Though this is comparatively a small lumber operation, still, provided the truth has been approximated in the estimates made, this done annually amounts to no mean revenue, and affords employment to not a few persons, supplying bread for many mouths, and enriching those who conduct the business. While such operations build up many beautiful villages along the romantic banks of those fine streams and rivers where falls occur, they also give an impulse to the farming interests of the country contiguous, and serve as so many little hearts in the great system, whose pulsations vibrate with general intelligence, education, and improved manners throughout the interior.
For the principal facts involved in the view given of the Presumpscot and its lumbering interests, I am mainly indebted to the kindness of E. Clarke, M.D., of Portland, Maine.
The next considerable river is Saco, which rises among the White Mountains of New Hampshire, at the notch near where the Ammonoosuc River takes its rise. The Saco, from its source to the Atlantic Ocean, into which it empties, is about one hundred and forty miles in length, its current rapid, and waters clear. In common with many other rivers, some portion of it is exceedingly crooked. Within the single town of Fryeburg its serpentine windings are said to be thirty-six miles, making in this meandering only four miles on a direct line. Fine intervale lands abound in this vicinity, and also in Brownfield.
There are four noted falls on this river. The first is called Great Falls, at Hiram, where the water plunges down a ledge of rugged rocks seventy-two feet. At Lemington are the Steep Falls, of twenty feet. At Buxton are Salmon Falls, of thirty feet; and ten miles below we come to Saco Falls, where the river is divided by Indian Island, containing thirty acres, and on each side the river tumbles over a precipice of rocks forty-two feet high, and disappears amid the waves of the Atlantic. From the east side of the above-named island, which is fertile and pleasant, the appearance of these falls is majestic.
This river is easily affected by freshets. At such times the water rises ten feet, and sometimes it has risen twenty-five feet; when in many places it overflows its banks, and makes great havoc with property.
This was particularly the case in the great flood of October, 1775, when a large stream, called New River, broke out of the White Mountains, and bore down every thing in its way, till it found a channel in Ellis River. The Saco, being swelled enormously by this accession to its waters, swept away mills, bridges, domestic animals, and great quantities of lumber.
The burst of New River from the mountains was a great phenomenon; and as its waters were of a reddish brown or blood color, the people considered it an ill omen in those times of revolution.[ [22]
In regard to the lumbering interests on this river we know but little, save that in years gone by it has constituted a large share of the business done on the river, and that at the present time it has so much diminished as to be comparatively unimportant.[ [23]
CHAPTER VI.