A trip back in time reveals tidy pieces of Maine history

Saturday, October 29, 2005

By DAVE SHERWOOD

When Gene Letourneau first gazed across the ragged, wild shore of Ross Lake, he was more than 100 miles from the nearest road. The lake and surrounding forests were the most remote in the lower 48 states. Deer abounded. The mixed forest of spruce, fir, white pine and hardwoods remained largely intact.

Access was limited to two uncertain options -- a bumpy float plane ride from Greenville, or a 100-mile canoe trip upriver on the Allagash to Ross Stream, which connected the lake to the watershed.

Loggers entered this wild country by hard-frozen winter road, horse and train. Timber was harvested by bucksaw and floated down the Allagash and St. John rivers to mills in Aroostook county.

Letourneau, the former outdoors writer for the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal, went to Ross with bush pilot Percy Billings to scout a location for an outpost camp for the Guy Gannett Publishing Company -- owners of the Portland Press Herald, the Kennebec Journal, Morning Sentinel and local television and radio stations in Maine.

Ross Lake was to be a place where, Letourneau later wrote, "the fishing would always be good, the scenery outstanding and the wildlife sighting possibilities excellent."

It was a place where the company "would entertain advertisers -- the high-roller people who advertised in the papers," recalled Letourneau's son Fred, 66, of Winslow.

That was 1941.

Today, society and the surrounding countryside has changed but the camps remain a part of Maine's outdoor heritage.

This fall, we returned to Ross Lake to revisit the history, and also, to understand the future of the camp, the lake and the beautiful country in which they reside.

A STORIED HISTORY

According to Letourneau's history of the camps, Guy Gannett, the owner and founder of the publishing syndicate, did little hunting or fishing, but "found enjoyment in having his friends and guests placed in good environment for that purpose."

Ross Lake, also known as Chemquasabamticook Lake, fit the bill. Letourneau writes that in the mid-1920s, forest supervisor Albert Thibodeau visited the lake by canoe and witnessed "trout spawning in late October that covered one of the lower lake coves, an impressive sight."

The prospects for good hunting and fishing, and the lake's remote location, led to the log cabin outpost camp at Ross Lake. Gannett had another camp, Forest Park, near Lily Bay on Moosehead. He flew guests from there to Ross to enjoy the unique location and outstanding fishing.

The camp was fashioned from nearby spruce logs, and workers and materials were flown in by air or poled upriver from Allagash village in Aroostook County.

An old red log book in the camp, tattered at the seam and gnawed by mice, highlights an impressive guest list. Open it and the smell of mildew overwhelms. Some of the signatures, printed in pen on yellowing paper, are illegible. Others -- baseball player Ted Williams, United Nations secretary Ralph Bunche, heavyweight boxing champion of the world (1926-1928) Gene Tunney, and former Maine senator Edmund Muskie -- are testaments to the worldly history of the camps. Guests of Gannett's, as detailed in the logbook, arrived from Pakistan, Great Britain, Australia, Japan and Argentina, among others.

Fred Letourneau remembered recently one of Ted WIlliams' fishing trips with his father.

"It was the day after Williams had returned home from the Korean War, and he wanted to go fly fishing. He showed up in our front yard and he and my dad went fishing," he said.

An Associated Press photo taken in 1947 shows Williams holding two nice trout on the dock in front of the Guy Gannett Camps. A corresponding signature in the camp logbook, dated July 1, 1947, confirms the visit.

True to Maine form, alongside all of these jottings of well-known public figures and diplomats are notes about the region's outstanding fishing and hunting.

"Most of the people that came to the camp fished and hunted, and my father acted as their guide, though he never got paid for it. He considered it part of his job," said Fred Letourneau.

A slip of paper, topped by a Morning Sentinel letterhead, is tucked inside the old camp log. On it, Letourneau had scribbled the outlines of three ponds -- Pleasant, Narrow and Wadleigh -- and the location of each pond's springholes -- places where brook trout congregate during warm summer weather. His accompanying fishing reports cover decades of accumulated fishing knowledge of local ponds and streams.

