Dark Downeast - The Ghost Town Beneath Flagstaff Lake (Maine)

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

On July 4, 1949, the villages of Flagstaff and Dead River came together, with current residents and past, for a celebration that they called Old Home Days. They knew a celebration like this would never happen again, because the little villages of Flagstaff and Dead River were about to die.Years of methodical planning and legislative action, of deconstruction and relocation and clear cutting, of door-knockings from lawyers, of man-made fires and packed trucks filled with personal possessions finally culminated in a flood that would drown the small towns, effectively erasing them from the map of Maine forever.This is The Day Dead River Died: The Ghost Town Beneath Flagstaff Lake. View source material and photos for this episode at darkdowneast.com/flagstafflakeFollow @darkdowneast on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTokTo suggest a case visit darkdowneast.com/submit-case Dark Downeast is an audiochuck and Kylie Media production hosted by Kylie Low.

On July 4th, 1949, the villages of Flagstaff and Dead River came together, with current residents and past, for a celebration that they called Old Home Days. I remember a celebration kind of like this in my main hometown, Old Hallowell Day. It was a big deal in high school and it served as an unofficial class reunion in college. There was a parade and food vendors and live music and a beer garden and fireworks after dusk. Every year, my town came together. And every year, the same celebration. But for Flagstaff and Dead River, they knew a celebration like this would never happen again because the little villages of Flagstaff and Dead River were about to die. Years of methodical planning and legislative action, of deconstruction and relocation and clear-cutting, of door knockings

from lawyers, of man-made fires and packed trucks filled with personal possessions finally culminated in a flood that would drown the small towns, effectively erasing them from the map of Maine forever. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is The Day Dead River Died, the ghost town beneath Flagstaff Lake on Dark Down East. The land at the base of Bigelow Mountain, to the banks of the Dead River, belonged to indigenous people before it was ever settled and became the tiny villages known as Dead River and Flagstaff Plantations. For thousands of years, a path from the Kennebec River through treacherous terrain

and over steep ridges to the Dead River was known as the Great Carrying Place. According to the Arnold Expedition Historical Society, this stretch that is now part of the Appalachian Trail shortened the river-to-river trip by 25 miles and avoided the raging white waters where the dead met the Kennebec. Carrying boats across the 10-mile journey would have been an arduous endeavor, but the path became the chosen route of Benedict Arnold and his army in 1775 as they trekked towards the St. Lawrence River and onward to Quebec City to carry out their attack. As the local legend goes, the village earned the Flagstaff moniker after Benedict Arnold planted his Flagstaff at the campsite and raised the banner of the almost-United States during the famous march

to Quebec. The name, although lacking originality, stuck. Seeking the rich soil of the Dead River floodplain and the plentiful timber resources, the area was settled as Flagstaff, Bigelow, and Dead River Plantations in the 1800s, Flagstaff Plantation officially in 1865. A plantation is a type of minor civil division between an unincorporated area and a town. The use of the word in this way seems to be exclusive to Maine in modern times. The population in 1880 was 72 people, shrinking from 112 people a decade earlier. As detailed by the Dead River Area Historical Society, a man named Miles Standish built the Flagstaff Grist Mill and Sawmill in the 1840s. Each was powered by a small dam on Mill Stream, an outlet off the naturally occurring Flagstaff Pond. These small, electricity-generating dams and facilities were

common throughout Maine, particularly in rural areas throughout the later part of the 18 and into the early 1900s. Their primary function was to power the mills and buildings central to the industry of the area like the grist and sawmills of Flagstaff and Dead River, but in off-peak hours, the town's residents benefited from the surplus electricity. Duluth Everard Wing, called Dude by those who knew and loved him, was born June 16, 1928 in the village of Flagstaff. Dude was proud of where he was from, and later in life went on to be a founding member of the Arnold Expedition Historical Society and a member of the Dead River Historical Society. His memories of the town reflected the realities of living in rural Maine in the 30s and 40s. Quote,

