The Changing Nature of the Maine Woods

1. The Maine Woods: Through Time and Across Space

1 | The Maine Woods Through Time and Across Space From this elevation, just on the skirts of the clouds, we could overlook the country, west and south, for a hundred miles. There it was, the State of Maine, which we had seen on the map, but not much like that—immeasurable forest for the sun to shine on, that eastern stuff we hear of in Massachusetts. No clearing, no house. It did not look as if a solitary traveler had cut so much as a walking-stick there. —Henry David Thoreau, during his 1846 journey to Ktaadn (Katahdin) An Ancient Forest in Portland From the I-295 Fore River bridge into Portland, the new Mercy Hospital stands out, east across the water, below Bramhall Hill and the Western Promenade. In 2007, when the land was being prepared for construction, excavators struck a layer of ancient tree trunks (figure 1.1). A team of scientists was quickly assembled. Led by Woody Thompson of the Maine Geological Survey, the crew uncovered not just trunks and branches, but also remnants of other plants, insects, marine bivalves, and, quite remarkably, green conifer needles still attached to the preserved twigs of some longdead tree. Reconstructing this prehistoric scene was not easy. It required theworkof geologists,paleoecologists,andatree-ringexpert,whoassessed 2 t h e ch a ngi ng nat u r e of t h e m a i n e woods sediment layers,identifiedspecies,datedfossils,andunearthedcluesabout events leading to the deposition of this prehistoric forest into the sea.1 In their recent article, published in the journal Quaternary Research, the scientific team concluded that these plants and insects belonged to a white spruce–balsam poplar woodland that thrived some 13,500 years ago on the slope of Bramhall Hill. Fossil pollen in lake sediments from across Maine tellusthatthiswoodlandtypewaswidespreadinthestateafterthemassive continental glacier melted away and retreated north into Canada. During that time, the position of the sea relative to Maine’s coast was as much as 125feetaboveitspresentlevelandconsequentlymuchfartherinland.Bramhall Hill was an island and the Fore River part of the ocean proper. The contemporaneous deaths of the excavated trees, their broken trunks, and the mixed sediment layers suggest that the slope of Bramhall Hill gave way suddenlyandtheforest plummeted into thesea,minglingwithclayandsea shells of the Presumpscot marine sediments. The remnants of the ancient forest and the ocean floor were preserved in situ in the sediment layers, now above sea level.2 SouthernMainewascolonizedbyPaleoindians3 notlongaftertheBramhall Hill spruce forest met its demise.4 Millennia before their first contact Figure 1.1 White spruce tree trunk, 13,500 years old, excavated in 2007 near the new Mercy Hospital site in Portland, Maine. Note the bent trunk, thought to be the result of a landslide. t h e m a i n e woods 3 with Europeans, they had established rich cultures across the entire state, influencing the ecosystems within which they lived in ways that have been largely obscured by time. The first successful European settlements in southern Maine (English) were established in the 1620s and 1630s.5 Extensive harvesting of big white pines for ship masts and lumber followed soon thereafter, along the lower parts of rivers such as the Piscataqua, Saco, and Presumpscot. But settlement and clearing of the presettlement forest was slow and sporadic, held back by warfare with the Abenakis and the French, until the ultimate English victories in the late 1750s. When the trickle of settlement became a river in the early 1800s, the impact on the forests of southern Maine was profound. Land was rapidly cleared for farms and timberextractedforexport ,shipbuilding,localconstruction,andfuelwood.By the mid-1800s, about one-third of southern Maine was open farmland and the logging frontier had moved Down East along the coast and north into the interior along the Kennebec, Penobscot, and St. John rivers. Figure 1.2 Map of Maine, highlighting Portland and Moosehead Lake. 4 t h e ch a ngi ng nat u r e of t h e m a i n e woods By the mid-nineteenth century, external conditions again brought changes to southern Maine. Developing cities in Massachusetts and elsewhere , the advent of railroads for transporting food, and better land in the Midwest lured people away from farms and rural towns throughout the state. The population of Gorham, for example, only ten miles inland from Portland, declined from 3,351 in 1870 to 2,541 in 1900.6 Urban folks from the burgeoning...