Presumpscot River: Sebago Lake to Westbrook

By Tom Bell

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Paddle name: Presumpscot River: Sebago Lake to Westbrook Nearest town: Windham Region: Western Lakes and Mountains/Greater Portland Water type: Lake/River Difficulty: Adv. Beginner Length: Approximately 14 miles Put-in: At the Sebago Lake Basin; there is a boat launch on Bridge Road in North Windham. Take-out: At the railroad bridge in downtown Westbrook on the right; spot a car on Route 25. Other: This river can run very low in the warmer months, making for tough paddling. Some parts of it are quite flat, as well. There are also many dams along this route, meaning portages, not all of which are marked. Make sure to check water levels before heading out. Want more? Continue the trip from Westbrook to Casco Bay Maps: Get driving directions from MapQuest. View a topo map from Maptech MapServer. Staff photo by John Ewing Reporter Tom Bell looks across at Westbrook's Dana Warp Mill while nearing Saccarappa Falls on the Presumpscot River by canoe View a slide show of photos from the trip. (14 photos)

I pressed my face against the screen door of the Saccarappa Falls hydroelectric station and saw two men in a large, dimly lit room. I had expected them to order me off the property, but happily they waved me in.

Inside, two of the stations' three turbines, built 98 years ago in the age of Thomas Edison, were whirling like monstrous clothes dryers.

"These things just sit here and make electricity," said Don Bernier, shouting to be heard over the turbines' eternal buzz.

"It's just gravity," added Terry McFarland, "dropping through a turbine and spinning."

The men are dam keepers. For the people who want this dam and two others on the Presumpscot River demolished, they represent the opposition, Sappi Fine Paper North America, the corporation that owns five dams on the river. Sappi is asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to renew their licenses for another 30 to 50 years, and a coalition wants the commission to order the removal of three of the dams.

Bernier and McFarland said dam opponents are hypocrites who claim to be environmentalists while dismissing the dams' ability to produce pollution-free electricity.

"They say we've captured the river for a century," McFarland said, "and they want to set it free."

I met the pair during a canoe trip from Sebago Lake to Portland, a 25-mile journey down a river that has more dams per mile than any other river in Maine.

Seven canoeists from the Presumpscot River Watch completed the run in 1994, and a group of six people canoed the river earlier this summer. They put their canoes on wheels on some of the portages. In 1969, two college students traveled from Westbrook to Falmouth in a motorized dinghy, when the lower Presumpscot was an industrial and municipal sewer. According to a newspaper story from that time, the students vomited along the way.

Since white settlers first arrived here in the 17th century, the Presumpscot has been at the center of conflict. The Abenaki tribe, which depended on the river's fish for food, waged a futile war to keep the river open. Some groups today say they are resuming that battle.

I made the journey, along with photographer John Ewing, to learn more about the river and its dams. Like many people in the Portland area, I saw the river as a murky, industrial waterway that passed under my car at the bridges at Route 302 and Interstate 95. It was not a place where I wanted to spend any time.

But the Presumpscot today is cleaner than it has been in a century. Perhaps, I thought, it deserves more than a fleeting glance from a highway.

I also saw it as a road trip, of sorts. I set out with a fixed plan, as I would on any good trip, but the biggest rewards, I knew, would come from the unexpected.

We began early in the morning, hoping to reach Martin's Point, where the river spills into Casco Bay, by dark. We would have to portage nine dams, so we packed as little as possible: lunch, water, a bag of camera equipment, a notebook, a map and a change of clothes. I had spent several days reporting on the river and reading about its history, and I was eager to see it for myself.

We began at the river's source, Sebago Lake.

What an innocent beginning for a river that is drinkable at its origin and unswimmable at its end.

After the great glaciers receded 11,000 years ago, the entire Presumpscot watershed was under seawater, making Sebago a marine bay. That's why the lake today contains natural populations of land-locked smelt and salmon.

The lake also provides most of the Portland area with its water supply, and the clear headwaters of the Presumpscot are a near-ideal habitat for cold-water fish.

The Head Dam divides the river into two parallel channels, one man-made and the other wild. For about a mile here, the river breaks free from the effects of dam impoundments and runs fast over an ancient rocky riverbed. Yet the Head Dam also assures a steady flow year-round, providing a fairly constant environment that allows fish to thrive.

About 7,000 anglers come here in a typical year, making this stretch — per mile — the most heavily fished water in southern Maine. Every spring and fall, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife hauls in truckloads of adult river trout and land-locked salmon. For a six- to eight-week period during both seasons, the fish truck makes deliveries every two weeks.