When there was enough water in the mill pond to operate it, the generator ran. I think they waited till it would start to get dark and the lights would come on. And I think we knew when they were going to come on so you could have electric lights and turn off your kerosene lamps and enjoy a light bulb. And then the first thing you knew it, it would be getting dimmer and dimmer and finally we realized it was time to go to bed. So it was unique. There was no money involved as far as I remember. I don't remember getting a bill or paying the poor old man that ran the mill. Sometimes, villagers had to ration the supply of electricity for special events. At school, we had a lot of lights for the gymnasium. If you had a basketball game

scheduled that night, then the people in town shut off all their lights and hoped that the light would carry the school so the kids would have a basketball game. Unquote. That electricity generated by the small mill in that cozy main village is what made it the target of two entrepreneurs who knew that power, electrical power, meant money. Walter S. Wyman and Harvey D. Eaton founded what would become Central Maine Power Company in 1899. The pair were central figures to an era that electrified Maine. You see, Wyman and Eaton were entrepreneurs, and there was money to be made in electricity. With much of Maine's power generation independently owned by small, local companies

like the mill in Flagstaff Plantation, Central Maine Power devised their plan to consolidate this power and expand both the supply and access to electricity across the state of Maine and beyond. According to Maine Folklife Center, a key piece of consolidating those smaller facilities into one central power utility was to control the flow of the Kennebec River. Wyman planned to do this with the construction of one massive dam where the Dead River and Kennebec River meet, an area known simply as the Forks. But the logistics didn't pan out, and damming the Forks wasn't feasible, so Wyman pursued an alternative. Not one dam at the forks, but three smaller dams.

The Wyman Dam on the Kennebec River in Bingham, the Harris Dam at the outlet of Indian Pond, which is now the largest dam in Maine, and finally, what would be named Long Falls Dam on Dead River. Legislator Percival Baxter, who would later become governor of Maine, wasn't on board with CMP's plans. He was an outspoken voice to protect the smaller individual power companies from being combined under one larger company. Instead, he wanted a law that would protect the rights to hydroelectric power as part of the public domain and allow the state to develop its own system of dams and reservoirs. Baxter also wanted to prohibit the export of any hydroelectric power generated in Maine to other states. That law, known as the

Fernald Law after Maine's governor at the time, was passed in 1909. Expanding electricity access in Maine with the construction of the three dams was a dazzling idea, but CMP's plans were to export the power out of state. Wyman at CMP was committed to making this happen, but the Fernald Law at the time, along with Percival Baxter, stood in his way. It seems that from the very inception, Central Maine Power faced an uphill battle with the state and its residents, not unlike the battles they face with energy projects of today. If you live in Maine right now, the TV commercials and door knockers and roadside signs advocating for and against Question 1 concerning the Central Maine Power corridor construction of high-impact hydroelectric power lines through the upper Kennebec region,

those are all inescapable. I'll spare you the minute details of the legislative battles that ensued as CMP pursued their vision for these dams and a consolidated electricity provider. But according to Maine Folklife Center, in 1927, the legislature ultimately told CMP that they could carry out their plan with a slightly altered scope and under the condition that they lease the land from the state of Maine. As of 2011, the land lease was still in place. However hard Percival Baxter fought, and the years of delays he was capable of inflicting on Wyman, he could not prevent the ultimate fate of Flagstaff Plantation. The linchpin of it all was that the ruling gave CMP the power of eminent domain, the power of the government to take private land and convert it for public use, providing compensation to the property owners in the process. The most common cases of eminent domain claim a few feet

of someone's property to widen a road, to improve traffic flow. Some extreme cases might tear down a garage or shrink someone's sprawling acreage into a postage stamp lot. Significant, controversial, and disappointing to say the least, but nothing I've heard compares to what happened to Flagstaff Plantation in 1930. Building a dam at Dead River involved more than controlling the flow of water with a system meant to generate and store hydroelectric power. When a dam is built, the water that once rushed through the waterway is slowed, stopped, and yet the water still needs a place to go. In the case of Flagstaff Plantation, the water could only flow to one place should that dam be built, and it would swallow up an entire village in the process. There's a book dedicated to the story of how Flagstaff Lake came to be.

Written by Alan L. Burnell and Kenny R. Wing, Lost Villages of Flagstaff Lake is a photographic history of Bigelow, Dead River, and Flagstaff. I have the book sitting on my desk right now. Starting this podcast has been great for my reading habit, though this book is really all about the images. Vintage photographs of the villages, scans of old maps, and copies of historic documents are paired with brief captions that weave the tale of Flagstaff, the center of the three settlements. The population of the small community was just 140 people in the 1940s. The village consisted of the sawmill, the E.J. Levitt General Store, and the Butler and Savage General Store, a blacksmith shop, and church. There was the town high school set up on a hill, and along the roads were a masonic lodge,

a barber, a dance floor, and a pool hall. The Flagstaff Hotel, which was once a tavern built by Miles Standish in 1842, rounded out the Flagstaff village amenities. Of course, there were dozens of family homes and barns. A cemetery was a necessity, and so the village had one of those, too. Flagstaff was at the heart of the three villages, and while it wasn't a thriving metropolis, that didn't matter to the people who made it their home, the people who descended from the first settlers of Flagstaff. It was a full-fledged community with families and homes and businesses and services and a town council. It wasn't like it was already circling the drain when central Maine power began knocking on doors. Not at all.

