The Falls Of Skowhegan

from 2020 Western Lakes & Mountains Region

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From The Journal of Isaac Senter

by Brian Swartz

Isaac Senter and J.W. Hanson visited the waterfalls at Skowhegan 74 years apart — and came away with diametrically opposed observations about the town’s most prominent geographical feature.

Born in Londonderry, New Hampshire in the early 1750s, Senter studied medicine with Dr. Thomas Moffat, “a Scot physician of repute,” in Newport, Rhode Island. In 1775 Senter joined the other Rhode Island militiamen in the siege lines around British-held Boston, and that “September was appointed surgeon to Benedict Arnold’s forces,” according to The Journal of Isaac Senter, published in 1846.

Not yet the American hero who would morph into a traitor, Benedict Arnold believed that a military expedition could travel the Kennebec River to its headwaters, cross the height of land between the District of Maine and the Province of Quebec, and attack Quebec City. The expedition’s route looked direct on the available maps, and Arnold did not know about the many topographical obstructions in his path.

For Isaac Senter, the Arnold Expedition began in Cambridge, Massachusetts at 5 p.m., Tuesday, September 12. He and three comrades “marched … seven miles on our way to Newbury Port,” camped that night “with some part of the army,” and kept walking until reaching Newbury in early afternoon on Thursday. An innkeeper running “a very agreeable place” put the men up until they boarded the transport “Broad Bay, a topsail schooner” on September 19, Senter noted.

Carrying “1,100 men, officers included,” the 11-ship fleet sailed with the tide. Wind-driven rain raised a heavy swell that night, and “most of the troops” heaved their last meals overboard, observed Senter, not indicating if he joined the rush to the rails.

The Broad Bay entered the Kennebec River as “the wind and rain continued exceeding hard” the next morning,

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struggled through the river’s tide-swept entrance, and anchored a mile upriver, Senter wrote. The weather hampered the Arnold Expedition, and the transports struggled upriver against wind and tide. Senter finally went ashore on September 23 and walked five miles through woods “destitute of any road” to Fort Western in Augusta.

He noticed the upriver “Rapid … beyond which our transports could not pass.” Some ships could not pass above “Garden’s Town” (Gardiner), so many soldiers paddled upriver in batteau “made of green pine boards, which rendered them somewhat heavy,” Senter noticed.

He and the expedition moved upriver, passing Fort Halifax at Winslow and portaging Ticonic Falls. His own batteau delivered in sinking condition, Senter paid $4 for “a more portable well-built one, seasoned” and “fit for the business.

“My boat’s crew consisted of three Englishmen, sailors, one old Swiss, and a young Scotsman,” Senter noted. As the crew struggled upriver “for about two miles” with the water “exceeding swift” on October 1, he walked along the shore.

Farther upriver “the water now grew very rapid” below falls called “Wassarunskieg,” Senter wrote, and the soldiers wore themselves ragged carrying the batteau around this passage. His crew carried his gear and the batteau “to the foot of the falls, where we were obliged to put in and cross over the opposite side” of the Kennebec River.

The soldiers took to the water again, but “not far had we advanced ere we came to a fall called Scunkhegon,” Senter reported.

This was the “Falls of Skowhegan,” where soldiers “found a rock of bluish flint, five feet high and twelve feet in diameter, in a conical form, just below the Falls, scalloped to the water’s edge,” wrote J.W. Hanson in 1849 in History of the Old Towns Norridgewock and Canaan, Comprising Norridgewock, Canaan, Starks, Skowhegan, and Bloomfield.

The rock “was where the Norridgewogs (Norridgewock Indians) obtained their arrow-heads,” Hanson noted.

An officer with the Arnold Expedition described how at Skowhegan the Kennebec River “precipitates itself with great fury over high rocks, and being confined by high and rocky banks, runs a quarter of a mile with very rapidity, below which it forms a basin, and then directs its course to the south.”

“The falls at Skowhegan strike the lover of natural beauty with delight,” Hanson noted in 1849. “Situated in the middle of the river, is a high, rocky, wood-crowned island … and the waters, after meeting this obstruction, di- (cont. on page 28)

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(cont. from page 27) vide, and passing along, they are precipitated over a fall on either side.

“The velocity of the river, as it hastens through its narrow channel, and its magnificent beauty as it tumbles over the precipice, in form and thunder-tones, make one of the wildest scenes in the State,” Hanson eloquently described the Skowhegan falls.

Before white men built dams at the island, “it must have been a glorious view” across the waterfalls and into the Skowhegan Gorge, Hanson commented.

As for Isaac Senter and his wornout comrades in October 1775, “with a great deal of difficulty we passed” the falls at Skowhegan, “but not without coming very nigh [to] losing one of my hands,” the good doctor recalled. Past the falls, “I proceeded about half a mile and tented.”

No romantic description of the Skowhegan falls passed into Senter’s

Pass on a tradition that will last a lifetime

journal. By now seriously slowed by the Kennebec’s swift current and elevation-dropping flow, Arnold and his men portaged the river at Skowhegan and paddled toward the falls at Norridgewock. Dysentery caught up with the expedition there, and Isaac Senter had much work to do.

Ultimately Skowhegan became only another difficult waterfall among many on the Kennebec.

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