Haven is a Maine town whose layered history of renaming turns the idea of a refuge into both a local inheritance and a bitter irony. Once a quiet community away from the state’s main tourist routes, it becomes the site of the buried spacecraft, the spread of the Tommyknockers’ influence, and a catastrophe that draws the outside world’s attention only when the town is already burning.

Names and Local Memory

Before it was called Haven, the town had four other names. In 1831, Montville Plantation became Coodersville. It retained that name until 1864, when residents chose Montgomery in honor of Ellis Montgomery, a local boy killed at Gettysburg. The choice seemed apt to the town at the time, especially since the last remaining Cooder, Albion, had gone bankrupt and died by suicide two years earlier.

In the years after the Civil War, a fashion for classical town names spread across Maine. In 1878, residents voted to rename Montgomery as Ilium, following the pattern of nearby Troy and other classically named towns. The decision caused a tearful protest from Ellis Montgomery’s seventy-five-year-old mother, who objected that fourteen years was hardly an “immortal memory” for her son. Some townspeople reportedly listened with enough sympathy to wonder whether the vote might be reversed; nevertheless, Montgomery became Ilium.

The name Ilium was later displaced by Haven through the intervention of a revival preacher known as Colson. Myrtle Duplissey, the town’s self-appointed historian, came to believe that Colson’s real name was Cooder and that he was Albion Cooder’s illegitimate son. That identification remained her conviction rather than an established fact, but it tied the town’s religious renaming back to the family associated with its earlier name.

The Revival and the Name Haven

Colson arrived in Ilium after bypassing Derry and setting up his tent in town. On a hot August night, his sermon began with the harvest as a symbol of divine reward before turning to the town itself. He called it sanctified and described it as a haven, comparing it to the home of Adam and Eve before they ate the forbidden fruit. Congregants remembered his ability to shout for Jesus, even while acknowledging that he was a scoundrel.

Colson’s appeal to sacred harvest and sanctuary also served his own interests. He urged the congregation to give the largest love offering of his stay, then had sexual relations with six young women after the meeting. His pious language and self-serving conduct coexist in the account: the promise of a sanctified refuge helped define the town’s new identity, while the preacher’s actions expose the distance between that promise and the man who voiced it.

A Quiet Town and Its Civic Life

In the later twentieth century, Haven is described as a wide place in the road, comfortably removed from Maine’s main tourist routes. Its ordinary civic life is local and personal. After Ralph McCausland died in 1972, his widow, Ruth, ran for town constable two years later. A young newcomer, Mumphry, opposed her on the assumption that the job required a man; the town elected Ruth by 407 votes to nine. Mumphry and his wife left Haven three weeks later, while his son stayed. Ruth was never opposed again.

Ruth’s election marked her return to public life after a bleak period following her husband’s death. She could not explain why becoming constable felt right, but the role let her remember Ralph while also resuming service to the town. The narration presents such a person as capable of becoming something like the heart of a small community: Haven’s civic continuity rests not only on its names and institutions but on the people who keep participating in its shared life.

That shared life changes as the alien influence spreads. By the time the town’s residents have begun to change, Haven contains a communal pool of knowledge and thought. Ruth, who would previously have dismissed such a thing as insane, recognizes that it is undeniable. The town’s closeness has shifted from the familiar bonds of local life to a collective consciousness that makes private thought less private.

The Town Sealed and Discovered

The crisis unfolds alongside the excavation of the spacecraft in the woods beyond Nista Road. Less than half a mile from the clothesline where a resident stares toward the hazy trees, Bobbi Anderson and Jim Gardener are uncovering more of the enormous object. The proximity binds the everyday town to the buried discovery: the woods are not a distant frontier but part of Haven’s immediate surroundings.

As the crisis intensifies, the town’s borders become physical and political boundaries. Haven is described as having become a separate country, with its borders policed. Devices placed in a rough perimeter around the town perform a function the residents do not consciously consider: sealing the borders when the time comes. This time arrives early, though apparently not too early. Meanwhile, John Leandro, who has investigated reports of visitors becoming ill and turning back, drives across the town line and enters Haven without difficulty, unaware of the changes and defenses that have transformed the place.

The town’s transformation also draws the attention of outsiders. News of a crashed plane and the death of Dr. Bailey reaches Gardener, who connects the report to the light aircraft that had passed over the ship and excavation. A broader international crisis—the prospect of renewed fighting in the Middle East and the advance of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ nuclear clock to two minutes before midnight—makes the buried ship seem potentially consequential beyond Haven. Gardener nevertheless doubts that the transformed town and its inhabitants are concerned with averting the world’s danger.

Fire, Exposure, and the Aftermath

When the clock-tower base bursts open at 3:05, the blast breaks nearly every window in Haven and many in nearby Troy and Albion. The image of a community previously isolated from major routes is reversed: smoke draws people toward the area, and crowds arrive before they understand the reported anomalies. State police and the National Guard eventually block the roads, but by the following morning the fire has become the greatest forest fire in Maine history. An easterly wind gives it a running start that cannot be overcome.

By nightfall, fewer than two hundred people remain alive in Haven, and much of the township’s wooded western half has burned or is still burning. As the air changes, the surviving Tommyknockers gather in Hazel McCready’s yard. Phil Golden and Bryant Brown start the large air exchanger, and those gathered around it gradually breathe more easily. The improvised refuge within the damaged town offers a stark counterpoint to the name Haven: survival now depends on a machine and a dwindling community, not on the sanctuary promised by its history.

The next morning, twenty fewer people are alive. Leandro’s story has broken worldwide, and photographs taken by dozens of witnesses as the ship rose make official denials by the State and Defense departments increasingly ineffective. When the Army finally enters Haven later that week, fewer than eighty Tommyknockers remain. The town’s story ends not with its old obscurity restored, but with public exposure, fire, and a radically diminished population: the place named for refuge becomes the landscape through which the outside world learns what has happened.