In the parking lot of Route 35, we met a fly fisherman, Bob Cole, 73, a retired minister from North Berwick. He was slipping on his waders and extending a collapsible plastic cane. Cole said his legs haven't been steady since last year, when doctors surgically removed veins in his legs and transplanted them to his heart.

"You have choices in life," he said as he ambled down to the river. "You can sit back or get out, and I choose to get out."

In its natural state, the river begins in the area of Whites Bridge, which was the summer grounds for the Abenaki. The name Presumpscot comes from the Abenaki word pesumscot, which supposedly means "falls-at-standing rock" or "many-rough-places river" or "many-falls-river."

Whatever the translation, Presumpscot is more lyrical than the Leavitt River, the name chosen by Christopher Leavitt, an English sea captain who 378 years ago was the first white man to explore the waterway.

The modern Presumpscot begins at the outlet of Sebago Lake Basin. The Head Dam, working in conjunction with the nearby Eel Weir Dam, controls the level of the lake.

That level is the subject of a 15-year feud that pits Sappi and marina owners against some lakefront property owners. A higher lake, especially in winter, when electricity costs increase, benefits Sappi's hydroelectric operations. In 1996, all sides agreed to a state-sponsored plan that allows high water in the spring and summer, when boating is at its peak, and a lower level in the typically stormy fall months, when erosion can be worse.

During our trip, the water level was running at a rate of 130,396 gallons per minute, less than half the normal flow, according to the calculations of the dam keepers. The old riverbed, where the fishermen are, was too shallow for a canoe, so we put in on the man-made channel, which once was part of the old Cumberland & Oxford Canal.

Irish laborers in the 1820s hand-dug the canal, which allowed boats to travel from the Fore River in Portland to Harrison at the end of Long Lake. The 267-foot drop to sea level required 27 locks. The canal, its towpath and some of the locks are still visible at other points along the river.

Here, just below Sebago Lake, the canal was widened and deepened to provide a higher head of water at the Eel Weir Power Station.

At the river's upper stretch, the most interesting scenery lies below the surface. The water is so clear I could follow the course of the river's rock-ribbed bed. Trout darted amidst the shadows of trees, and smallmouth bass lurked in the ruins of the river's industrial past.

We saw a cribwork, a wooden platform filled with rocks, that was once part of a string of cribs that guided logs to a channel. Middle Jam Road, which runs along the river from Route 35 to North Gorham, got its name from the logjams that often occurred in this stretch. We saw what looked like a huge dock, perhaps one of the old canal gates, and the remnants of a sawmill.

A great blue heron sprung suddenly from a log, trading a fishing spot for the security of a tall white pine downstream. We also saw an osprey, but no signs of the two nesting eagles that are said to fish the river all summer.

After we portaged around the Dundee Dam, the river's largest, we saw our first signs of litter, a beer can on the river bottom. We then saw our first person, a woman on the shore walking a cat on a leash. The woman said she was from Seattle and spending the summer in the riverside home where she grew up.

Downstream, on the Windham side near the replica of a covered bridge destroyed by vandals in the 1970s, we spotted Dusti Faucher, the president of Friends of the Presumpscot River. Faucher, who lives on Covered Bridge Road, had agreed to meet us here. Her organization, formed in the early 1990s to fight a proposed de-inking plant in South Windham, has become a powerful force in the dam relicensing issue.

Two groups, American Rivers and Friends of the Presumpscot River, are calling for the removal of three dams: Saccarappa, Mallison Falls and Little Falls. They also want fish ladders installed on the other dams. Their argument: The dams don't produce enough energy to justify the harm they do to the environment.

Sappi uses the hydropower at its Westbrook mill, where it also generates power from a cogeneration plant. The two energy sources give the mill more power than it needs because Sappi sells electricity on the market, Faucher said.

Except for the one-mile section below the Head Dam, the river now offers poor habitat for fish, Faucher said. Although the Presumpscot is too warm, too deep and too slow-moving for the fish that normally thrive in rivers, there's still enough current to inhibit pond-loving fish.

"It's in ecological limbo," she said.

On the other side of the river, Hall Sawyer was filling buckets with water to give to the 20 pigs he keeps on his 170-acre spread. Removing the dams, he said, would reduce the Presumpscot to a mudhole for much of the summer, and ruin recreational uses like boating and swimming.

"There would be nothing upriver," he said.

Sawyer, 74, has seen little change in the river in the 60 years he has lived on its banks.

"I like it the way it is," he said.

The upper section of the Presumpscot meets the federal government's Class A water quality standards, which is about as pristine as a river outside a wilderness can be.

