“The more we know the easier it is to accept each other, in my experience,” said Lea Sutton, the new director of North Gorham Public Library. Sutton brings years of experience and love of learning to the library that has served northeast Gorham and eastern Standish for 125 years. She was director of the Davis Memorial Library in Limington for ten years and still worked there part-time before coming to Gorham in October.

Sutton was born in Stanford, Connecticut to Quaker parents who met at Earlham College. The daughter of teachers, she lived in Indiana and Iowa before earning her BA in history at Earlham. She graduated from the Cincinnati University College of Law, where in 1976 she was one of the first women students. Sutton moved to Westbrook with her former husband before settling in Standish in 1983

Sutton did not practice law in Maine but was the head librarian for the Cleves Law Library in Portland from 1982 to 1987. She was the head pre-school teacher at the Friends School of Portland, helping to start the private elementary Quaker School while creating the preschool curriculum. She has two adult daughters who live in Waterboro and Eliot, Maine.

“Of course, books and reading are a huge part of my life,” Sutton said,” I love what old things tell us: old stories, old people, old trees, old buildings, even old cars and old movies.” A committed “tree hugger,” she loves to hike and observe her garden. This year she experimented with “no mow summer,” and found out what wanted to grow in her yard. “I learned to really appreciate the tolerance of my neighbors for the resulting landscape,” she said.