Moosehead Lake
| Moosehead Lake | ||
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| Sunset on Moosehead Lake | ||
| Geographical location | Piscataquis County in Maine (USA) | |
| Tributaries | Moose River , Roach River | |
| Drain | Kennebec River | |
| Islands | > 80 | |
| Data | ||
| Coordinates | 45 ° 38 ′ N , 69 ° 39 ′ W | |
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| Altitude above sea level | 312 m | |
| surface | 311 km² | |
| length | 64 km | |
| width | 16 km | |
| scope | 451.9 km | |
| Maximum depth | 75 m | |
| Middle deep | 17 m | |
| Catchment area | 3280 km² | |
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The Moosehead Lake is the largest lake in Maine , the northeastern state of the United States .
It is located in the Longfellow Mountains of the Maine Highlands Region . The Kennebec rises in the lake ; Of the more than 80 islands, Sugar Island is the largest before Deer Island , which is also in the south of the lake, and Farm Island in the northern part of the lake.
There are several settlements on the lake, such as Greenville in the south, Moosehead in the south center across from Deer Island and Rockwood in the northwest. To the northeast are Seboomook and North East Carry, which can only be reached via the lake. There is a public road between Greenville, Moosehead, and Rockwood only on the lake's southwestern shore. On the southeast bank is a private road between Greenville and Lily Bay across from Sugar Island.
history
After the last ice age , known in North America as Wisconsin glaciation , over 1200 lakes and ponds were created in the Mooslake region; the lakes in the region now have a total area of 963 km² and thus make up a quarter of the total water area in the state.
Already in pre-European times, when paleo-Indians inhabited the region, the approximately 200 m high Mount Kineo attracted hunters and gatherers who were looking for flint or hornfels , which is also called hornstone here . Kineo is a Maliseet name for flint or flint. Both these early so-called Red Paint People (because they often used red ocher for their funerals ), who from 4000 B.C. BC, as well as later Penobscot and Norridgewock looked here for the valuable raw material at a time when iron was not available for the production of tools. Algonk troops came to the region around 1000 . Indians who didn't live by the lake, but who dug for flint here.
Around 1800 came Chief ( Chief ) Louis Annance from St. Francis tribe of Abenakis in the area of the later Greenville. Other tribes were Norridgewock, Abenaki, Delaware , Mohawk, and other Iroquois. Again and again they got into conflicts with each other over hunting rights, especially when European weapons came into the region and the tribes became increasingly dependent on beaver hunting, whose furs they exchanged for goods from the colonial powers.
European hunters soon made competition for the tribes living there, but also for the Iroquois Mohawk , who also supplied them with weapons. In 1764 surveyors from Massachusetts , to which Maine belonged for a long time, came to the lake-rich area. Greenville was the first non-indigenous settlement to be established on Township 9, Range 10 North of the Waldo Patent . The southern part went to Thornton Academy in Saco, the northern part to Saco Free Bridge. Nathaniel Haskell of Westbrook acquired the 11,000 acre southern section in 1824. He successfully recruited settlers who included Isaac Sawyer, Edmund Scammon, Oliver Young, William Cummings, Enoch Shaw, Ichabod Tufts, and Charles Meservey. The first boy born there was Alpheys D. Tufts, son of Ichabod Tufts, the first girl Bethiah Shaw, daughter of Enoch Shaw.
In 1831 the area was organized as the Haskell Plantation , incorporated in 1835 - the settlers elected a deputy. The settlement was initially called Cuba, a little later it was renamed New Saco, and finally it was called Greenville. Initially, the settlement was part of Somerset County, but when Piscataquis County was established in 1838, Greenville was part of the new county to which it still belongs today. But this first settlement was on Wilson Pond, not where it is today, namely on the lake. There in 1824 Nathaniel Haskell and Oliver Young sawed 10 acres of trees, Haskell's son-in-law John Smith deforested another 6 acres, then in 1825 the first road to Moosehead Lake was built.
In 1827, Haskell got Deborah Walden, his now widowed daughter, and their three children to move in with him. She later married Oliver Young and died in 1880. The expansion of the settlement proceeded slowly and the Indians were evidently friendly. More were added to the existing sawmills. When the incorporation took place in 1836 , the first construction was carried out where the place stands today.
Henry Gower built a house overlooking Moosehead Lake and a two-story hotel he named Seboomook House ; In 1845 he opened the first store that catered for land speculators, loggers and visitors. In 1846 there was a forge and a school next to the two houses and the shop. From 1846 the logs of the woodcutters were pulled with a steamboat . The steam boat Katahdin still serves the traffic on the lake today. In 1846 the Eveleth House was built, the second hotel. The philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau was enthusiastic about the beauty of the region.
During this time, the logging industry had long been transforming the Maine landscape. Commercial wood processing began there as early as 1631 at the Saco and Piscataqua. In addition to the loggers, raftsmen established themselves who took over and transported the logs. The long winters were used to transport the logs over the ice. As early as the middle of the 19th century, there was no longer any question of primeval forests.
James Withee was the first “settled minister”, so he worked as a farmer and as a priest, but it was not until 1858 that the first meeting house was built after meeting in different private houses, the Greenville Union Meeting House. In 1868, the Presbyterian lay priest James Cameron established a Union Church (today: Union Evangelical Church, United Church of Christ). Also Methodist recruited between Howland and Moosehead Lake, but they appeared only occasionally in Greenville. Methodist meetings did not begin until Elijah Young; a small church was built.
