The bicyclist will find Maine roads made of sand, rocks and clay (that becomes glue when it rains) and roads that seem to select all the hills, and climb over them with ‘a persistency worthy of a better cause.’ Roads cost money and Maine is not a wealthy state. The practice of allowing citizens to work out their taxes on the roads in their community is the worst system ever devised, because the men have no knowledge of road-building and spend their time in idle chatter. The making of the road happens when other business is slack and is not necessarily the best time of the year to construct a road. Our roads should be built by men skilled in the business that have studied engineering and the various kinds of road building including a knowledge of soil mechanics and maintenance. [Maine Division of the League of American Wheelman Guide to Cycling in Maine, 1891]

      Deeply rutted and gouged by a century of ironclad wagon wheels and shod hooves passing over them, Lincolnville’s roads were in rough shape at the beginning of the twentieth century. In some places they traveled over ledge outcroppings, but more often they formed dusty gullies between stone walls on either side. Those gullies were muddy sinkholes for a good part of the spring as the frozen earth thawed, releasing a winter’s worth of moisture. The roads were so bad at those times that they gave the name ‘mud’ to a season, kept people home for weeks, halted commerce, put the mailman afoot, and, depending when the thaw came, made a mess of the March town meeting.

     Like nearly everything else that came out of the 19 th-Century, the roads in Lincolnville were handmade.  Men cleared the way for a new road with axes and bucksaws, oxen and chains. Roots and stubborn rocks were grubbed out, pried up. Fill was painstakingly dug from gravel banks, shoveled onto wagons, and hauled to low spots.

     Still, judging from the uniformity of the old roads in town, a good deal of planning must have gone into their design. The long road from Ducktrap to Searsmont is nearly a straight shot; what slight deviations found in it today may be where the original roadbed is lost under modern construction. Most were "three rod roads", that is forty-eight feet wide, which included the shoulders. The early road builders hauled rock from the roadbed and used it to build walls along the road. Those rock walls, forty-eight feet apart, still march alongside many roads long-since abandoned to the forest.

     All the roads that were ever built are still here. The main, numbered routes—1, 52, 173, 235—follow original roadbeds in most places, though some bad corners and steep hills have been eliminated. Grass formerly grew clear to the edges of the traveled way and down the middle as well; many remember that grass grew in the middle of Atlantic Highway—Route 1. The practice of bulldozing stonewalls right into the roadbed helped to fill low spots, while decades of paving have substantially raised the surface. Rosey Gerry, who lived on the Greenacre Road as a little boy in the 50s, swears his father’s old car was pushed into the muck of that road along with most of the rock walls that once lined the sides.

     The roads that were abandoned have changed less, since they were simply left to lie unused, though no one who once lived on one of them would recognize their surroundings today.  Most of them now lie under the litter of the deep forest, the depression of two wheel ruts in the leaves about all that’s visible. The open fields, the grazing animals, and the fencing—perhaps split rail, slab wood, woven alders, high stonewalls, or a combination of these—are all gone.

     The really wet stretches were paved with "corduroy", logs laid perpendicular across the roadbed right next to each other like the ribs of corduroy cloth.  As those logs rotted into the mud over the years more were laid on top, until uncounted cords of wood lay mired in many of the roads.  Part of the old Whitney Road runs through a peat swamp; the road is raised from the surrounding wetland by two feet or more. In a few places the corduroy surface still shows through, a hint of what lies buried underneath.

     When a stretch of road wore out from use, from the constant wear of wagon wheels and animal hooves, its path was moved to one side or the other. A single pair of wagon ruts along an old road may turn into four or more ruts as the road builders (or repairers) sought firmer ground. The worn-out spots are still visible on many abandoned roads. Sometimes a mud hole would be filled with rocks or other debris. In the spring the frost would often heave these rocks up to the surface; after a few weeks they would subside again. One such boulder could be counted on to heave up through the asphalt of Slab City Road every spring until the road was finally rebuilt in the late 1990s. We frequent travelers learned to swerve around it.

     The road along the edge of Megunticook Lake between Camden and Lincolnville—Route 52—is still called the Turnpike after its origins as a toll road. The mountainside came right down to the lake until a Camden man, Daniel Barrett, figured out a way to build a roadbed along the shore. He started in 1802, and with the labor of some forty men, including four slaves brought to the area from the West Indies by a sea captain, Barrett completed his road four years later. The men rolled giant boulders down the hillside into the lake to form the crude base of the road, then wagon loads of smaller rocks, dirt, and gravel were hauled in by oxen team to fill in between the boulders. Although the road provided a much better route between the two towns than the mountain road it replaced, it would prove to be a continuing headache well into the 20 th-Century.

