Little Lyford Pond Camps: From Frontier Logging to Backcountry Bliss at a Traditional Maine Sporting Camp

Appalachia, June 2005

From almost anywhere in the northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canadian provinces, it is only a day's drive to the AMC's perfectly secluded Little Lyford Pond Camps and dozens of the most scenic hiking, paddling, and skiing adventures in Maine's 100-Mile Wilderness. Most visitors approach from the south, along Interstate 95. As civilization starts to recede, turn off the highway at Newport and follow a short series of state routes to Greenville or Brownville (the western and eastern gateways, respectively), and leave the pavement for gravel logging roads. Visitors may encounter like-minded adventurers or the occasional hunter or logger; more likely, they'll spot some moose.

The going was tougher in George Bliss's day. George S. Bliss made the trip from his home in Lynn, Massachusetts, to the Camps twenty-five times between 1921 and 1946, but not once did he do it in one day. He came with friends for the fishing — fishing so good that it was worth two to three days of trains, buses, and automobiles, the latter sometimes drawn by animals or pushed along railroad tracks due to poor road conditions. We know this and much more about sporting camp life in this era because Bliss kept copious notes from each of his visits and compiled them into journals. The Little Lyford Pond Camps were then one of dozens of sporting camps dotting Piscataquis County, and Bliss was one of hundreds of sportsmen who escaped their corporate lives for long visits full of rugged summer activities. This was the golden era of the Maine sporting camps.

The Sporting Camp Tradition
The genesis of the sporting camp tradition can be traced to the rough infrastructure developed by timber companies. Throughout the nineteenth century, they pushed their operations farther into the wilds of New Hampshire and Maine for a constant supply of high-grade timber. These companies established camps for the loggers, built access trails and roads, dammed rivers, and widened gorges. In the region of Maine now called the 100-Mile Wilderness, dozens of logging camps dotting the wilderness a few miles apart supported hundreds of loggers, who arrived each season to cut during the summer and fall, slide the logs to the rivers on the winter snow, and drive them downriver to the Penobscot and the lumber mills and markets beyond. As primary-growth logging operations waned and technology improved, timber companies no longer kept hundreds of men in these northern camps. The camps became sporting retreats — some private, and others public — actively marketed as sportsmen's paradises to those entrenched in civilization around Boston and New York. The camps inherited their layout and structure from the logging days — individual cabins cluster around a dining lodge that serves home-cooked meals, with a pond, lake, or river only steps away.

The Little Lyford Pond Camps were built circa 1874 as a logging company camp to temporarily house and feed dozens of men who cut and drove saw logs down the West Branch of the Pleasant River each season. Lumber in the area was considered excellent but was not harvested until the 1850s, when the first dam was built, enabling log drives downriver. According to David C. Smith's 1972 essay "A History of Lumbering in Maine 1861–1960," a bridge was also built on the river, from which men would be lowered on ropes when logjams needed breaking up. Three hundred and fifty thousand pine logs were harvested and sent downriver, but according to Smith, "this had barely touched the outskirts." In 1879, the newly formed Pleasant River Dam Company spent six weeks blasting out the narrowest gorge in the famous Gulf Hagas. This particular gorge, known as the "Jaws," was widened from eight to twenty-seven feet, and new crews of men immediately went to work harvesting timber from the land above it. By the next year, the company had 5 camps, and with 100 horses, 275 men, and 2 blacksmith shops, harvested 17 million feet of virgin timber.

Loggers drove logs down the West Branch of the Pleasant River for the last time in 1941, staying at Little Lyford Pond Camps as guests, and only for a few nights. There are no obvious records of when and how the Little Lyford Pond Camps made the transition from logging camp to sporting camp, but as early as the 1920s, advertisements appear touting the hospitality of the Sherburne family (proprietors), and the incomparable fishing awaiting adventurous city-dwelling men who made the trip to the Maine woods...

—Sarah Jane Shangraw is editor-in-chief of AMC Books.