Wild River Railroad
In 1891 a railroad was built following the present Route 113 from Gilead to Hastings lumber mill on Evans Brook near its confluence with the Wild River. A row of ten houses built along the Wild River for company employees at Hastings became known as "the ten commandments". Rails extended ten miles (16 kilometers) up the Wild River from Hastings by 1896 with branch lines up tributaries Bull Brook, Blue Brook, Moriah Brook, Cypress Brook, and Spruce Brook. A 1903 wildfire destroyed the unharvested timber in the watershed. The railroad was dismantled in 1904. The lumber company land was purchased for the White Mountain National Forest between 1912 and 1918. Passage of the New England Wilderness Act in December, 2006, designated 23,700 acres (96 km2) of the watershed as the Wild River Wilderness.
Read more about this topic: Wild River (Androscoggin River)
Famous quotes containing the words wild, river and/or railroad:
“That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“but we wish the river had another shore,
some further range of delectable mountains,”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“Though the railroad and the telegraph have been established on the shores of Maine, the Indian still looks out from her interior mountains over all these to the sea.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)