     In 1907 the Legislature passed an act allowing Camden and Lincolnville to prohibit automobiles from the Turnpike, which was described as “having steep grades and being narrow, circuitous, and on the margin of Lake Megunticook [it] is unsuitable and dangerous for their use.” (1907 Acts of Maine State Senate and House of Representatives, p. 268.)

     Most of the pages of the early town reports are taken up with the names of townsmen who worked on the roads. Each section of town had its own road commissioner. For instance, in 1917 road commissioners were John Wiley of Cobbtown, Hollis Dean on Belfast Road, George Mahoney at the Beach, and Winfield Young on Youngtown Road. Each man organized the men in his area to do the work needed on their neighborhood roads. With wages for a common laborer at about a dollar a day, it appeared as if every able-bodied man in town worked off some of his taxes this way. In 1900, 218 men worked, in 1901, 253, and in 1902, 247. These figures don’t include the crews who shoveled snow to clear the roads in the winter, since many are duplicates.

     The inadequacy of local roads, pointed out in the 1891 Wheelman’s Guide, became more apparent with the arrival of the automobile in the early 1900s. Just as now, if a man invested in a brand new automobile, he wanted to be able to drive it anywhere he pleased. Drivers included plenty of local folks as well as the increasing numbers of tourists motoring up from the cities. Roads that “become glue when it rains” just didn’t cut it.

     Maine’s first Commissioner of Highways, Paul D. Sargent, laid out his suggestions in 1905 for “improving country roads: cutting bushes, straightening, widening, cutting down hills, the construction of sand roads, clay roads . . . trained men will have charge of road work and it will be done according to some systematic plan, in place of our present method of working a section here and a section there when we can find nothing better to do and letting the most of it go uncared for practically all of the time.” (A History of Maine Roads, State Highway Commission, p.4.)

     That first report from the state inventoried all the roads in every town. It indicated that Lincolnville had seventy miles of roads, including one and a half miles of village streets which were eighteen-feet-wide and sixty-eight and a half miles of thirteen-foot-wide country roads, all in “good” condition. Further, the town owned no gravel pits and had not prospected for gravel. Lincolnville did, however, own an American Champion road machine worth $225, which could cover one third of a mile a day. Such machines, which were apparently used to grade the gravel surface, tended to narrow the roads over time since they couldn’t get into the bushy ditches, and the vegetation then grew into the travel way. (1st Annual Report of the Commisioner of Highways for the State of Maine, 1905.)

     According to the report, an “adequate” road allowed two teams to pass without going into the bushes or ditch. Since two wagons require at least sixteen feet, Lincolnville’s thirteen-foot-wide roads must have necessitated a lot of pulling off to let the other guy pass.

     Then in 1913 the new State Highway Commission was charged by the Legislature with building a system of connected highways throughout the state, recognizing that two distinct interests needed to be served—local residents and interstate travelers. Three classes of roads were designated: state highways, state-aid highways and third-class highways, known today as town roads. Since each town built its roads to serve the needs of its own citizens prior to 1913, there was little uniformity in the roads connecting to an adjacent community. The new state system would remedy that by having these through roads engineered and constructed by the State Highway Commission.

     Today’s Route 1 was designated State Highway D in 1916, and three and a half miles of it was constructed that year. Work began west of the village and through the Beach to the Northport town line. The sixteen-foot-roadway had a seven-inch deep gravel surface, and was ninety-five percent completed that year for a cost of $19,021.50. Other roadwork done that year included a stone culvert some twenty-six feet long on a state aid road, not identified, for two hundred dollars. Route 52, which at one point was designated Route 137, was a state aid road.

     In 1916 as well, patrol maintenance of state and state aid highways was implemented, a system whereby the cost of road maintenance was shared by the state and the municipality. Patrol maintenance men were on duty between April and November. In the 1916 season Lincolnville paid $300 and the state paid $200 for the patrolmen whose tasks included “dragging, raking rocks, clearing culverts and ditches, surfacing gravel” on some ten miles of local roads. For the first time professionals were responsible not only to build, but to maintain the state’s highways. Only the third-class or town roads remained in the hands of the farmers, merchants, teachers and tradesmen working off part of their taxes doing a little roadwork.

     No discussion of Lincolnville’s roads in the early decades of the 20 th-Century would be complete without a look at the town’s lost opportunity for public transportation.  According to an unidentified newspaper clipping in the Lincolnville Historical Society’s collection, a proposed cross-country electric streetcar line was about to add the final link that would join Chicago, Illinois to Bangor, Maine. Promising that “construction will begin in the Spring of 1910, if not before” the Waldo Street Railway Company was busily acquiring land along the line, which would skirt the western shore of Penobscot Bay from Camden to Belfast, about eighteen miles. From there, if it could solve the problem of crossing the head of Belfast Harbor, it would continue on through Searsport, Stockton, Frankfort, Hamden and Bangor.

