PROSPECT -- She'd left on a Friday, celebrating her 2006 Columbus Day weekend with some shopping in Bangor and time with her daughter.

It was dark by the time Vera Dyer returned home. As she and her daughter approached her house, Dyer noticed how brightly the moon was shinning. She made a comment about it to her daughter.

Then it hit her. The moon wasn't supposed to be visible from where Dyer and her daughter were driving. Something should have been blocking their vision. Something was missing.

"Oh my God," Dyer said.

"What?" her daughter asked.

"The restaurant. It's gone."

The Sail Inn Restaurant, owned and operated by the Dyer family since 1948, was taken by the state of Maine under eminent domain laws in November 2003.

The Dyer family's story is now out in a book called "The Taking," by Dick Dyer, of Winthrop.

The state claimed the restaurant and the five acres on which it stood. A settlement regarding how much the property was worth or if the property had rightfully been taken had not yet been reached. When it was eventually settled, Maine Department of Transportation legally could not comment on details of the case, which includes confirming or denying events, said Ray Quimby, chief of right of way operations at MaineDOT.

But with one week before the Penobscot Narrows Bridge's grand opening, Vera Dyer came home to see the restaurant leveled.

She hurried to the phone to call her sons and asked them if they knew the restaurant was going to come down that morning.

None of them did.

"MaineDOT never came to say they were going to do it," said Vera Dyer, who is now 77. "They never said anything about it, or even notified the lawyers. All the years of hard work and sacrifice, then to see it gone like that. I was appalled."

The Sail Inn was a 55-year-old business located on about five acres of deep-water frontage on the Penobscot River, looking into Penobscot Bay. Built in 1936, the restaurant was purchased by then 18-year-old Eddie Dyer in 1948.

Dyer wasn't old enough to have a malt liquor license in Maine, so his parents signed with him. They also agreed to cook breakfast and lunch so Eddie could earn extra cash working as a stonecutter at the Grenci & Ellis Granite works in Frankfort. He met Vera Gebo, who worked as a waitress at the restaurant. The couple married and had six children.

Eddie and Vera moved into a house adjoining the restaurant in 1953, then built a new Sail Inn in 1968.

The new restaurant was simply decorated. It had paneled walls, booths and counters with a row of stools -- the kind of seating that catered to the restaurant's steady stream of solo-traveling truck drivers.

Its prominent feature was its windows, which highlighted a picturesque view. The restaurant specialized in fried and battered clams, fried pickled tripe, homemade biscuits, pies, tartar sauce and onion rings.

Running the restaurant was hard work, but it was worthwhile, Vera Dyer said.

"Anyone who has been in the restaurant business knows you live the place, because it takes all your time," she said. "We poured a lot of ourselves into it."

Eddie and Vera sold the business to their sons, Paul and Robert, in 1988.

Business continued to grow, along with recognition. Down East magazine featured the diner in its November 2001 edition and then-governor Angus King attended a 50th anniversary party in 1998.

Three years later, the restaurant was bulldozed. In response, 75 to 100 patrons and community members united in an organized protest at the Penobscot Narrows Bridge's ribbon cutting. They made placards. One elderly man silently stood with a sign in the middle of the bridge.

"I knew people were concerned, I knew they cared, but to do this like they did, and some stayed all day long, it was amazing," Vera Dyer said. "We weren't the ones who set (the protest) up. It was the people who wanted to do something."

The support was touching. But just the same, Vera Dyer said she was thankful her husband, who died in January 2003, hadn't lived to see it.

Eminent domain, the government's ability to possess private property for public use, is granted in the United States Constitutions' Fifth Amendment. In some situations, the state delegates eminent domain power to public and private companies in order to run telephone, power, water or gas lines. The act is legal as long as the owner of any appropriated land receives just compensation, which is usually based on the fair-market value of the property.

