Before her death in 1910, Nettie Cummings Maxim chronicled the people, landscapes, and animals of a typical Maine farm at Bird Hill in Bethel at the turn of the century. In a time before mass media, her world consisted almost entirely of her family and farm. This intimate familiarity with her immediate world and a degree of cultural isolation allowed Nettie to explore and capture on film the details of farm life through the seasons and the innocence and wisdom in the eyes of the children whose lives were so closely entwined with life on a rural Maine hill farm. After one look at her...

The four Cumberland County towns--Standish, Baldwin, Sebago, and Naples--along the west shore of Maine's second largest freshwater body of water, Sebago Lake, form the core of the latest work by Diane and Jack Barnes: Sebago Lake: West Shore. Even at a time when the vast hinterland of Maine was plagued by raids from Native Americans allied to the French, intrepid woodsmen and settlers ventured into the rugged, primeval wilderness via the Presumpscot and Saco rivers as far as Standish. But by 1830, the Cumberland & Oxford Canal was completed, and the four towns in this volume and several...

Until 1725, the Saco River was the main artery for the Pequawket Indians traveling in canoes to and from the Atlantic. Soon thereafter came trappers, followed by loggers, who harvested the colossal white pine and sent the logs floating down the river to sawmills mushrooming all along its course. By 1871, the Portland and Ogdensburg Railroad had reached Fryeburg, fifty miles from Portland, thus linking the Upper Saco River with Boston and beyond. Soon, a steady stream of summer visitors began arriving in the region and the White Mountains beyond. Upper Saco River Valley: Fryeburg, Lovell,...

Maine's Lake Region is uniquely endowed with a network of lakes and waterways that define its identity. Long before the first resemblance of a road extended into the hinterland from Falmouth (Portland), the more intrepid and rugged individuals traveled up the Presumpscot River to Sebago Lake, and then up the serpentine Songo River to where they either chose to meander up Crooked River or continue following the Songo the short distance from the confluence of the two rivers into Brandy Pond, and up beautiful Long Lake (or Long Pond, as it was first named). For little more than 40 years...