York Town News
York history buff explores roads less traveled
By Virginia L. Woodwell
Local historian Ron Nowell illustrated the walking paths and back roads of York's history, like those pictured on this 1920s-era map of portions of York Village, York Beach and York Harbor during an event last week.
Courtesy photo
Ron Nowell and Neill Ramsdell discuss the paths and walkways of York's past following a talk by Nowell at the York Public Library last week.
Photo by Virginia Woodwell
YORK - We've forgotten.
In the days when transportation was by horse, roads were rutted and muddy or dusty, and littered with horse manure. Walking paths located away from roads were therefore prized.
That was one of the points made by local historian and former Selectman Ron Nowell in a talk called "Historic Walking Paths and Back Roads," presented at the York Public Library at noon last Tuesday, March 13.
Walking paths in York - throughout the Village and beyond, and along the rivers and shores - Nowell said, became especially valuable, and widely touted as assets, as the town began to attract tourists in the 19th century.
Before that, and from the earliest settlement by Europeans, shore paths served fishermen, and roads following paths into the hinterlands were designed to yield access to the public lands called commons.
Pressures of population growth and other cultural changes have altered all those patterns of use, and one of the results has been a blurring of distinctions between public and private walkway rights.
That was an issue to which Nowell returned repeatedly in his talk, starting with a focus on beaches.
York's public beaches, Nowell said, are "public in use only," since a court decision established that the property rights of landowners extend to tidal low-water marks. Long Beach, he said, belongs, historically and technically, to a Norton family, a truth recently acknowledged, Nowell noted, when town officials had to obtain Norton permission before installing a new flight of stairs there.
Similarly, he said, at the Harbor Beach, the town has jurisdiction over the half covered by terms of the Hartley-Mason estate, which established the public park above it, but the other half is the property of the Stage Neck Inn.
Officials, he said "haven't confronted" this issue.
Confrontations, however, have abounded in recent years over the public nature of the Shore Path, also known as the Cliff Walk, which runs close to the ocean along the bluff from Cow Beach on the northeast to the harbor and river on the southwest.
According to Nowell, while York's "Marginal Way" - the Shore Path or Cliff Walk - wasn't as clearly established from the outset as Ogunquit's, the public nature of this path is recorded in between 80 and 85 percent of deeds to the properties it crosses, and federally-funded research conducted in the 1970s and again in 1984 confirmed much of that fact, with onsite surveys then resulting in the placement of permanent bronze markers along the path to prevent its deliberate eradication.
The public nature and use of the Shore Path is further confirmed by other evidence, he said: fragments of railings there, and the memory of benches and huts sited along it; its appearance on maps issued in the early 1900s by The York Improvement Society; annual mention of it in town reports, with appropriations made for maintenance and poison ivy eradication there, and testimonies from scores of persons who've worked on it or used it over the years.
Nevertheless, Nowell said, the growth of vegetation there has made it currently impassible, and some homeowners there have ignored its presence and built lawns and gardens across it.
That has happened in one instance, Nowell said, despite the owner's having obtained a building permit containing an affidavit, notarized by the town clerk and signed by the owner, stipulating that a "Marginal Way Path," or five-foot right-of way, crosses the property.
Nowell termed the Shore Path, or Cliff Walk, "an unbelievable asset," and said, "There's no reason you can't walk it, though you might be challenged."
In a question-and-answer period following the talk, Nowell was asked what he foresaw happening with the Shore Path, and what people could do to force the issue.
He said, "According to Maine law, if you encounter any obstacle on a public way, you have a right to remove it and place it on the property of the owner."
The larger issue, he said, is in selectmen's hands, and Selectman Torbert Macdonald, Jr., he maintained, has been requesting, for two and a half years, that it be placed on their agenda, but that hasn't happened. Vice Chairman Dwight Bardwell, Nowell added, has also promised to raise the issue, but hasn't yet.
In describing other significant paths in town, Nowell said that the first paths were those along the rivers that were used by fishermen, with the paths' fates related to the development of other structures - like the establishment of the first ferry across the York River where the Stage Neck Inn is now.
When York was first settled, Nowell said, 90 percent of the land was common land, and put to use in the harvesting of masts for the royal navy. Early roads were thus described as "the path to the outer commons."
In 1746, the town created "The Stated Commons," and a hundred-foot right of way to it, rerouting the Post Road onto "a path into the woods" and through an area where the Whippoorwill development is now.
Roads were laid out for access to this common land, Nowell said, "but somehow people absorbed them into their land" - an illegal act in some instances, since, as Nowell put it, "once a road has been used for 20 years, it becomes public and stays that way."
A recent survey conducted by The Nature Conservancy for the York Land Trust of property that has come to be called the Hilton-Winn Farm on the Ogunquit Road unearthed such an old "rangeway" or road.
Nowell credited Brett Horr of York's Planning Department with the development of a comprehensive map of the town that will be available to all on the internet within a year.
What he called "an invaluable tool" in ferreting out all of this information and more are old maps of Maine towns, including York, made available to the public by the University of New Hampshire at http://docs.unh.edu/towns/MaineTownList.htm. An 1893 or 1897 water department map there he called "very, very accurate."
A first project planned as a result of this research, he said, will be to recreate a path through the back part of the Town Farm property, off Long Sands Road, from what was once Parsons Lumber property on Woodbridge Road.
In the question-and-answer period, Nowell gave little credence to roads being laid out on either cow paths or Indian trails. Legends about Indians, he said, "were always a selling point in York," and he cited the example of his own grandfather and great-grandfather making up tales for tourists about certain giant rock piles being Indians' burial grounds.
Tourists, he added by way of an aside, took to coming from Ogunquit to Mount Agamenticus, and, at a time when Jews weren't allowed by law to spend the night in Ogunquit, his grandmother rented them rooms.
In the question-and-answer period, a member of the audience suggested that Nowell's talk be televised and recorded for playback on local network television, because there is widespread interest in the topic.
