York Town News
HDC Walks provide a trip back in time to York's forgotten history
By Virginia L. Woodwell
This photograph, thought to date from the 1880s, depicts one of the Mount Agamenticus families that once resided in the then-cleared woodlands around the mountain. Pictured are Orrin Fitzgerald, Charles Stewart and Jane Fitzgerald Stewart.
Photo courtesy of Ron Nowell
Historic District Commission member Ron Nowell examines the remains of one of the homes that once dotted the Agamenticus region. Now, little more than cellar holes and such items as this rusted stove and bedstead remain of the farm families that once resided there.
Photo by Virginia L. Woodwell
CAPE NEDDICK - Few participants showed up for a walk last Saturday, July 29, sponsored by York's Historic District Commission to introduce the public to the last remaining evidence of the people who once lived on or near Mount Agamenticus.
Those who came, however, were treated to rare insight into a neglected aspect of local social history, made vivid through the sightings of wells, tumbled-down root cellars and cemeteries, and by first-hand stories, remembered or passed along from generation to generation.
York native, former selectman and avid local historian Ron Nowell was the walk leader, and his exceptional memory for historical data, coupled with a gift for story-telling, brought to life the scores of people who'd once themselves enlivened that now heavily-wooded place not so very long ago.
Elisha Lewis, for example, Nowell reported, was one of the last of several families of Lewises who'd had homes on the mountain starting in about 1800 - nine of them by 1860, according to the census of that year. They came from Kittery originally, were all illiterate, and, by 1895, were gone, leaving behind no wills or deeds or other written records.
But there's a slight declivity still in the ground where the root cellar in Elisha's house once was, and some foundation rocks around the rusted remains of a stove and some bedsteads. Nowell said that when Lewises flourished there, they communicated by "hollering" - and even without hollering, in a world then cleared of trees, they could be heard at some distance.
Word had it, Nowell said, that students at the Agamenticus School, half a mile away, could hear Elisha talking to his horses, and Nowell reported that his own father could remember driving by and hearing Elisha inside, talking to himself.
Elisha Lewis' house site was one of the first stops on Saturday's walk, and it exemplified the extreme poverty of people in this region.
Agamenticus houses, Nowell said, "were nothing more than long, narrow camps, one-room wide."
They had root cellars, he added, but no other cellars, low ceilings and often dirt floors, and in some instances, "You could see right through the boards."
Old photos, thought to be from the 1880s, which Nowell displayed just before the walk, showed one house that measured only 14 feet wide and 18 deep, and another that had only one window. A photo of one Samuel Edward Lewis showed him standing before a house that was clearly barely patched together; he'd moved into that one, Nowell said, because his own had become truly decrepit.
"Nobody up here had money," Nowell stressed.
The walk began shortly after the blacktop of Old Mountain Road ended, and it followed what would now be called a wooded trail. But it had actually been the original road to Mount Agamenticus, Nowell said, and the fact that it was once commonly referred to as "the highway" meant that it had been accepted as a public road, though never formally recorded as such.
Today, a car-width wide or wider in spots, and often rutted by all-terrain vehicle use, it snakes up hill and down dale, sometimes over large granite outcroppings and always between stone walls that line it on both sides. Those stone walls, and substantial piles of stones Nowell pointed out here and there throughout the woods, testify to the fact that the land was once entirely cleared.
Much of that clearing came about because of a heavy commitment to sheep farming. Before the Civil War, Nowell reported, York and Cumberland counties in Maine boasted the largest population of sheep in the nation, and Agamenticus sheep farmers could get their wool processed at a mill at Chase's Pond.
All that changed, however, with the opening up of the Plains states. Never prosperous, Agamenticus residents were subsequently reduced to a catch-as-catch-can existence. They became known for their basketry, and some gathered and sold hickory nuts and berries, but, with few other means of making money, they also depended heavily on bartering.
On the walk, Nowell paused to point out a place where the road, at a curve, appeared once to have gone straight ahead. That, he said, represented some plans of Edward E. Marshall, proprietor of the big York Harbor hotel known as the Marshall House, to build another resort on the mountain. The plans were never realized, Nowell said, though both Marshall and Josiah Norton, who ran the brickyard in York, bought land on the mountain to harvest firewood there for their respective businesses.
At another spot, Nowell led walkers just a little off the road to where perhaps a dozen rough stone slabs set upright in the forest floor signified a cemetery. But only one of the stones contained any markings. "L.L.," it read, scored in primitive letters, and with the fragment of what looked like a "5" beneath them. Nothing else was written on the stone, and Nowell said that, indeed, there's only one gravestone on the mountain with any name and date on it, and that commemorates a young girl named Lena (pronounced "Lenna"), a Lewis daughter buried at another site.
Probably, he guessed, Lena died of typhus, once known as "black water disease," the result of mountain folks' typically digging their wells close to swamps and vernal pools.
She may, too, it was suggested, have been the product of intermarriage between cousins, common there, in that close and isolated community.
Nowell said that the crude, scarcely-marked, graveyard visited on Saturday has been erroneously designated on maps and in books as a Plaisted family cemetery.
Several characters stood out as Nowell unfolded this narrative: Jane Fitzgerald Stewart, who wasn't really married but took the Stewart name anyway, she smoked a pipe, but hid it when company came; "King" David Fitzgerald, so designated because he headed the Fitzgerald clan; Bradford Fitzgerald, who carved his name and a date on a granite outcropping on Old County Road, off Ogunquit Road, and especially the latecomer Bob Henneberger, who died in 1997 after having become widely known as the mountain's "hermit."
Nowell said that Henneberger may have been introduced to Mt. Agamenticus and its tourist-attracting basket-makers as a child when his parents came to summer at the shore. In any case, he himself came in 1947, after conscientious-objector service as a medic in the South Pacific in World War II, and he remained, living in isolation in a camp he built himself. Despite his conscientious-objector status, Nowell said, he loved guns, and he also treasured his dogs. Passers-by, frightened of both, wore a path outside the main path past his door.
"But he was a nice guy," Nowell stressed, as he described Henneberger's skill as an artist, and the extreme distress Henneberger felt when he shot one of his dogs by mistake and when he discovered that he'd begun his cellar hole at a grave site.
"He'd go out of his way not to cut a live tree," Nowell said, explaining that Henneberger, seeking firewood, would cut standing dead trees instead.
Early in the walk, Nowell told a tale about Herbert Bracy's attempting to walk home to the mountain late at night after an evening of poker-playing down below. It was cold, and he planned to cross Chase's Pond on the ice there, but each time he stepped out on it he saw a hand rise up in front of him, and it spoke the words, "Go back! Go back!" So Bracy walked around the pond, and the next day, said Nowell, "All the ice in it was gone."
Nowell has been working assiduously, piecing together such scraps of lore and fact, and personally tramping this region, to give the long-departed mountain residents a history that's been, to date, largely ignored.
A second, similar walk is scheduled to cover the Knight's Marsh area in the southwestern quadrant of the Agamenticus area. It will start at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 19, and will depart from the parking lot on Kingsbury Lane, off Route 91. Like the first, Nowell said, the walk will not be difficult in any sense, will follow dirt roads and cover a mile-and-a-half, maximum. Anybody is welcome to attend.
For more information, call the Historic District Commission at 363-2200.
