With more than a dozen volunteers gathered around him, geologist Chenzung Wang wheeled a cart across a small patch of grass on the outskirts of the former Loring Air Force Base.
“Take a look,” he said, pointing to a blip on the cart’s computer screen. A white parabola appeared in sharp contrast to the soil around it. Picked up by ground-penetrating radar, the anomaly, as Wang referred to it, indicates that, 5 or 6 feet underground, are the remains of a sentry dog that once patrolled the base.
That’s what the leaders of the Loring Air Museum were looking for.
The plot of land has long been home to the Sentry Dog Cemetery, honoring the dogs who died while stationed there. But the property is in the midst of a restoration, months after the museum secured a 99-year lease to retain control of it.
And when volunteers drive new fence posts to mark the cemetery’s boundary, they want them to be as accurate as possible.
“We’ve had it pretty darn close,” museum vice president Matt Cole said. “Today, it’s going to be perfect.”
The cemetery is located off Swamp Road on the southern end of the base, next to a building that formerly housed the sentry dogs.
More than 100 dogs served the base in its 41 operational years. There are 12, possibly 13 dogs buried in the cemetery. The Air Force switched to cremation at some point, volunteers who were stationed there said.
“They walked the perimeter. They were at the gate. They did the base security. They kept me safe,” Polly Chike, a museum director who was stationed at Loring in the 1980s and 90s. “The dogs mean everything. Absolutely everything.”
The dogs also patrolled the B-52 ramps and guarded the North River Depot, where nuclear weapons were stored.
Developer Green 4 Maine bought 450 acres of the former base, including the sentry dog memorial, from the Loring Development Authority in 2023. The lease agreement with Green 4 Maine grants the air museum oversight of the cemetery, and the museum pays nothing for use of the property.
As part of the restorations, the museum is replacing rotting perimeter fencing with new material, intended to keep the cemetery identical to how it originally looked in the 1960s. That includes the misspelled entrance sign, which for seven decades has read “Sentry Dog Cemetary.”
The fencing and memorials were previously rebuilt in 2014 by a 16-year-old from Presque Isle who took on the venture as his Eagle Scout service project after hearing from veterans that the site was in disrepair.
The current efforts by museum volunteers are designed to ensure the cemetery remains in good condition for years to come for veterans and others to visit and pay their respects.
“Occasionally there will be a canine handler that will show up and he’ll be out here, and he’ll come back to the museum right in tears,” Cole said. “Those dogs were like their partners. It’s a big deal.”
