The Penobscot drains an immense territory covered with pine, spruce
and hemlock forests. Two hundred millions of feet of lumber will be
floated down it in a single season. Its bold western bay shore rises
into the Camden Mountains, and both sides of the bay were embraced
for thirty miles in the Muscongus Patent, a grant of King George I.
which came to the colonial Governor Samuel Waldo, of Massachusetts,
and afterwards, by descent through his wife, to General Henry Knox.
Thus Knox became the Patroon of Penobscot Bay, building a palace at
Thomaston, where he lived in baronial state and spent so much money in
princely hospitality that he bankrupted himself and almost ruined his
Revolutionary compatriot, General Lincoln, who became involved with
him. On this western shore, Rockland, with nine thousand people, is a
town of sea-captains, fishermen and lime-burners, its rocks making the
best lime of the district, and a hundred kilns illuminating the hills
at night. Adjacent are Dix Island, and to the southward Vinalhaven
Island, producing fine granites shipped abroad for building. To the
northward is Camden, under the shadow of Mount Megunticook, its two
peaks rising fourteen hundred feet above the harbor. Out in front is
an archipelago of pretty islands, the chief being "the insular town of
Islesboro," stretching about thirteen miles along the centre of
Penobscot Bay, its ten square miles of irregular contour having of
late developed into a region of cottages built in all the pleasant
places and making a very popular resort. To the northeastward the
massive Blue Hill stands up an isolated guardian behind the peninsula
of Castine, where the attractive white houses are spread over the
broad and sloping point enclosing its deep harbor, and its
church-spire rises sharply among the trees. In the eastern archipelago
of Penobscot Bay are the Fox Island group of about one hundred and
fifty islands, and the larger islands of North Haven and Vinalhaven
are to the southward, beyond which are the shores of Cape Rosier,
making the eastern border of the bay, while through a vista looms up
the distant Isle au Haut, an outer guardian upon the ocean's edge. At
the eastern horizon behind the cape rise the hazy, bisected,
round-topped peaks of Mount Desert, thirty miles away.
Belfast is another maritime town of Penobscot Bay on a deeply-indented
harbor under the shadow of the Camden Hills, the place where Weymouth
in 1605 landed and set up the cross. It was settled and named by
Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in 1770, and it looks out pleasantly across
the broad bay upon Castine. Above are Searsport and Fort Point, with
the ruins of the colonial Fort Pownall, and then the river is quickly
contracted into the Narrows, where the swift tides run at Bucksport.
The upper river is sinuous and picturesque, and at the head of
navigation, sixty miles from the sea, is Bangor, with twenty thousand
people, finely located on commanding hills, its chief industry being
the sawing and shipment of lumber. The sawmills line the shores and
the log-booms extend for miles along the river. The chief assembly
room of the city is the Norumbega Hall, and there also is a
Theological Seminary of high standing. It is said that the settlement,
which had languished during the Revolution, in 1791 ordered Rev. Seth
Noble, its representative in the Legislature, to have it incorporated
under the name of Sunbury, but he, being very fond of the old tune of
Bangor, wrote that name inadvertently, and it thus was given the town.
Thirteen miles northward is Oldtown, another great gathering-place for
logs and sawmills, and having the Tarratine Indian settlement on the
island in mid-stream. The Penobscot River receives various tributaries
above, which drain the extensive northern forests of Maine--the
Piscataquis coming from the westward, the Mattawamkeag from the
northeast, and the Seboois. The main stream rises near the western
Canada border of Maine and flows eastward into Chesuncook Lake, whence
its general course to the sea is southeast and south. The river thus
drains a broad basin, embracing myriads of lakes in the northern Maine
forests, and it has an enormous water-power, as yet only partially
utilized.