Illustrator and painter D.D. Coombs of Auburn produced this full-page illustration for the Lewiston Evening Journal in 1895 to show some of the changes in Lewiston over its first century. The city was incorporated in 1795.
Delbert Dana Coombs was born in Lisbon Falls in 1850 and moved with his family as a toddler to New Gloucester, where he soon showed a proclivity for art and drawing. He began making a name for himself when James Blaine, a powerful Maine politician who almost won the presidency in 1884, asked him to draw cartoons to help his campaign. He was then asked to run the Lewiston Evening Journal’s new illustrating department, which gave him a steady income and the chance to continue growing as an artist. By the late 1880s and 1890s he had established himself as a well-known landscape painter known for his pastoral scenes in Maine and New Hampshire — many in the Lewiston-Auburn area — as well as for his illustrations of all sorts and portraits of well-known Maine leaders, some of which still hang in government buildings and museums in Maine. Coombs lived most of his adult life in Auburn, and became well known to readers of the Lewiston Evening Journal for his many illustrations and sketches. He died in 1938 at the age of 88 and was buried in a family plot in the Mount Auburn Cemetery alongside his parents and his wife. Artistically prolific throughout his life, he is said to have painted a picture on the day he died.
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