in the early eighties. And only recently he also started painting and that passion blossomed as well. Truly a man of many talents who will be missed dearly.

He leaves his loving wife, Carol Colby, his siblings Richard Allen of Sebago, Marian Allen of Sitka, Alaska, and Neal Allen of Sebago, along with several nieces and nephews and cousins scattered throughout the country.