On the walls and in the log book, good-natured jottings describe guest's adventures. Notes are scribbled on the logs and doorways inside the camp. They list impressive catches of lake trout, brook trout and whitefish from the 1940s and 1950s. They also reveal that, even in these "good ole" days of Maine fishing, people-- even famous ones -- still struck out.

"We loved our stay, but after ten hours of fishing time, Evelynn and I are going home without a sign of a fish!" wrote B. Knowlton in August of 1955.

ENDOFANERA

An entry by Gene Letourneau dated Aug. 5, 1958 reads: "First truck reached Ross Lake today on road from the Province of Quebec to haul lumber out." Though Letourneau wouldn't drive his Jeep to the camp until 1960, this entry signaled the end of an era.

"The single biggest change in the north Maine woods since the 1940s? That would be the road network that's been developed," said Al Cowperthwaite, director of North Maine Woods, a group of state agencies and private landowners that manage campsites and road access in the northwoods. "Back then, most of the travel was on rivers, or men would come in to log on horse-drawn sleighs after freeze-up."

Cowperthwaite said the 1960s and 70s brought the end of Maine's renowned river log drives, so paper companies began to seek alternative methods for removing timber from the vast northern forest.

"They needed a more reliable way to get their wood out, other than spring runoff, so the first network of all-weather roads was constructed," he said.

Letourneau's notes in the old camp logbook follow this progress with deepening concern.

He writes "with access developing, the lake's fishing resource was exploited a great deal, both in open water and ice fishing seasons. When Billings spotted a single canoe as he was making a landing in the 1954 season, he exclaimed 'the country's getting crowded."

By the late 1960s, roads were cut in to the remote Allagash region of Maine at an astounding pace, said Cowperthwaite. A United States Geological Survey map from 1945, found rolled up beneath a camp bunk at the Gannett camps, shows nothing but unbroken forest in the region between Fort Kent, the Canadian Border, Ashland and Greenville. Not a single road mars the landscape.

A look at Delorme's Atlas and Gazetteer 60 years later shows a veined network of thousands of miles of gravel logging roads.

CHANGING LANDSCAPE

According to state wildlife biologist Rich Hoppe, based in Ashland, it's hardly the wilderness it was when Letourneau and bush pilot Percy Billings first touched down on it in 1941.

Hoppe said logging has changed the forest dynamic. Moose -- a rarity in Letourneau's early days at Ross Lake -- are now everywhere. Snowshoe hare thrive in old clearcuts, and lynx have moved in to capitalize on the food source. Deer have all but disappeared as efficient timber harvesting remove the spruce and fir trees they depend on for cover during the long winter months.

Letourneau saw this change unfolding.

"From 1958 to 1964, the deer kill decreased greatly around the lake. Four million feet of timber cut from Fool to Sweeney Brook. Moose showed signs of coming back around 1964," he wrote. Moose sightings listed in the logbook increase exponentially through the 1970's and 80's.

The news isn't all grim.

The fishing has held up, at least in part. Don and Andrea Lavoie, of Ross Lake Sporting Camps, still boast of good catches of lake and brook trout -- summer and winter. According to state fisheries biologist Dave Basley, Ross still offers a thriving whitefish fishery, one of few left in the state.

And the access, though easier than in the past, is still laborious.

"It's a long day-trip. Unless you're staying out that way, you probably won't fish it. It's a big effort to get up there," said Basley.

The Allagash lakes, including Ross, remain largely undeveloped, said North Maine Woods' Cowperthwaite.

Letourneau's last visit to Ross was in 1990.

The lake where "the fishing would always be good, the scenery outstanding and the wildlife sighting possibilities excellent," had changed, but Letourneau's tales will remain a part of Maine's sporting heritage forever.

Dave Sherwood -- 621-5648dsherwood@centralmaine.com