Stories of Piscataquis:

The Piscataquis River Valley Through Time.  

            As difficult as it may be to imagine, there were volcanoes in these parts hundreds of millions of years ago. And around thirteen thousand years ago, the sea lapped gently at the hills along what is now the Piscataquis River Valley. Geological processes: plate tectonics, volcanism, glaciation, ice cap melting and crustal rebound all played a part in creating the landforms you see about you. 

            Tens of millions of years ago the rocks beneath the hills you see about you were tilted, bent and folded into mountains. Long periods of erosion by water, wind and ice lowered the peaks and softened the contours of those ancient mountains. During the great Ice Age, their tops were torn off and rounded by an ice sheet about two miles thick that crept inexorably towards the southeast and south southeast. When the ice sheet melted, it left behind eskers of sand and gravel, moraines of gravel and boulders, and the level of the sea rose to flood the land between the hills. Gradually, the land surface, relieved of the weight of all that ice, rebounded and the sea receded from this part of the land. Left behind were remnants of beaches in the form of banks of sand and gravel and beds of clay containing fossil seashells. 

            Run-off from mountain lakes and from the spring freshets every year carved the river bed from soft stone. Where the river encountered ledges of harder stone, falls or rapids occurred. Between those falls and rapids, the river meandered, eroding hillsides and depositing soil downstream, creating rich bottom land in what were called intervales. Over the eons, the Piscataquis River Valley  became a place where, beginning two centuries ago, settlers found everything they needed to create a livelihood.  They would clear the trees off those intervales and begin farming. At the rapids, they would build dams to power sawmills and gristmills and later woolen mills.  Where they found clay beds, they created brickyards, using the local timber to fire their kilns. Thus Nature created those conditions that settlers needed - land to farm, wood to cut, stone and rock with which to build, clay to make bricks, and falling water to power their machinery.  

            Go to the center of Milo, of East Dover, Dover village, Foxcroft, Sangerville, Guilford, Abbot, Monson. What do you find? A dam or places where dams had been built atop rapids which natural forces created long before Man appeared here and around which [European?] settlers built their communities.             

Reading suggestions: D.S. Caldwell, Roadside Geology of Maine, Missoula, Montana: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1998; David L. Kendall, Glaciers and Granite, A Guide to Maine’s Landscape & Geology, Unity, Maine: North Country Press, 1987. 

John F. Battick 

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