Backwoods Blog

MONTICELLO STATION

Backwoods Blog;

in the woods and on the road…

The thermometer hit minus 1 overnight, our first sub-zero temp of the winter. Overall, it’s been relatively mild thus far, nothing much to brag about. I did happen to come across an old journal entry that noted more typical temperatures for this time of year. This entry is from twenty years ago, just as the new millennium rolled in and it was a cold day in the middle of January. I’ve included a map that shows the areas mentioned in the entry and it marks the 50 acre Hutchinson property. The blue stick-pin indicates where the cabin is located on the Meduxnekeag River. Photographs of Monticello Station and the Great Northern lumber operation appeared in the Monticello Sesquicentennial booklet from 1996 with additional photos by Wendell Harvey. Keep warm everyone!

*

Journal Entry

January 20, 2000

I am sitting in the cabin on this mid-January morning and winter has finally arrived here in the north woods, a bit delayed perhaps, but now here full strength at minus 24 degrees where you think twice about jumping out of bed to start a fire. In fact, you think twice about almost everything on days like this – funny how contemplative a person can get in January. All in all, I’m in a much better mood now that the road to the cabin has closed for the season, forcing solitude upon my location and the snow is…deep enough.

Standing on the front porch with a cup of strong coffee in hand I can hear the snow machines in the distance coming through Monticello Station on I-83, the main link of the interstate snowmobile trail system connecting Houlton to points north. A hundred years ago this was a busy place. The railroad opened this portion of Northern Maine to markets in Boston and New York for passenger, freight and a mythic regional output of potatoes that sustained the livelihood and reputations of my ancestors and this town for more than a century. The quiet stream by my cabin was, at that time, an industrial water-route driving logs to the downtown mills, and in the thirties Great Northern Paper Company built a dam upstream by the railroad trestle for their lumbering operation complete with boarding house.

My earliest memories are of standing in our open field watching the trains make their way across the back hills in the distance and going along with my Dad to the potato houses of old Monticello Station; the smell of kerosene-soaked offices, dusty potato bins and men smoking cigars. In my teenage years, the B&A (Bangor and Aroostook) abandoned the railroad and pulled the tracks. The woods behind our farm grew quiet and traffic on US Route 1 in front of it began to increase as I went away to college. Upon my return I was surprised to find that local snowmobile and sportsman’s clubs had organized, funded and purchased grooming equipment and established a regional trail network for snow machines; the king-pin being the old B&A Railroad bed “rail to trail” recreation system. This is a busy place once again for tourism and new sport; from my cabin porch headlights winding through the night woods, high performance engines howling like the coyote in winter and grooming machines coming through Monticello Station like the trains of yesteryear. What will the new century bring? We are still a rural area for now, but for how long? Boston is getting closer all the time. Only the days to come will tell…as I sit at the table by the window in the cabin on this mid-January day in the new year 2000.

In the woods,

Dave

January 12, 2023