Poking Around in Maine

Poking Around in Maine
Airline Road
by Craig Mains

On our camping/hiking trip to Cobscook Bay and Quoddy Head, Chain-Wen and I drove out on Maine State Route 9 and returned on US Route 1. I enjoyed the drive out on Route 9, generally referred to as Airline Road. It was scenic, sparsely inhabited, and in good condition. I enjoyed driving Route 1 as well but something about Route 9 piqued my interest---enough to make a day trip part way out and back. Chain was working that day so it was just me and the dog, Angel.

Upon returning I read up a little on Airline Road and found out it had an interesting history and it was also appreciated by Maine travelers, both in its current modern condition and in the memory of those who traveled it in the past when it was a more challenging drive.

The idea for the road goes back to the late 1700s and a wealthy Philadelphian named William Bingham. In 1780 Bingham was considered the wealthiest man in the US. He made his fortune in shipping and trading but was also a land speculator. In 1793 Bingham acquired two huge tracts of land in Maine of about one million acres each. One tract was at the head of the Kennebec River. The other was between present day Bangor and Calais, not extending as far southeast as the coast, however. (Bingham also bought tracts of land in New York State---the city of Binghamton, is named for him.)

Bingham hired a friend, General David Cobb, to explore the tract between Bangor and Calais to determine a suitable route for a road that would be constructed so Bingham could sell off the land in small tracts to would-be farmers. One of the things that Cobb soon discovered was that the land was not very suitable for farming---the soil was either poor and infertile or the land was swampy, the growing season was short, the winters were brutal, and there were blackflies and mosquitoes. Referring to the latter, Cobb wrote to Bingham, "You have no conception of the hosts of these devils that infest the thick forest at this season." Besides the climate and the insects, Cobb discovered there were squatters living in the forest, who he categorized as impoverished, lazy drunkards.

Cobb did manage to get a road surveyed and built. Initially it was little more than a two-track, ox-cart trail. For a while the road was known by the unwieldy title of "General Cobb's Great Road from the Penobscot to the Schoodic." The Schoodic referred to the river that separates Maine from New Brunswick, which is now called the St. Croix River.

Progress attracting suitable settlers was slow and the bulk of the tract of land eventually ended up in the possession of the Baring Brothers Bank, which had financed Bingham's initial purchase. (Bingham's daughter married a Baring so there may have also been a family connection.) Upon Cobb's retirement the Barings hired John Black to find a way to profit from the land. Among other things, Black had Cobb's road upgraded. Where necessary it was made into a corduroy road consisting of logs laid perpendicularly across the road. It became known as Black's Road.

By 1857 the road was suitably passable to allow the Airline Stage Company to win the contract for transporting mail between Bangor and Calais. Before then, the mail route followed the longer, but more established route that followed the coast in a wide arc. The Airline Stage Company believed they could move the mail the roughly 100 miles between Bangor and Calais on Black's Road in one day, as opposed to the two days it took to move the mail using the 160-mile coastal route. Although the stage coach company only had the mail contract for 30 years the road has been known as the Airline ever since.

The Airline Motor Inn is just east of Brewer. I noticed the sign the first time I drove in that direction and found it a little puzzling as there was no evidence of anything aviation-related in the area. I learned later that "airline" was an old term meaning the shortest route.

Although the original route was somewhat meandering---to avoid the need to build bridges the road went between the best stream fording locations---it was still more direct than the coastline route.

Airline Road is now part of Maine Route 9, which runs from the southeast border with New Hampshire to the border crossing into New Brunswick at Calais/St. Stephen. However, only the section covered by the the old stage coach line, from Bangor to Calais, is called the Airline.

A view of the granite summits of Little Chick and Big Chick Hill from the shoulder of the Airline Road near the community of Clifton. The stage coach route had six stops to switch horses, one of which was at Clifton. A section of the old route that was abandoned during one of the upgrades in the roadway runs along the base of the cliffs and is called Stage Coach Road.

Chick Hill was one of my favorite hikes because it was only about 20 miles from Bangor. Chick Hill has an elevation of about 1150 feet and Little Chick has an elevation of about 905 feet. They are both popular with rock climbers.

A view to the west from the summit of Chick Hill taken during an earlier hike. The summit of Little Chick is on the right. A bit of Airline Road is visible.

