I can just imagine my family’s breakfast and dinner table conversation if my parents and grandparents were still here to take part in it:
“Did you see that huge rig that went up the road yesterday? That load was enormous. Must be the biggest ever on the North River Road.”
That’s what I surely would have heard more than 100 years ago when the Libbey-Dingley Dam (now known as Deer Rips Dam) was built, and again around 1925 when Gulf Island Dam was under construction.
Our family and neighbors had very similar experiences this summer as contractors for Central Maine Power Co. set to work on this leg of the $1.4 billion Maine Power Reliability Program upgrade of their transmission lines. Over many decades, landowners on this west side of the Androscoggin had reached a state of practical co-existence with power lines crossing farmland and woodlots.
In recent months, amicable meetings took place with CMP over leases and right-of-way easements, but nothing makes the upgrade project more real than the arrival of some very large forestry harvesters and log forwarders. Suddenly the discussion phase moved to the roar of engines and the whine of saws and chippers.
One of the things I like most about writing the “River views” column is the opportunity to gain perspective on a situation by looking at the past. For the most part, those two dams located near our Echo Farm and barely a mile from major commercial and residential areas of the Twin Cities, are invisible to the general public. Yet their benefits over the past 100 years have been tremendous.
My father, Walter Sargent, was 15 years old when Gulf Island Dam took shape. It was within walking distance, and he photographed a lot of the work as four coffer dams sub-divided the mighty river’s flow and allowed many tons of concrete to reach a height of 50 feet. The structure was 60 feet wide at its base, rising to 16 feet across at the top. It stretched 2,200 feet from shore to shore.
My Aunt Edith, a young girl at that time, wrote often about her memories in the Lewiston Evening Journal’s magazine section 40-plus years ago. She described the activity of “a small army” of workers on 12-hour shifts, seven days a week.
“Two great steel towers were raised on both sides of the river to bear the weight of the great cables across which the filled concrete carriages moved,” she wrote. In the early stages of work, there had to be a way for men to cross the river.
“Although I was only seven years old at the time, I can vividly remember walking across the high, swinging suspension bridge to the island. It was scary business to look way, way down and see the turbulent water for a victim.”
The new dam would create Gulf Island Lake and flood a lot of land upstream. Farmers sold their homes and land to CMP and moved on to different places.
At first, Gulf Island Lake was 11 miles long and half a mile wide. The elevation later rose to 262 feet and is now 13 miles long. Three cemeteries were moved and new roads, including the present Route 4 through Turner, had to be built to replace flooded roads. North River Road, once the thoroughfare north of Auburn, came to a dead end as the new lake formed.
Among the stories told by my aunt is the manner in which that large body of water filled the former farmland.
“It took longer to fill the lake than most folks thought it would,” she said. “The greatest filling had to be done between Saturday noon until Monday morning when the Lewiston mills were shut down. An immense amount of water was required for the flooded earth’s saturation. The dry fields had to be soaked and they drank the first water like a blotter until bedrock was reached. It took nearly as much water to accomplish this as it did to fill the lake.”
Many years have passed since the construction of the dams. Our fields and woodland have quietly shared the space with CMP’s poles all this time. It’s only now that some widening of cleared land, some taller poles and a period of noise and heavy-duty traffic remind us that the Androscoggin River’s invaluable bounty of hydropower comes at some cost. Other landowners along many miles of the MPRP route have also undergone upheaval in recent months.
If history teaches well, it won’t be long before scars of construction disappear as silent power lines pass above the green-again land.
Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and a native of Auburn. He can be reached by sending email to davidsargent607@gmail.com.
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