LEWISTON – It’s something of a miracle that nobody ever quite got around to draining a swampy section of the city known today as Garcelon Bog.

Owned by the city and protected by the Androscoggin Land Trust, the area offers pleasant walking trails and a refuge for plants and wildlife that struggle to find a haven in urban environments.

While people today may see the area as a preserve, for most of the city’s history it’s been eyed as a potentially lucrative source of fuel, an odiferous mess or a fine place for a highway.

Somehow it survived anyway.

Located at the end of Russell Street Extension, the bog is part of about 160 acres that are now protected from development, chock full of black spruce, tamarack and other trees that flourish in wetlands.

There’s a thousand-foot boardwalk and enough distance from nearby roads to give the place a surprising sense of isolation despite nearby roads, homes and businesses.

The bog’s beginnings likely extend back to the last melting glaciers of the most recent Ice Age, probably 10 thousand years ago. Its configuration, along with Maine’s cold weather, combined to make it so that dying plants would fall into the water, get compressed over time and create, ultimately, layer upon layer of peat carpeted with a thick layer of vegetation.

All that peat, which is an amazingly good natural filter to remove sediments and pollutants from runoff, caught the attention of the folks who settled in Lewiston as the little town began growing in the 19th century.

BURN THE BOG?

Let’s start with Nathaniel W. Farwell, who moved to Lewiston just before the Civil War and leased the Lewiston Bleachery and Dye Works from the Franklin Co. from 1860 to 1870.

It proved a lucrative move, pulling in wartime profits so great that he created the Great Falls Bleachery as well, then bought a woolen mill in Lisbon, building a second one there in 1872.

Clearly a savvy man, Farwell had a reputation for sagacity and honesty during a time when both were in short supply. He represented the city in the State House four years after he moved to town and became one of the town’s first mayors in 1873.

His connection to the bog, then two miles east of a city that had yet to grow much beyond the area that makes up its downtown now, is perhaps an example of his ability to see what others could not.

The price of coal, necessary for heat in those days, rose so high one winter that Farwell eyed the bog as a potential source of peat that could be burned instead, without the necessity of shipping it in from mines far away.

He gave it a shot for a bit, mixing peat with coal, but apparently abandoned the experiment.

Almost a half-century later, engineers with the U.S. Geological Survey showed up at what was still called Farwell’s Bog and drilled a series of test holes to see what exactly could be found there.

They determined that it had about 17 feet of fibrous peat, composed mostly of the remains of swamp plants, spread over more than 100 acres.

Though Farwell could not have known it at the time, the bog contained more than 400,000 tons of highly combustible peat, a sort of very fine moss.

Analyzing the samples, the federal experts reported in 1909 that the area began as a pond but early on became what they called “a moss heath,” where dying plants over the course of time formed a large deposit of only partially decomposed material.

Peat is formed only in wetlands, places where the ground is saturated with enough water most of the time to keep dead plant material from decaying in open air, where bacteria and fungi typically break it down.

The head of the Auburn Leather Board Supply Co., F.H. Fellows, saw opportunity even before the engineers laid it all out in a report on Maine’s peat deposits.

He set up a gasoline-powered plant on the northern border of the bog that contained a hopper-like section at one end that fed peat into a cylinder that chopped it up and pressed it into bars that could be cut into 4-inch bricks.

Once dried, the peat bricks made good material for burning. Fellows, like Farwell before him, mixed them in with coal at his factory to see if he could save money.

Apparently, though, it took five or six men to cut the peat, feed the machine, slice the bricks and the rest, an investment of time and labor that made the operation unprofitable.

Since a ton of wet peat, as it comes from the bog, makes about 225 pounds of bricks that can be used or sold, the bog could conceivably have been dug up and turned into 100 million pounds of burnable bricks.

In the days of coal, it was a lot of heat to be left in the ground.

As late as the 1920s, peat fans were still eyeing the site as a potential source of fuel, but the notion seems to have petered out by the time the Great Depression hit.

DRAIN THE SWAMP?

The bog was mostly left alone during the Roaring ’20s, its name gradually shifting in popular use from Farwell’s Bog to Garcelon Bog, a nod to the famous politician and doctor Alonzo Garcelon, whose name is best known today because it’s attached to the football field at Bates College: Garcelon Field.

The decision to leave the peat alone didn’t necessarily mean the bog was safe.

First, though, let’s consider what was then known as Jepson’s Brook — now Jepson Brook — a small waterway that once meandered from the bog to the Androscoggin River. It served as the swamp’s outlet, rushing along in the spring but a summertime problem.

As the city grew, people began living near it and they came to think of the creek as “stagnant and disease-ridden,” as one Depression-era account put it.

“Valuable land was going to waste as people did not care to build in this section on account of the odor that arose from this brook during the summer months,” Frank Gibson’s summary said.

One of the early projects of the New Deal, which put 293 men to work for a couple of years, turned much of the brook into a storm sewer, putting in thousands of feet of pipes and culverts to control the brook for more than 5 miles.

That took care of the stench and made it possible to develop neighborhoods not far from Bates College.

With all sorts of eyes on the project, water samples were collected from the little stream.

State engineers in 1937 handed a report to Dr. Robert Wiseman Jr., Lewiston’s health officer, detailing their findings about the Garcelon Bog.

Elmer Campbell, the state director of the Division of Sanitary Engineering, told the local health official that a sample taken from the brook contained “a strange odor” caused by an abundance of vegetable and mineral matter in the water draining from the bog.

He said the bog gives off gases that are sometimes trapped under the ice. When it escapes all at once, he said, large quantities of stinky gas bring complaints from people living nearby.

The solution, he said, would be to remove an old dam, drain the swamp and put the old stream bed in a ditch.

“If the water has no chance to become stagnant in the area, it cannot become saturated with swamp gases,” Campbell wrote.

The dam appears to be gone. But draining the swamp? It never happened.

A portion of Jepson Brook, by the way, was recently rehabbed by the city to haul away sediment and make some much-needed repairs to keep water flowing through as it should.

PAVE THE PLACE?

Dropping the idea of draining the bog hardly meant the place was safe.

In the 1950s, the city began eyeing it as a good place for a highway.

Officials thought it would make sense to have a highway spur run from the Maine Turnpike to the area where Russell and Sabattus streets come together, a spot with one big open area that seemed perfect for the project: the bog.

Like many possible government projects, experts studied the idea, engineers drew up plans, officials debated its costs and its value.

They argued about it for almost three decades before realizing that the road was never going to happen for a host of reasons, including a growing sense that the bog had some value as a natural resource that shouldn’t be destroyed.

Twenty years ago, when the city sought to create a new industrial park near the turnpike, it faced the necessity of compensating for its planned destruction of some wetlands.

That led in short order to a deal that preserved forever about 160 acres that included the Garcelon Bog to make up for tearing apart another wetland.

Since 2002, the Androscoggin Land Trust has had the responsibility of making sure the city-owned land is never developed.

The swamp, in short, won’t ever be drained or dug up or covered with concrete and pavement.

The Garcelon Bog will remain what it is for as long as it lasts.

To visit, you can park in the small cul-de-sac at the end of Russell Street Extension. It’s an easy, safe stroll to the end of the boardwalk.

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