     Streetcars or trolleys were commonplace throughout the country in the early twentieth century, providing convenient transportation within cities and between towns. Trolleys ran between Thomaston, Rockland, and Camden —we’ll have to take the author’s word for it that a trolley could be ridden all the way to Chicago –- so the idea of extending the line from Camden to Belfast was logical. But the developers ran into a hitch—the excessive demands of some of the property owners along the route. It wasn’t the “country people and natives” whose farms would be bisected by the new line, and who were “expected to have high ideas of farm values”—they proved surprisingly willing and pleased at the prospect of a trolley line by their doors. Rather, it was “the summer people who go to that region to get away from trolley cars and such things” who have not been so enthusiastic.

     “The line of sea coast from Camden to Belfast has up to this time been an almost uninvaded Eden,” commented the article. “Tourists sailing up the bay have wondered why this stretch of shore, with the numerous little coves, headlands and the beautiful golden sands of Lincolnville Beach, has escaped with but a few scattered cottages, when the region combined shore and country most delightfully.” The new trolley would open up this “veritable paradise and make available hundreds of as beautiful cottage sites as there are on the Maine coast.”

     The Waldo Street Railway Company apparently came to naught, for no trolley line was built through Lincolnville Beach. It was at this very moment, the early teens, that public policy, aided by powerful companies such as Standard Oil, was tipping the balance between public and private transportation, between the new automobile and the ubiquitous streetcar. Trolley companies were bought up and dismantled all over the country. Federal and state highway departments developed roads meant for automobiles, not trolleys. Whether the dream of “a trolley line by the door” in Lincolnville was a victim of such policies or simply of the stonewalling of a few summer residents trying to keep city ways from invading their Eden, we’ll never know.

This history of our town’s roads is taken from Staying Put in Lincolnville, Maine 1900-1950, available at the Lincolnville Library, Western Auto, and at Sleepy Hollow Rag Rugs. 

     Town Meetings in the 1970s and 80s were held at Tranquility Grange, usually on a Monday night in March. Whether from tradition or cabin fever, the place was always packed. The room buzzed with the excited chatter of folks who probably hadn’t seen another human being other than, perhaps a spouse, for weeks. Just as likely, though, the excitement came from last minute politicking for this or that issue that was about to come before the voters. And in my memory, that issue was often the closing of a town road.

     As a young and uninformed homeowner, certainly one new to the vagaries of small town politics, the spirited (!) debates that ensued went mostly over my head. Sometimes the town won and closed a road, but just as often the road dweller won, and voters overturned the town’s wish to close it.

     Fast forward to 2015. Road closings are again on the warrant, or rather, making four separate roads private: Albert Blood Road, Lloyd Thomas Road, Thorndike Road and Martins Corner Road. Three homeowners are affected. Essentially, these are people who bought houses and/or property on a town road, meaning the road is maintained, plowed, sanded, and repaired by the town. If the roads are made private, then those who live on them will be responsible for these activities going forward.

     After much study and expense assessing the value of the properties involved and assigning compensation for each, the selectmen have voted, 3-2, to bring the issue to the voters. But, instead of a lively debate at the June Town Meeting the issue this time will be voted on the Tuesday prior to Town Meeting. It will be a done deal by the time we all gather in Walsh Common to wrestle with the other issues facing our town. Seems to me this is a discussion that ought to be aired before the Town Meeting before we decide.

     Nomination papers are still being circulated for several open town positions: two on the Board of Selectmen, two on the LCS Committee, 1 on the CSD School Committee, and three on the Budget Committee. Get the papers at the town office, collect between 25 and 100 signatures of registered voters, and return them to the office by 5 p.m., April 27.

      A public open house meeting to discuss the new Flood Insurance Rate Maps for Waldo County will be held April 29 at both 2-4 p.m. and 6-8 p.m. at the Hutchinson Center in Belfast. Representatives from the Maine Emergency Management Agency and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will be on hand to answer questions and help property owners identify and understand how their risk might be changing.

     The School budget will be presented Tuesday, April 14, 6 p.m. at the Town Office. Take a look at it ahead of time.

“To: LBB

From: Mia & Bob

Subject: Carpenter who just saw Bob at Drake's

Message: … this afternoon a little after 3:00. Please send us a private email. Dyslexic Bob and Menopause-brain Mia cannot remember your name right now but want to get in touch with you.”

Sorry, Mia. I couldn’t resist!