Quietly and slowly, though with a purpose, lawyers arrived in town beginning in 1930, prepared to carry out the plan that they fought for in the legislature for over a decade. The powers that be knew that this would be a methodical process, not one to be rushed. It would take nearly 20 years from the time they made their first offer on a Flagstaff home to completely erase the entire town. In the book Lost Villages of Flagstaff Lake, a picture shows a man named Almond Deming sitting on the front porch of his home on the west end of the village, chatting with a man from CMP, likely negotiating a price for the vine-covered structure that had been the Deming home for decades. Homeowners had few options when the men knocked on their doors. Sell their home

for a price they didn't have much power to negotiate and find a new place to live outside of the villages, or agree to move their home by trailer, sometimes sawing them in half if it was too big, and receive compensation for that relocation. However, some opted for a third option for a while. They dug in their heels and waited to see what happened. In a presentation by Salt, written and produced by Pete Lang Stanton, Chloe Presenios, and Roger Smith called 15 Feet Below, they explained that the choice to move wasn't really a choice at all.

That's how eminent domain works. Knowing that they'd have to move sometime, the first wave of Flagstaff citizens accepted offers and started planning for what was next. Many of them moving out of the area for the first time in generations. Some of the folks who decided to relocate their homes by flatbed trailers found new plots of land upstream in Stratton Eustis, others on lots close to the Cathedral Pines. Some of those homes are still standing in the Eustis area. Homes and buildings weren't the only thing needing to be relocated. Remember, Flagstaff had a

cemetery, and the act of digging up graves and moving bodies was a controversial one for obvious reasons, especially for those who were buried without a casket. According to some sources, many of those remains did not make the move intact. Over the decades, houses were plucked up, the neighborhood thinned out, and the erasure of all other things, living or inanimate, began. Thousands of acres had to be cleared of trees, fences, farmland. Anything that would protrude from the lake had to go. With all that work to be done,

they offered a stipend to anyone who would clear their own plot of land. Except, there was no system, no method of tracking who was clearing what on which day. And the preferred method of clearing was fire. Black smoke choked the town, or what was left of it. Each day, new fires cropped up, intentionally set to destroy anything in its path. Some of the fires claimed homes before residents even had a chance to relocate. I thumbed the pages of the lost villages of Flagstaff Lake quickly, almost like a flipbook. Seeing the progression of these photos, from a once small but very obviously lively community to a desolate, barren, charred expanse of nothing, is chilling.

On July 4th, 1949, the villages of Flagstaff and Dead River came together, with current residents and past, for the Old Home Days celebration. For the last 19 years, the residents of Flagstaff Village watched their homes razed and burned around them, some helping to eliminate the traces of the community they loved. They had no choice. Reverend Arthur R. McDougall of the Bingham Congregational Church spoke to the townspeople on the first day of the old home celebrations in 1949, saying, quote, At this seeming burial of your tiny village, you people of Flagstaff can broadcast for all to hear that you have lived in one of Maine's small villages beside a river, surrounded by mountains, where there was room to live and to work, and that you have had the

dignity of everyday freedom, the like of which there is no wealth or treasure to compare, unquote. Everywhere you looked on that day, the land was barren. Journalist for the Bangor Daily News, Fred McDonald, wrote that not a single trace of wildlife could be seen, not a bird in the sky, smoked out by the still smoldering fires. Clifford Wing, Captain Clifford Wing, father to Dude Wing, seemed to take the fate of his home the hardest. He was 77 years old in 1949. As the community came together to reflect at Old Home Day that July 4th, before the dam gates closed, he looked around at his town in disbelief. Clifford had spent the entirety of his life and his career working on and around the two-and-a-half-square-mile Flagstaff Pond in the village. He and his wife, Eddie Bachelor Moody Wing, owned the Wing House, a boarding house in town, and Cliff built handmade canoes. And so, when the flood became

