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    Around Great Moose Lake
    Around Great Moose Lake
    Around Great Moose Lake
    Ebook148 pages43 minutes

    Around Great Moose Lake

    By Brenda Seekins

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Athens, Harmony, Hartland, and St. Albans surround the 3,500-acre Great Moose Lake in central Maine, and this volume reveals the fascinating history found here. Sportsmen discovered this land in the mid-1800s and established hunting lodges on the lake s shore, which continued for more than 60 seasons. In their heyday, the lodges provided employment for locals and planted alluring mysteries for later generations. Citizens later thrived on the farming and manufacturing in the late 19th and early 20th century. The colorful past left a rich heritage of seasonal and year-round residents and visitors that shaped the personality of the area. Around Great Moose Lake unravels some mysteries of the lodges and focuses on the changing culture around the lake and its four towns.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateJul 26, 2006
    ISBN9781439617885
    Around Great Moose Lake
    Author

    Brenda Seekins

    In Sebasticook Valley, author Brenda Seekins highlights an area known internationally for its industry, education, artists, inventors, and adventurers. Seekins has been a reporter for thirty years and is a director with the Sebasticook Valley Chamber of Commerce. In compiling Sebasticook Valley, she has thoughtfully chosen images from valley historical societies and from her own and other private collections.

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      Book preview

      Around Great Moose Lake - Brenda Seekins

      times.

      INTRODUCTION

      It was not until after the Revolutionary War that organized settlements appeared in the area that would one day become Hartland, St. Albans, Harmony, and Athens. Reading the early history of those towns, Great Moose Lake is a sentence here or there where early settlers crossed a stream or the lake itself or they harnessed the power of the streams or rivers. In the early days of development, the lake was incidental to the primary objective of creating a new life in new communities.

      As the four towns were still building and growing, adventurers from the urban areas to the south were already looking for a playground away from their busy lives. They came north.

      This book attempts to tell something of two different lifestyles, and in some ways how one helped the other. The settlers came to build a life. The sportsmen, or sports, from Massachusetts came to benefit from the life they or their families had already built. Locals found employment with the sports and the sports demonstrated a different lifestyle and pleasure in the lake.

      By the time the sports arrived to enjoy the lake, the settlements were more than 50 years old. The visual history of the four towns and their lake does not begin until the late 1800s, some of the earliest photographs date back to 1888, captured by the adventurous sports from away.

      The settlers arrived around 1800 and incorporated their towns within the next decade or two. They came east and northeast, overland and not up the streams and river, often clearing their own roads and paths as they came. Some optimistic adventurers purchased land in Athens and Harmony, sight unseen, when large tracts became available as schools and towns of early Massachusetts sold their state land grants in the wilderness of Maine to raise cash. Some settlers scouted the area first, leaving to return a year or two later to bring their families to the new settlements.

      In 1792, Ephraim Ballard and Samuel Weston were the first surveyors of record in the region, labeling some of the area as ranges in Waldo Patent and north of the Plymouth Claims. It would still be another 28 years before the land would be part of a state known as Maine. Much of Maine’s population at that time lived along the coast or on the lower reaches of the major rivers. Interior Maine had only attracted adventurers and squatters to that point.

      Dr. John Warren of Revolutionary War fame was one of the earliest landowners, owning all of Hartland and St. Albans in addition to neighboring Corinna and Palmyra. His land was a grant for his services during the war. In Athens, David Copp of Jackson, New Hampshire, and six other men became land developers. Copp purchased the land from Berwick Academy, while Charles Vaughn purchased Harmony lands from Hallowell Academy. All the communities were originally land grants to communities, schools, and individuals by the Massachusetts state government.

      Telling the story Around Great Moose Lake is not a comprehensive history of the lake, but merely a collection of stories, facts, and photographs that begin to tell some history of the lake and the towns that border it.

      —Brenda Seekins, 2006

      One

      HARTLAND

      AT THE LAKE

      The Gosling, a motor launch from the Wild Goose Club, was a common sight on Great Moose Lake in the late 1800s and early in the 1900s. The motor launch and others like it allowed members of the hunting and fishing club to travel between the main lodge at Castle Harmony, on the northern shore at the outlet of Main Stream, and the Commodore Club, a lodge built by a second generation of club members, on the southwest shore of the upper lake.

      Originally built in 1888, the Commodore Club was still a popular destination nearly 30 years later in 1917 and already had a new addition to provide adequate space for its members and families. The Wild Goose Club and its Hartland and Harmony lodges hosted sportsmen and their families, primarily from Massachusetts, for more than 60 years.

      The sportsmen of 1917 were a polished, but rugged bunch. Jackets, white

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