Most eminent domain cases don't get the kind of attention the Sail Inn taking did. Between the fiscal years of 2002 and 2006, MaineDOT acquired 6,808 properties. Eighty-eight percent of those acquisitions were considered minor takings, used primarily for minor strips, drainage or highway widening projects. In those situations, the payment was $5,000 or less.

Jeffrey T. Edwards, a partner at Preti, Flaherty, Beliveau & Pachios in Portland, who served as the Dyer family's attorney, said almost every major public works project involving highways, turnpikes and bridges involves the use of eminent domain.

"I think when it happens to people, it catches them because it's not something people are aware of until it comes knocking at their door," Edwards said. "Any road widening or bridge project, you're subject to having your property taken for that purpose. It's not done whimsically or out of malice; it needs to be done."

How and why land is taken is determined by federal rules and regulations, said Quimby.

"If regulations require, we take enough right of way to construct and maintain the project and to protect the safety of the public," Quimby said. "Beyond that, we have to consider the impacts on the owners abutting the highway. We're trying to thread the needle and require enough right of way to meet what the regulations say we need to meet and, at the same time, minimize the damage to the abutting property owners."

The Sail Inn was nestled between the old Waldo Hancock Bridge and the Dyer homestead. The restaurant was bringing in $500,000 a year at the time and, with more traffic predicated on Route 1 because of the new, scenic bridge, the family was planning for more business.

According to Dick and Vera Dyer, MaineDOT said publicly the Sail Inn would not be taken on at least three occasions. Assured their restaurant was secure, the Dyers spent $36,000 for a walk-in freezer/cooler and another $15,000 for a new well.

But the restaurant and its land were taken. The Dyer brothers were offered $225,000 for it. The family didn't believe the offer was just compensation for a successful restaurant or its river-front property.

Figuring out what just compensation for the property would be took the Dyers and the state into a five-year legal battle. Each real estate estimate presented from certified appraisers varied. Eight properties assessed as "like properties" were used to determine what was just compensation. Out of the eight, only three are still in operation today. One was a restaurant on Route 17 in rural Union, near an agricultural fairground.

In the case of the Sail Inn, there just wasn't any similar property that could be used to determine just compensation, said Edwards, the Dyer family's attorney. Maine law does not take into account the aesthetic or icon value of property when calculating just compensation.

"The Sail Inn was a unique situation because it was unique property," Edwards said. "It was a difficult property to appraise. It was an iconic restaurant and location, so there will be no properties similar to the Sail Inn. Restaurants come and go and this restaurant had been in the family for 50 years."

Five years passed. A settlement of $725,000 was eventually agreed on in November 2008. As part of that agreement, MaineDOT cannot comment on details of the case, other than what was included in its post-settlement press release, Quimby said.

"It's never an easy process when you're going to be taken by eminent domain because you really don't have the option to say, 'No, I don't want this to happen,' " Quimby said.

The family does not plan on reopening a restaurant. But Dick Dyer said if he can use what he's learned to help others, he will.

He's told his family's story in "The Taking," a 55-page workbook-style account of the Sail Inn's taking, the legal battle that followed, and what landowners need to know if they decide to challenge the process.

Besides telling the story of the Sail Inn, the book offers "quick clinics" throughout the text, giving advice about what to remember or research if land might be taken.

The case is officially closed. A book is out. The Sail Inn's former location is covered in bark and decorative boulders, but the site still draws tourists looking for that perfect photo -- a photo taken countless times from the late Sail Inn's deck.

Vera Dyer sees these visitors. She still lives on the adjacent property.

"Nobody is ever going to convince me that restaurant needed to be taken. Nobody," she said. "They could have done business and would have still been doing business if this wouldn't have happened. They could have gone and worked some place else for a year because of the construction. But nobody is going to make me believe they needed to take that restaurant.

"If anything, people have learned from it. It's water under the bridge now."

Sada Reed -- 621-5690

sreed@centralmaine.com