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living legacy of abject clear-cutting. Moose pad around like they own the place. Visiting in the wrong week of the wrong season is to risk being carried off and consumed by sanguinivorous insects. And hikers of the Appalachian Trail still become badly, and occasionally, fatally lost in the woods here—so tangled, dark, and domineering—even in the mild summer season. This immense forest drew European Americans seeking dominion of the frontier, as French Canadians and Protestant New Englanders battled to exploit the region, its resources, and people. More whites from the gentler latitudes flooded in as the industrial evolution of the logging industry fueled, first a timber market, and then a paper production boom largely necessitated by the advent of the rotary printing press.
The forest was logged in a resource extraction so sweeping that pockets of old-growth trees remain only in the region’s most remote hills. The Androscoggin River, whose effective headwater is Mooselookmeguntic, was one of the most severely polluted Rivers in America only two generations ago, largely as an effect of the sulfite processes used in paper making. Long before any of that nonsense, Abenaki Indians—the “Dawn People”—knew well that traveling overland in Maine was, for the most part, folly. Mercifully, the land in this corner of the country is positively shot through with water: lakes, ponds, bogs, innumerable streams, and the massive rivers that frame and ABOVE Photograph of a ‘zig-zagged’ cast-in-place concrete labyrinth weir RIGHT Kennebec River Log Drive, 1922