The past few weeks have seen me several times in my one-time hometown of South Berwick.
- My dad sold his condo after a year and a week on the market. I claimed some furniture and helped him move the rest. Memories of crowds at Aggie's Ice Cream Parlor and how best to get out of Old Mill bubbled up to the surface.
- Alicia and I toured the historic Sarah Orne Jewett and Hamilton houses on Historic New England's open house day. We shot twin evil eyes at the guy who refused to refrain from photography, pictured the often-backed-up Routes 4 and 236 concurrency as a cart path, and grinned at the serenity on the Hamilton's grounds and gardens. I don't know if it's particularly nice or if I just underrated river frontage, but the land on both sides of the area around where the Cocheco and Salmon Falls rivers come together to form the Piscataqua is Really Really Nice. There was a particular spot where gardens opened up on both sides of a stone path, with an imposingly broad side of the house in the background. Arrestingly near-perfect symmetry.
We enjoyed decent food and huge portions at the Asia Cafe (gotta love those Chinese-place lunch specials) and picked up a couple of overstock books at the new-ish Mercantile shop. One of those early-summer days which detaches itself from the calendar with everyone in a good mood.
- The next day, after we explored an old road on the Dover-Rollinsford line (a trip that deserves its own post), Alicia went to work and I had a chance to close out the SB experience. Bear with me as there's some personal back story and (hopefully more interesting) local railroad history to go with this one.
One of the first things I did after downloading Google Earth during the winter of '09 was to zoom all the way in on this image:
The south end of this shot is where Rt. 236 swings left after being unnaturally straight for a while after the Dover-Eliot Rd / 101 intersection. Dad had told me that that section of road followed an old railroad grade, but I hadn't really put two and two together until seeing the overhead shot. In the summer, there is a farm stand ahead on the grade where the road swings left towards downtown SB. Where it intersects Route 91 are three mailboxes, but no houses are visible down the good two-lane gravel road.
Over my year as a resident, I knocked off other targets - Great Hill Rd, Love Brook Rd, Dennett Road (especially from the Boyds Corner Rd end), and Crooker Lane. This one eluded me, though, as I couldn't decide whether to walk or drive and was afraid of meeting hostile homeowners some distance up the road. I was also convinced that the road needed to have a name - otherwise, how did the mail get delivered? I [very] briefly contemplated opening the mailboxes to see if there was anything inside with an address. The usually reliable South Berwick planning board minutes and dearly departed South Berwick Citizen didn't provide a road name, but the prospect of (literally) miles of good road/trail remained exciting and I really wanted to know whether there was a bridge (or any remnants thereof) over the Great Works like the causeway over Knights Pond.
Wait, what causeway? You betcha! The causeway, intriguing gravel road, and Route 236 alignment are all nearly perfectly aligned and were part of the route of the Portland, Saco, and Portsmouth railroad. Near the causeway, it intersected an old alignment of the Boston & Maine (now used by Amtrak for the Downeaster and freight trains) at South Berwick Junction / Agamenticus Station. Yes, there really were two railroads (and a station) near today's Junction Rd. Sadly, it took me until this year to realize that's where Junction Rd got its name.
The P, S &P ran from Portsmouth into Eliot and South Berwick, then turned northeast and passed through North Berwick, the Kennebunks, Saco, and eventually Portland. The Boston & Maine (today's Amtrak) also heads through North Berwick but then takes a more coastal route to today's large station in Wells and beyond.
Complicating the issue are two things:
1) The section of the B&M that ran to South Berwick Junction has been abandoned and is no longer visible (you can barely see it on some aerial shots). If you take the Downeaster from Dover today, you stay on the NW side of Route 4 until North Berwick and don't go near Agamenticus Rd. My guess is that this rerouting was done after the P, S & P was discontinued and there was no longer a reason for a detour.
2) A third railroad also once passed through South Berwick - the Portsmouth, Great Falls, and Conway. Dazzle your friends by asking them what Rollinsford and Somersworth were once named and then telling them it's Salmon Falls and Great Falls. Actually, Salmon Falls isn't too hard to come up with - the downtown village retains that name - and you'll find Great Falls in the name of many downtown Somersworth villages.
This confused me to no end for a long time because I got "two abandoned railroads met at Agamenticus" into my head and assumed that one of them must have been the Portsmouth, Great Falls, and Conway...but it's not. That one ran closer to the coast, but I'm not sure exactly where - or why it came into Maine at all. This could be helpful, but where is Brock's Crossing? And, why did the line cross into Maine for short stretches not once, but twice? Weren't bridges expensive?
A new year brought a new approach: approach the Great Works from the Emery's Bridge end to the north. I didn't think there were any houses on that section of road - except for those very close to Emery's Bridge Rd. Crooker Rd (the road next to the cemetery across from The Lunch Box) runs almost to the ROW, but has a creepy house part of the way in. So, I cut through the purported future home of Our Lady of Angels church - for now, just a meadow.
I parked in one of the Willow St field lots and the walk up Agamenticus Rd was routine. I sweated lightly in my tick-avoidance long sleeves and windpants. Bore right at the sign; the meadow grass was about chest-high. As the trees converged, the remaining grassland aimed at the Crooker Ln house so I entered the woods. It got muddy for just long enough for me to wish I'd worn hiking boots, but quickly firmed up. I guess that's not a surprise; you wouldn't want to run a railroad or power lines through a bog.
The woods were fairly open and I'd guess that I wasn't the first to head this way. Nothing resembling a trail, but superior routes suspiciously presented themselves. It was probably only 10 minutes before I hit the ROW and turned right. The power lines were in a gully to the SE; the road sat high and was in fine shape, 10-12 feet wide. "Warning: Gas line" signs popped up every so often.
In my haste to get going, I forgot to leave something to mark where I'd popped out of the woods for reentry purposes. No matter, I could always just walk out to the road. Sunday afternoon with the Red Sox winning seemed like a pretty safe time to saunter out.
The road itself wasn't particularly interesting or scenic, but my adrenaline remained high as I wondered what would come at the river. Occasionally, four-wheeler side trails split off into the gully or the woods; the road itself was straight as an arrow. With nothing to obstruct it, the chain-link fence in front of the Great Works was visible from a fair distance. It was easy to go around the fence to the river's edge, and a rock structure built into the riverbank looked to be part of the remains of the old bridge, but nothing jutted out into the river except for the gas line; that's the faintly visible line on satellite photos.
Once again, rivers are really pretty! This year's high snowfall / runoff and May rains only helped the Great Works, I'm sure.
From there, I was able to get out easily to the nearest paved road and back to my car; in the interest of not publicizing every last adventure area, that'll be left as the proverbial exercise for the reader (you can also email me for more info, but it's basically the path of least resistance).
After reading more on the South Berwick website after getting home, I concluded that the houses across the river have York Woods Rd (Route 91) addresses such that the CMP road is effectively just a very long driveway. I wonder who plows it, though, and if you could build a house there given modern road frontage requirements......
On the other side of Emery's Bridge Rd, the power lines continue alongside a four-wheeler trail. Although the CMP right-of-way is less well defined so that adventurers need to stay more mindful of private land ownership, I bet there's some great exploring on that side, too!
No comments:
Post a Comment