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Sunday, July 20, 2003
OUTDOORS: Deirdre Fleming
Percival Baxter, despite his philanthropy, is a mystery
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Also on this page: Percival Baxter | |||||||
On a Maine map, Baxter State Park looks like nothing more than a neighborhood to the city of Millinocket, which serves as the gateway to Baxter. Driving up through its woods, it might as well be on another planet. As photographer John Ewing and I drove toward the park on a crisp June day, the asphalt and graded dirt roads offered no clues to the wilderness that lay beyond. I wondered what Percival Baxter would have been saying to his father, James, when the Baxters made their first trip to the region in 1903. We had come to retrace that historic trip for the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram. Coming as they did by railroad, steamer, canoe and "tote," the last leg up to Kidney Pond must have been very exciting. It still is today. Yet driving the road stuck behind a cement truck and noisy motorcycle, it was sad knowing there was no way to experience the trip as they did. The leg of Baxter's trip by steamer would have offered the most dramatic first views of Katahdin, which the former governor eventually bought and gave to his home state. Today, you scarcely catch a view of the mountain at all. I tried to imagine what the youngest of James Baxter's eight children would have thought while traveling with his father and fishing partner to the Katahdin area 100 years ago. But just as I turned to Ewing to muse over this, I watched my fishing partner snacking on a Dove bar, and I realized how far removed we are from the era of exploration, discoverying - and, yes, even hardship - in which Baxter lived. It occurred to me then, as it would several times on our three-day journey, that even if we had made the trip exactly the way Baxter had, the experience still would have been very different. Today's human traffic in the park is a fraction of what you experience at other popular outdoor destinations, such as Acadia National Park or the White Mountains, but it's also not as remote and untouched as it was in Baxter's day. On the other hand, what park forester Jensen Bissel said is true. In many places in Baxter State Park, be it whether on a pond or a trail or a mountain peak, you can experience the same views, sounds and smells Percival Baxter did in 1903 on his first trip to the region. You'll see moose without looking for them, be greeted by curious snowshoe hares without courting them, and experience the calls and cries of loons in the evening without even wishing for them. It's comforting to think we may have even shared the same thoughts Baxter had when the wildlife spoke to him 100 years ago.
While some sources for this story claimed he was a young age of 19 years old on that trip, the record shows he was 26 in the early fall of 1903, when documents show he first visited the Katahdin region. His birth date was Nov. 22, 1876. SWhile some said Baxter vowed Katahdin should belong to the people of Maine on that trip. Others wrote or said he did so later. A search through several of the state's special library collections on the Baxters produced no books about the trip, no journals detailing the visit, no photographs showing the fish he might have caught. Reading and researching history is enlightening. Trying to write it is horrifying. difficult. This series tries to follow Baxter's journey as closely as possible using information recorded at or around 1903, be it - his father's journals in Baxter Memorial Library in Gorham, Percival Baxter's own writings, or and the popular travel guide "In the Maine Woods" that came out with the expansion of the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad into northern Maine at the turn of the last century. Unfortunately, James Baxter did not record in his 1903 journal anything of that trip and travel guides then, as now, were very likely slanted to attract sportsmen to the newly accessible areas of northern Maine. A speech Baxter wrote in 1967 for the dedication of the Togue Pond Gate House told of how he first saw Katahdin in 1903 "while on a fishing trip with my late father." The years of research by those who have studied Baxter's deeds helped here. But the truth is Percival Baxter's first visit to the land he eventually bought for the people of Maine is very likely lost to us. And what he felt and decided when he first fished in the shadows of Katahdin may never be known. This was the first, but not the saddest realization that came out of trying to retrace Percival's footsteps on that trip. What three days in Baxter State Park made clear was how little is known about one of the state's greatest outdoorsmen and philanthropists. His generosity for many is a mystery. And for some his name is unrecognizable - there are visitors to the park today who have no notion of why the place is even named "Baxter." There is no statue anywhere in the state reminding all who visit the park in the middle of Maine that Baxter gave it to us. There is no large memorial thanking him for this unusual and precious gift. As one Baxter visitor from away asked three weeks ago: "Who is Percival?" Who indeed. Staff Writer Deirdre Fleming can be contacted at 791-6452 or at:
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