HALLOWELL — According to friends of Gerald “Gerry” Mahoney, the city may have looked different without him.

Mahoney died Sept. 1 after a long illness. He was 78.

According to his obituary, Mahoney was born in Standish, Michigan, and later attended the University of Michigan. Mahoney played for the university’s baseball team and participated in training camp for Major League Baseball’s Detroit Tigers.

Mahoney pursued a law degree from Georgetown University, where he met his wife, Wendy, to whom he was married for 53 years. Mahoney later became a special agent for the FBI, serving in Philadelphia, Boston and Augusta offices. He was named the bureau’s Agent of the Year in 1996.

Hallowell’s city historian, Sam Webber, called Mahoney’s death a “terrible and sad loss” of someone who “contributed so much to the city.”

“We worked on many projects together for nearly 30 years … including the Museum in the Streets and the crane boom,” Webber said. “Most of the time we did historical research together.”

Bob McIntire said he helped Webber and Mahoney with the Museum in the Streets project, which added plaques with historic facts about the city in several locations. McIntire said Mahoney was deeply interested in history, evidenced by his 2003 book “Ardent Spirits: the Franklin Debating Society: A Social History of Hallowell, Maine in the Early 19th Century.”

McIntire said Mahoney found a large collection of meeting reports and writings from the Franklin Debating Society at the Hubbard Free Library. According to a 2012 column in Summertime in the Belgrades, the group was made up of 16- and 17-year olds who worked at a print shop. The group, which operated in the early 1800s, wrote essays and discussed the important topics of the time; racism, slavery and status of women.

According to columnist Katy Perry, the group was named after Benjamin Franklin, as he was also an apprentice printer and founded a similar group called the Junto.

McIntire said Mahoney also compiled the letters of John Drew, a 19th-century sea captain from East Hallowell, now Chelsea, in a collection titled, “From the Pine to the Palm: The Library Letters of Captain John Drew.” McIntire said Drew’s letters helped the library pay off its mortgage, after the library reached out to Drew for a contribution to help pay off their expansion costs. Drew agreed to give the royalties from his columns titled “Sea Letters by the Kennebecker,” which were published in the Boston Journal. Those royalties, McIntire said, paid off the library’s mortgage.

In 2016, the Kennebec Journal reported that Mahoney came across Drew’s journal while again poking around in the Hubbard Free Library. The letters were read at an event at the library, where members of Drew’s lineage were in attendance.

Mahoney was heavily involved in a number of city organizations, including Row House, the Hubbard Free Library, and the Vaughan Woods & Historic Homestead.

In February 2019, the Kennebec Journal reported that Mahoney, Webber, Al Hague and Irv Paradis restored a portion of a crane that sits at Granite City Park, on the north end of Hallowell’s downtown. Hague said he and Mahoney were heavily involved in bringing the crane, which is linked to John Perazzi and Settimo Masciadri of Hallowell Granite Works, to the park in 2014 as part of the Waterfront Advisory Committee.

“He and I were great partners in this project all the way through,” Hague said. “Just a nice guy; straight as an arrow.”

That committee helped aid in the creation of the park itself. Hague said he and Mahoney convinced the city to build up the foundation and boardwalk on the shore, which is now the home of the city’s iconic brightly-colored Adirondack chairs. Hague said the city would look very different without Mahoney’s work on the committee.

“These things don’t happen in a minute,” Hague said. “We worked fairly extensively over a period of time.”

“He’s a very fine gentleman,” he added. “I can’t say enough about him.”

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