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c h a p t e r f o u r Alone with Scribe and Staff Rewriting the White Mountains, 1870–1900 The southern boundary of the White Mountains is roughly delineated by a range of mountains stretching from Mount Chocorua near the Maine state line toward the Pemigewasset River to the west. Immediately to the west of the peak celebrated for its association with “Chocorua’s Curse” rises its neighbor, Mount Paugus, named by the poet Lucy Larcom for the Sokosis leader, and known locally as Old Shag or Toadback.1 Spring runoff from both peaks swells Paugus Brook on its course toward the Bearcamp River to the south. The notch through which Paugus Brook runs presents a challenging obstacle to hikers; during a traverse of the range in 1925, Brooks Atkinson suggested that those who attempt to climb the two thousand feet from Paugus Brook to its namesake summit are “by no means numerous or altogether wise” (Atkinson and Olson 68). Today a hiking trail winds from a trailhead at the end of Paugus Mill Road through third-growth forest, past a pile of sawdust and industrial detritus that marks the site of an old lumber mill along Paugus Brook, and northward to the former village of Albany along the Swift River. The toponymic and topographic sediment that layers this eastern end of the Sandwich Range complicates what might at first appear to be the simple act of hiking through the notch. The artifacts that litter the site of the old Paugus Mill —tin stovepipes, stone foundations, and fuel cans painted with a barely distinguishable Mobil Pegasus surrounding an immense mound of sawdust—suggest that the site had been home to a logging operation as recently as the mid1950s . An array of wooden scaffolding buttressing sections of Paugus Brook nearby, however, hints at earlier use. According to the oral histories collected by Marjory Gene Harkness in the mid-1950s for the Tamworth Narrative, a mill operated on or near that site between 1907 and the mid 1920s, chiefly exporting oak pilings to serve as foundation for reclaimed land in East Boston. 104 alone with scribe and staff In the late 1880s Frank Bolles, who had purchased a summer home in the nearby village of Tamworth Iron Works, engaged his Tamworth neighbor Nathaniel Berry in a quest to find what he thought to be a “lost trail” northward along Paugus Brook to the Swift River, believing this to be a significantly shorter route from Tamworth to Conway. Berry, a “farmer, lumberman, hunter, trapper , surveyor, carpenter, and public-spirited citizen,” whose family had lived on the same Tamworth farm for at least two generations, himself recalled a road through the notch when he was a boy around 1850 (Bolles, At the North 45– 46). Roughly a mile north of Berry’s farm on Paugus Brook (almost precisely where today’s mill site remains visible), Bolles and Berry entered a “clearing of an acre or more” that was home to “the ruins of a saw-mill” where in the years before the Civil War there had stood “two or three slab houses” and a “stable where the lumberman’s oxen had been kept in the winter nights.” Bolles’s narrative of the expedition in his 1893 (first edition) book At the North of Bearcamp Water makes it clear that he and his companion passed through an industrial landscape that had long since been abandoned to the hardwoods of the New England forest; Bolles noted how the “strong, quarrelsome blackberry had mastered the sawdust” (48). Although the date of the site’s earliest use is unclear, what is apparent is that the same site on the banks of Paugus Brook had been used for a sawmill on at least two if not three separate occasions between 1840 and 1960. Leaving their own marks on the forest floor, the hikers who pass through the sparse mixed hardwood forest of beech, birch, and maple past the site today are provided with precious little historical context save for National Forest Service signs threatening eager souvenir hunters with a hefty fine, signs whose only interpretive function is to designate this as a “historic site.” The future of industrial artifacts in National Forest wilderness areas has recently been a contentious topic among White Mountain historians and the National Forest Service. While there are vocal proponents for rewilding wilderness areas by removing logging artifacts, Littleton, New Hampshire, writer Mike Dickerman argues that the White Mountains occupy a “permanent...

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