Swamp Stomp
Volume 16, Issue 38
Katahdin Woods and Waters Recreation Area (Katahdin Woods and Waters) is a part of the North Woods located in north central Maine. The area is approximately 87,500 acres within a larger landscape already conserved by public and private efforts starting a century ago. “Katahdin Woods and Waters contains a significant piece of this extraordinary natural and cultural landscape: the mountains, woods, and waters east of Baxter State Park (home of Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail), where the East Branch of the Penobscot River and its tributaries, including the Wassataquoik Stream and the Seboeis River, run freely.” This is a popular destination due to its waterways, scenery, geology, flora and fauna, night skies, and so much more.
Katahdin Woods and Waters contains objects of significant scientific and historic interest. For some 11,000 years, Native peoples have inhabited the area, depending on its waterways and woods for sustenance.” The native people would use the waterways as their main form of transportation. They would move around the area seasonally searching for many resources, such as food, medicine, and furs. Due to nearby archeological research, researchers believe that there is still a lot to be discovered about these native people in the Katahdin Woods and Waters area.
The first documented Euro-American exploration of the Katahdin region dates to a 1793 survey commissioned by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. After Maine achieved statehood in 1820, Major Joseph Treat, guided by John Neptune of the Penobscot Tribe, produced the first detailed maps of the region. The Maine Boundary Commission authorized a survey of the new State in 1825, for which surveyor Joseph C. Norris, Sr., and his son established the “Monument Line,” which runs through Katahdin Woods and Waters and serves as the state’s east-west baseline from which township boundaries are drawn
Henry David Thoreau — who made the “Maine Woods” famous through his publications — approached from the headwaters of the East Branch to the north. With his Penobscot guide Joe Polis and companion Edward Hoar in 1857, on his last and longest trip to the area, he paddled past Dacey Farm with just a brief stop at Hunt Farm. He wrote about his two nights in the Katahdin Woods and Waters area — the first at what he named the “Checkerberry-tea camp,” near the oxbow just upriver from Stair Falls, and the second on the river between Dacey and Hunt farms where he drank hemlock tea… Artists and photographers have left indelible images of their time spent in the area. In 1832, John James Audubon canoed the East Branch and sketched natural features for his masterpiece “Birds of America.” Frederic Edwin Church, the preeminent landscape artist of the Hudson River School, first visited the area in the 1850s, and in 1877 invited his landscape-painter colleagues to join him on a well-publicized expedition from Hunt Farm up the Wassataquoik Stream to capture varied views of Mount Katahdin and environs. In the early 1900s, George H. Hallowell painted and photographed the log drives on the Wassataquoik Stream, and Carl Sprinchorn painted logging activities on the Seboeis River.” A lot can be discovered about what has changed on Earth over the years by studying the area’s geology.
For these reasons and many more, President Obama proclaimed the Katahdin Woods and Waters Recreation Area as a national monument.
Source: “Proclamation by the President of the United States, August 24, 2016: Establishment of the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument.” The Free Press. The Free Press, 25 Aug. 2016. Web. 31 Aug. 2016.