an approaching reality, he dreamed of building an ark reminiscent of Noah's, a floating home for all the residents of his doomed village. The gates of the Long Falls Dam closed in 1950. On Friday, March 24, 1950, the Bangor Daily News printed an article with the headline, Spring Means Watery Death for Flagstaff. The water had already begun to trickle into the man-made reservoir, and spring runoff into the Dead River meant more acreage would be submerged. Slowly, roads were cut off. Old foundations and stone structures that survived the fires began to disappear beneath the water. Some of the homes of the original Flagstaff village

remained when the gates were shut, but by 1952, they all ended up burned or moved. The lake filled in. 12 billion cubic feet of water expanded into 22,000 acres of cleared land. Where Flagstaff Plantation once stood, the new Flagstaff Lake slowly but surely took over. Poet Galen Jeep Wilcox, known for his works about the Maine wilderness that he adored. He wrote a poem about the plight of Flagstaff while he was on guard duty in the U.S. Army. As a teenager, he participated in the 20-year process of clearing and burning in Flagstaff. As quoted in a piece by the University of Maine Folklife Center, Jeep Wilcox said, I could not believe the power of eminent domain. I could never forget some of the people

whose lives were ruined by the project. Jeep passed away in 2020 at age 85. This is his poem, titled Man-Made Lake. I'll never forget the day they took my home away to make a lake that God did not plan. Though it has been many years, I can still recall the tears shed when they made Flagstaff Dam. My only choice made me sad, either move or wish I had. No way could I stop their flood. So knowing nothing I could do using a token dollar or two,

they took what cost me sweat and blood. From Eustace Ridge I see man's lake of misery, where once I tilled the fertile sod. T'was there I made my stand, Trying to convince my fellow man To leave the lake building up to God. Yes, my life still goes on, But for me, dreams are gone, Haunted with nightmares from days gone by.

Like a vagabond, I still roam, For the day they took away my home was the day my dreams began to die. Someday I'll pass on, and from this land I'll be gone. Inside of heaven's gate I'll stand. Once again I'll shed a tear for all of those still here with roots in a forgotten land. Imagine your hometown dying this way. The house you grew up in, your school, your neighborhood stores, all of it either burned, razed, or relocated in such a way

to erase its existence as you knew it altogether. The land, down to the last matchstick of a tree, decimated by fire and flood. Intentional fire and flood, at that. We all have different feelings about where we're from. Our hometowns might be a source of pride and nostalgia, or they might only hold reminders of things we'd rather not revisit. But whatever your feelings may be, your hometown is always part of your story. When someone new says, tell me about yourself, we almost always begin with our name and where we're from. There's a through line that we share with the humans whose geographical history aligns with our own.

Whether you look back on your hometown with fondness or disdain, there's something to be said about hearing the names of the streets you've driven, the local businesses you frequented, and the references only locals fully understand. Imagine if where you're from just didn't exist anymore. The book Lost Villages of Flagstaff Lake begins with a dedication that really struck me. Quote, to all the residents of the Dead River Valley, both living and deceased, who sacrificed their homes and much of their heritage for the creation of Flagstaff Lake. The reluctant surrender of the land they so deeply cherished

for the perceived greater good of the entire state is an unimaginable act of heroism." Today, Flagstaff Lake is a favorite retreat for outdoor enthusiasts. Its shallow waters best suited for kayaking and swimming. There are very few hints of the towns that once stood there, below the surface of the peaceful mountainside reservoir. Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. All sources for this story and others are listed in the show notes at darkdowneast.com so you can dig into the research and learn more. Now through the end of 2021, I'll be sharing information about missing and unidentified

persons in New England. It is my goal to call attention to these cases in hopes of bringing these humans home to the people who love and miss them. 23-year-old Amanda Grazuski was staying with a friend on Birch Street in Derry, New Hampshire on March 17, 2020, when she reportedly left early in the morning without her purse, cell phone, or other belongings. She has been known to frequent Nashua, Salem, Manchester, and Hooksett, New Hampshire, according to authorities. Amanda has brown hair and hazel eyes and several tattoos. If you have any information regarding Amanda's whereabouts, please contact Derry Police at 603-432-6111.

Photos and more information on this case is listed at darkdowneast.com slash missing. Thank you for supporting this show and allowing me to do what I do. I'm honored to use this platform for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones, and for those who are still searching for answers in cold missing persons and murder cases, as well as the stories that make up the darker history of Maine and beyond. I'm not about to let these stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East.