But the river's quality falls rapidly after the junction with its biggest tributary, Windham's Pleasant River. The Pleasant and the Presumpscot's other tributaries — Black Brook and Colley Wright Brook in Windham, Piscataqua River in Falmouth, Mosher Brook in Gorham and Thayer Brook in Gray — all fail Class B standards for dissolved oxygen.

Two other tributaries — Otter Brook in Windham and Inkhorn Brook in Westbrook — don't even meet Class C standards and are unsafe for swimming.

The reason: Storm-water runoff from lawns, farms, driveways, rooftops, parking lots and roads carries into the river soil, and other pollutants, like oil from cars, fertilizers, pesticides and animal waste. Runoff from suburbia is now the greatest threat to the river's water quaility. Soil clouds the water, damages fish gills, covers water plants and raises water temperatures by causing streams to become shallower and wider.

The soil also covers gravel beds, which are fish spawning habitats. The nutrients feed algae and bacteria.

This kind of pollution is harder to control than the stuff that comes out of factory pipes, and the problem will only get worse as the Presumpscot watershed becomes more developed.

Once past the confluence with the Pleasant River, the river takes on a greenish hue and becomes murkier. On the river bottom, milfoil grows in weird, octopus-like forms.

Gradually, the trip to Portland was becoming a long slog. There was hardly a current. One impoundment runs into the next, with little free-flowing river between, and all forward movement must be earned with the paddle.

It occurred to me then that the Presumpscot is a series of narrow lakes, and that we could have canoed up the river just as easily as down it.

The portages were wearing us out. North Gorham Dam portage was a 400-foot hike. The Gambo Dam portage was supposed to be 300 feet, according to a guidebook, but we overshot it by about 300 feet because we couldn't find a path through the woods to reach the river. Only two of the portages were marked.

Now I understood why we had yet to see another canoe. The Presumpscot may have some endearing spots, but the rewards of the journey aren't worth the sweat expended on it. The other side of each dam offers a river that's only slower and cloudier with each stroke.

The prize here is not the modern river. The Presumpscot is exceptional because it is one of America's oldest industrial rivers, and along its twists and banks lurk the ghosts of its storied past. During our portage at the Gambo Dam, we weaved the canoe past the circular stone foundations of Gambo Powder Mill, which supplied the Union army with a quarter of its gunpowder. A boat loaded with gunpowder could travel by canal to Portland and then sail to Boston.

These mills occasionally blew up. After each explosion, according to historical accounts, before the dead and injured had even been removed, more local men would line up to seek their jobs, which paid as much as double the prevailing wage.

During Colonial times, a mast landing was located just below Mallison Falls. Pine trees with diameters of 2 or more feet were cut and carried overland to this spot. From here, the trees were floated to tidewater for ships bound for England.

The river was the only thoroughfare available to early settlers and was key to the settlement of Westbrook, Gorham and Windham.

Downstream on the Windham side of the river, about a mile from the river on Anderson Road, stands a wooden marker, "Site of Chief Polin's Death, May 14, 1756."

The story of Polin is an early example of the conflict that has marked this river for nearly four centuries.

Polin led a band of people merged from the Abenaki and Pennacook tribes. The natives, who had long depended on sea-run fish as a food and fertilizer for their crops, claimed fishing rights on the river.

The river was once abundant in salmon, shad and alewives, according to the writings of early settlers.

But the settlers saw the river as a source of power and wealth. The first dam was built in Falmouth in 1732, and others soon followed. The dams ran the mills, which produced lumber, paper, pulp, flour, textiles, sails and silk. The mill owners often fought among themselves over claims to water rights.

According to historical sources, Polin traveled to Boston, where he urged the Massachusetts governor to allow fish to pass the dams. Although the governor agreed fishways should be built, his orders were unenforceable on the Maine frontier.

Enraged, Polin and his warriors began raiding settlements along the river. In the spring of 1756, he and his group of warriors paddled down the Presumpscot for a surprise attack on a settlement at present-day Windham. They found a group of farmers cultivating their fields while eight heavily armed men kept guard.

Polin's band sprang from the woods and killed two farmers who had gotten ahead of the main group. On hearing the shots, half of the guards fled to the settlement's garrison, and the other half moved forward and traded fire with the Indians. Both sides took cover behind trees. Polin fired and missed. While he was reloading his musket, one of the guards shot from 30 feet away and killed him instantly. The Indians, who "made the air sound with yells of rage," according to one account, carried their dead chieftain back to their canoes and paddled upriver to Sebago.

There, according to oral tradition, they buried him beneath the roots of a beech tree.

Chief Polin's death "put an end to all further trouble with the Indians in this vicinity," wrote Samuel Thomas Dole, a Windham historian who lived in the late 1800s. "They never again attempted to disturb the whites in their occupancy of the land."