In the Civil War , 47 men from the region fought, in 1869 the Bangor and Piscataquis Railroad , later the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad, reached Greenville, but there were long delays. In 1871 it reached Guilford, Abbot in 1875, Blanchard in 1877. But it was not until July 1884 that the railway reached Greenville Junction. In 1888 the Canadian Pacific Railroad also reached Greenville.
The People's United Methodist Church was founded in 1899 and was consecrated on December 9, 1900. Ronald W. Walden, later a priest in Bangor, served here during the 1970s. He was a descendant of the first female settler, Deborah Walden.
Shirley was founded with the corporation in 1834. The place got its name from J. Kelly, a member of the Maine Legislature, the parliament. He named it after his hometown, the name Somerset was rejected.
Shirley was originally part of the "Million Acres" of the Bingham Kennebec trade. In 1791 William Bingham and Henry Knox acquired a large area at Kennebec. In the course of time the land was divided up and sold, so that today there are 43 townships. The headwaters of the Piscataquis are located around Shirley, and mills were built on Shirley Pond. The first settlement was established in 1825 when Joseph Mitchell, Eben and David Marble settled east of what is now Shirley. Where Shirley is today, Shaw and Jabez True bought land in 1829, and settlers from Poland came in 1832. The local post office was initially called True's Mills, but was named Shirley in 1834. At the time of incorporation, there were 25 voters on site. In 1848 the western half of Wilson township came to Shirley. Wilson Township was founded in 1838 and was initially called Savages's Mill.
Plum Creek Timber, a Seattle company and the largest private landowner in the United States, went public in April 2005 with a development that included the construction of 975 homes, two resorts, a golf course, boat berths, campsites, and over 100 rental cabins. Despite resistance from residents, the Maine Land Use Regulatory Committee accepted the project. In order to create facts, trees have been felled in some areas.
Rockwood and Mt. Kineo, located on the straits of Moosehead Lake, had been sought out early to win Flint. Rockwood was originally called Birch Point and was a popular campsite. Today there is the Rockwood Post Office, a shop and a few other houses. The railroad reached Rockwood around 1900, but it wasn't until decades later that a road connected Greenville and Rockwood. Rockwood was probably founded by settlers from Nova Scotia before the Civil War. The Somerset Railroad (predecessor of the Maine Central Railroad) built a connection to the Kineo Station at Birch Point. The name Rockwood probably goes back to Hiram Rockwood Page, who decided in 1909 that Kineo Station also needed a post office - which he named after himself. Around 1900 there were two shops and a number of houses there. The Rockwood Community Church, usually just called Log Chapel, was built in the 1940s. Today it is only supplied seasonally by the Union Evangelical Church (United Church of Christ). The Catholics built a mission church on the bridge over the Moose River; Initially, once or twice a year a Jackman priest came to Rockwood on foot, which was a 50 km hiking trail through jungle. Later priests came from the Holy Family Catholic Church in Greenville.
The poor soil hardly allowed farm work. Therefore, many turned to logging or led tourists and hunters, especially since Mt. Kineo was barely a kilometer across Moosehead Lake from Rockwood.
The first building on the Kineo peninsula was a tavern, built in 1844 and run by William and Henry Hildreth of Greenville. On July 4, 1846, the Amphitrite completed her maiden voyage on the lake and stopped in Kineo. With the Kineo House , the first hotel was built, but it was converted into a fishing lodge in 1856. The original hotel burned down, but a new one was built in 1870. But this too burned down in 1882, only to be rebuilt immediately. The now expanded Mt. Kineo House was able to accommodate over 500 guests in 1911. This boom collapsed with the decline in rail traffic and the increased use of the automobile. The Maine Central Railroad closed the line to Kineo in 1933 and the hotel was sold in 1938. When dismantled, the building caught fire and burned down completely. In 1940 the Samoset Corporation acquired Mt. Kineo, but business was poor.
Since 2012, the Kineo Band of Malicites , a Maliseet tribe also known as the Moosehead Lake Indians , has been fighting for state recognition alongside the four recognized tribes in Maine. Part of Kineo Mountain and possibly Sugar Island are to be designated as a tribal area. The recognized tribes are the Aroostook Band of Micmacs, the Houlton Band of Maliseets, the Penobscot Nation, and the Passamaquoddy Tribe. They are recognized by the federal government, but Maine has not yet recognized a single tribe.
geography
The 11,000 km² Moosehead region includes the headwaters of the Kennebec, the western arm of the Penobscot , the Piscataquis , the Pleasant and the Saint John Rivers .
The lake is 312 m above sea level and covers an area of 64 by 16 km, which corresponds to an area of 311 km². Its bank length is given as 640 km.
The largest tributary is the Moose River , which flows east of Jackman through Long Pond into Brassua Lake , the second largest is the Roach River .
literature
- Everett L. Parker: The Moosehead Lake Region. 1900-1950 , Arcadia Publishing 2004.
- Everett L. Parker: The Moosehead Lake Indians. Ethnicity, History, Legends , Greenville 2007.
Web links
- The Moosehead Historical Society and Museums
- History of Moosehead Lake Region , Moosehead Historical Society (July 16, 2011 memento in the Internet Archive ).
- The Moosehead Lake Region Resource Guide
- Webcam
Remarks
- ↑ Richard Boisvert: The Paleoindian Period in New Hampshire , in: Claude Chapdelaine (Ed.): Late Pleistocene Archeology and Ecology in the Far Northeast , Texas University Press, 2012, pp. 77-94.
- ↑ Maine Earth First: Another Act of Resistance to Plum Creek by Maine Earth First! .
- ^ Tribes fear loss of public funds with plan for new Moosehead tribe , in: Bangor Daily News, August 31, 2012.