Aroostook & Northern Penobscot Counties
18
An 1863 Visit To The St. John Valley by Brian Swartz
T
Acadians mostly on their own
he St. John Valley in northern Maine is a beautiful place to visit, as a Portland writer calling himself “P.” learned during a spring 1863 excursion through Aroostook County. Most Portland-area residents then looked south toward Boston, not north toward Augusta, Bangor, or (heaven forbid) the thick forests stretching away to the New Brunswick border. The southern Maine legislators waging a political war to move the state capital from Augusta to Portland (its original site) in 1863 cared not a whit how far their northern Maine counterparts must travel to conduct the people’s business. While the Military Road (modern Route 2A) connected Houlton with Bangor, St. John towns lay anoth-
er day’s or two days’ travel beyond the Shiretown. A lack of good roads reaching either Van Buren or Fort Kent meant Valley residents and travelers relied on the St. John River, no matter the season. “Our lumbermen on the head waters of the St. John, have a … more direct and shorter road, by which their supplies are brought into camp from Quebec,” but “then they have the St. John itself—the highway to their natural seaport, the city of St. John,” New Brunswick, P. explained to readers who may have never seen the Androscoggin or the Kennebec. “Thus, they are isolated in a business point of view from the southern slope, and the principal cities of Maine,” he
ROBERT PELLETIER BUILDING CONTRACTOR
wrote. Trying to delineate the Valley’s geography for his readers, P. explained to that the Madawaska Territory — or “the district formerly bearing this general designation” — took its name from the Madawaska River, “which flows into the St. John [River] on the northern or provincial side. “The plantation known to our maps and State [news]papers as Grand Isle is properly [called] Grande Isle; so, named from a large and fertile island in the St. John river, near the heart of the Madawaska territory,” he wrote. P. had already traveled up the Valley and met its original white inhabitants, the Acadians. “The settlers of this territory were originally French,”
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