Maine, The Woods and The Sea

In The Woods and the Sea, (Knopf), Dudley Cammett Lunt makes the theme of these books explicit: "I am one who likes links with the past," he says. His past is a savory Maine boyhood: his grandfather's house, remembered for its abundance of cherries and peaches; delightful summers at Pine Point, where fire balloons were sent aloft on the Fourth of July if there was a light offshore air; the marvelous clambakes of Uncle Ira on the shore of some tidal river, reachable only by birchbark canoe; early canoe trips past the relics of log drives; "booms, cribs, sluices, dams, tramways, yards, tote roads." Many of these relics are rotting into oblivion. "The forest is taking over again," Lunt says. He closes his book with a plea that motors be kept from the proposed Allagash National Riverway. "Keep it wild," he says. "For God's sake, keep it wild."

Some of the books written by Dudley Lunt include The Road to the Law (1932); The Bounds of Delaware (1947); The Farmers Bank: an historical account of the president, directors and company of The Farmers Bank of the State of Delaware, 1807–1957 (1957); and Thousand Acre Marsh (1959), a book describing the marshes, swamps, and tidal creeks of both Maine and Delaware. He also wrote Tales of the Delaware Bench and Bar (1963), which sketches the development of the court system in Delaware from colonial times; The Woods and the Sea (1965), a collection of reflections on the natural settings of Maine, and Taylors Gut (1968), the focus of this manuscript collection. Mr. Lunt also edited several volumes of Thoreau’s works, one of which was The Concord and the Merrimack (1954).

The area from which many lumber industries drew their wealth was previously the home of Native American tribes that archaeologists believe first settled in the region -- ten centuries before the lumbermen came. The tundra-like environment left by the last Ice Age finally yielded to dense forest in northern Maine about 10,000 years ago. Though a few families of Paleoindians may have traveled through the Allagash region at that time, the archaeological record shows a larger population during the Archaic period (10,000 to 4,000 years ago). The people of this era were generally nomadic, using nets for fishing and stone or wood tools. Most plentiful among the artifacts discovered from this period are stone axes and gouges for woodworking. Between 4,000 and 3,500 years ago these types of tools became less common, suggesting a shift from dugout canoes to a birch bark type. This view is also supported by a shift in the frequency of sites to drainage areas where heavier dugouts would not have been useful.

The Ceramic Period (3,000 to 500 years ago) is named for the emergence of the use of pottery. Though not very durable at this point, pottery enabled cooking directly on the fire, rather than the labor-intensive method of heating stones and placing them into a bark or wooden container. Although the Allagash region is not conducive to the long life of ceramic artifacts, archaeologists have found pottery here at least 2,000 years old.

According to Dr. Art Spiess of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, “For most of prehistory, Maine’s Native American population supported itself by hunting, fishing, and gathering in band organized societies without complex political organization…Maine Native Americans always have been relatively mobile in lifestyle and lived in relatively small groups.” The archaeological record seems to indicate that traditional Native American's began to move away from the Allagash region early in the 1800s.

Many of the early settlers recalled Indians paddling the rivers and befriending the whites wintering in the vicinity. The first settlers learned a great deal about the area, its natural resources and survival skills from them.

The meaning of the name Allagash has several interpretations. Author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau explored the upper reaches of the Allagash River in the 1800's. His guide, Polis, translated Allagash as "hemlock bark". William Willis, an Algonquin scholar, cites the name meaning "bark camp" from a hunting camp located at Allagash Lake. Another scholar, Lucius Hubbard, thought the name was a contraction from Allegaskwigam'ook or "bark cabin lake".

Most of the early settlers were of Scotch-Irish descent. Some were decendents of loyalists who were displaced after the Revolutionary War and others were immigrants searching for a place to call home.

The first white settlers began moving in to the area in the early 1800’s. The need for pine for shipbuilding brought lumber barons and opportunists. Lumber companies and lumberjacks were sent to Northern Maine to harvest the pine. Naturally the workers brought their families with them. The lure of having their own land was a huge incentive for people to inhabit such a vast, untamed wilderness. Numerous homesteads were established along the Allagash River, St. John River and the Little Black River.