The Story Behind Lilac Season: How a Rock in Maine and a Distillery in Indiana Became a Saga

When I was a child, I found the initials M.S. 1917 carved into a large granite boulder outside my home in Sullivan, Maine. I don’t know why, but I became convinced those initials belonged to a man named Malcolm Silsby. Silsby was a common enough surname in Downeast Maine, and the idea rooted itself in my imagination. As the years passed, the carving weathered until it was barely visible, but the significance — true or not — stayed with me.

I grew up in a town most people have never heard of. In the 1980s and 1990s, Sullivan had a population of around nine hundred. I lived in the old Harvey Robertson house, built in the 1920s by one of the rising quarry masters of the era. The granite industry shaped everything: the landscape, the economy, the stories the old-timers told about teams of oxen hauling massive blocks down the main road before the First World War took the young men away to France.

Harvey Robertson and his house feature in Lilac Season. It was typical of the style of house built by the well off prior to the Great Depression. Robertson, a Sullivan quarry master whose family hailed from Nova Scotia, traded Sullivan granite for Florida cypress with which to trim the mantles and pillars of his magnificent house.

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to write a story set in Sullivan during its granite‑boom days. But life carried me elsewhere. I moved from Maine to Indiana, started a family, and the story I thought I’d write never materialized.

Then one day, everything shifted.

On a tour of a distillery in Nashville, Indiana, I stepped into a reconstructed moonshiner’s cabin. The guide explained how bootleg whiskey traveled from Brown County to Indianapolis speakeasies during Prohibition. Something sparked — a sudden collision of two worlds I had never imagined together. Maine and Indiana. Granite and moonshine. The past I came from and the place I now lived.

Somehow, those two landscapes fused into the beginnings of Lilac Season, the first book of the Daugherty Saga.

And I remembered the initials on that rock.

M.S. 1917. The year the United States began drafting men for the Great War. Had he carved them because he didn’t know if he’d return? Had he left space for someone else’s initials beside his?

Whoever he was — real or imagined — he became Mal in Lilac Season, the young man Lilly and Victor drive to Waukeag Station, where he will board a train to basic training and eventually to France.

Here is a moment from that scene:

Old Eli Beale was the ferryman. He never spoke. Lilly called him Charon behind his back. The ferry bumped to the opposite shore. Victor had to crank the car again to move the Model T off the deck, and Lilly and Mal began to speculate that they might have to tow it onto land. Mal suggested pushing the T off the ferry and Victor shouted, “No, you don’t!” Finally he got it started.

“Anyway,” Mal continued, “this old war is just about over.”

“You think so?” Lilly said hopefully.

“Absolutely. They’re just sending us over there to finish the Krauts off. They’re already practically beat. I may not even go to Europe.”

Lilly didn’t say anything. She thought about the initials Mal had etched into a piece of granite before he left. M.S. 1917. He had not carved hers beside them. She had noticed.

There truly was a ferry that carried travelers across the bay to Waukeag Station before the bridge was built in 1926 — the Old Singing Bridge, whose humming metal still echoes in my dreams. It was dismantled and replaced the year I left home in 1999.

So while Lilac Season is set largely in Indianapolis, part of its heart will always belong to Sullivan. To the granite dust. To the old house. To the initials carved into a rock by someone I never knew, whose imagined life became part of the story I finally wrote.