The
Sawmills
A
mill crew takes a break at a sawmill near Sanford, c 1910. (photo:
Fred Libby, courtesy Maine State Museum)
In the
eighteenth century, when Europeans first began settling in Maine,
the region's seemingly limitless forests were seen as a vast
emporium of wealth. Rivers offered a means of powering the mills
which could convert the logs to marketable lumber. In many Maine
towns, the first frame structures to be built were sawmills.
A
double sawmill in Buxton on the Saco River, looking toward the
eastern side of Bonny Eagle Falls around 1880. In its heyday this
mill could churn out 2,000,000 board feet annually (photo
courtesy Maine Historic Preservation Commission).
At first
the mills were built on rivers near the coast, but as forests were
cleared in coastal areas the mills were moved further inland. In and
around Bangor, the epicenter of Maine's exploding timber industry by
the mid-nineteenth century, there were at one time over 200 sawmills
in operation, sawing over a million and a half board-feet daily.
.
Lower
dam in Norway, December 1864. On lesser-flowing streams, like the
Little Androscoggin, a series of dams helped maximize power (photo
courtesy Maine Historic Preservation Commission).
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But while the scale of sawmill operations in Bangor was staggering,
there were over 1000 other active sawmills in the state by 1870, and
the majority were relatively small (after the mid-nineteenth century
some of these were powered by steam rather than water).
As
late as the 1930s, water powered mills continued to operate. This
mill in Andover is on the Ellis River, a tributary of the
Androscoggin (photo courtesy Maine
State Archives, George French Collection).
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When the
timber industry exhausted the resource, most of Maine's sawmills
were abandoned. Although many dams remain on Maine rivers, the
flowing waters are no longer a significant source of power--many of
these dams may be removed in coming years as people realize the
benefits of free-flowing rivers to fish and river ecosystems in
general.
Photos
and information are derived from Paul E. Rivard, Maine Sawmills,
Maine State Museum, 1990. Photos reproduced by permission of the
Maine
State Museum.
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River Culture