The section of road between Bangor and Clifton is rural but doesn't feel remote. East of Clifton it starts to feel more remote. There are 10 named communities between Bangor and Calais, of which two have populations greater than 1000 people. The total population of the 10 communities is about 5600 people. A lot of them must live back in the woods. Although there are some occasional reduced speed zones, mostly between Bangor and Clifton, there isn't a single stop sign until the intersection with US Route 1 outside of Calais.

Typical scenery along Airline Road. The road generally has wide shoulders and the surface is in remarkably good condition for what would be considered a secondary artery. There are numerous three-lane sections allowing for uphill passing.

From the comments sections from some of the websites I looked at, many Mainers still have recollections of traveling the road before it was modernized. People commented on memories of family trips either getting stuck behind logging trucks going up hills or having logging trucks bearing down on them from behind at breakneck speeds. There are also stories of people starting out from one end of the highway in the winter only to find it impassable somewhere in the middle, leaving people to abandon their cars and trudge through thigh-high snow until they found a hunter's cabin they could break into and build a fire.

A rough timeline of the improvements to the highway is along these lines:
1905---Airline Road is designated a state road.
1910---the road is widened and parts of it are graveled.
1930s---the road is tarred in places and cleared for year-round travel (but maybe not all the time).
1950s---the road is tarred from end to end.
1973---the last unpaved section of the road is paved.
1982---the road is upgraded to a modern roadway similar to what is present today.

Shown above is a section of the old Airline Road. Like many highways during upgrades, some sections were relocated to eliminate sharp curves. This left sections of the old road behind. This section, near Aurora is still in use as a local road that parallels Route 9. Some appear to be truly orphaned, however, with no buildings on them or reason to use them.

Above is a sign for the now defunct Mace's Snack Bar near Aurora. There seemed to be as many closed businesses as there were operating businesses.

When I started reading about Airline Road after returning from the Lubec Loop trip to Cobscook Bay and Quoddy Head one of the features that caught my attention was the Whale's Back or Whaleback. This was a section of the Airline that ran over the top of a two-and-one-half-mile-long esker. How could we have missed that? There are stories about the Whale's Back from people who drove the road in the past when it was narrower that describe a steep drop off on both sides. I also read conflicting information about whether the road still crossed the esker. One website mentioned that an upgrade routed the road around the Whale's Back. Another mentioned that the 1982 upgrade "widened and leveled" the Whale's Back.

It does appear that the road still runs along the top of the esker. As part of the 1982 upgrade the state built a roadside stop about half way across Whale's Back with a view towards the north side of the highway, shown above. The stream is the Middle Fork of the Union River. The esker runs very roughly east/west and creates a barrier for the southerly flowing stream. Not visible in the photo, it makes a 90 degree bend to the left (west) to eventually go around the esker.

An esker is a landform composed of sediments and rocks carried by a stream that once flowed under or within a glacier. Because streams under glaciers may meander, eskers often have a serpentine shape.

Today, there is nothing that would jump out to a driver that would make them think they were traveling over an unusual feature. The road is not particularly serpentine and although there is a drop off on both sides, it isn't that noticeable due to the vegetation. I was only able to know where the Whale's Back was from looking on some maps, websites, and Google Earth (where both ends are labeled).

Shown is a view of Airline Road as it runs along the top of the Whale's Back. The road bends and dips but not noticeably more than in other sections of the highway. I can see why we didn't notice anything unusual on the first trip.

One website I visited mentioned that noted natural historian Louis Agassiz briefly studied the Whale's Back in 1864 when he was visiting Maine. Agassiz was a Swiss-born biologist who studied in Germany and France. He later emigrated to the US and became a professor of zoology and geology at Harvard. Among other interests, Agassiz is considered to be one of the fathers of glaciology. It's no surprise that he ended up visiting Maine as the entire state is something of a theme park of past glaciation.

Other European scientists had proposed that glaciers were responsible for features such as moraines and erratic boulders but their assumption was that existing glaciers in the Alps had once extended over a larger area. Agassiz was the first to propose that some surface features were the product of massive continental ice sheets. [1] At the time, most scientists believed that erratic boulders and glacial till were the results of the Biblical flood from the time of Noah!

The website I visited mentioned that Agassiz measured the height of the Whale's Back esker as varying from 250 to 320 feet. That is an incredible deposit of glacial debris. If that is accurate [2] it raises the question---where did all the material go? Currently, the Whale's Back is estimated to be about 75 feet high, which based on the view from the scenic turnout appears about right. If the state lowered the height of the esker by spreading the material laterally the esker would be noticeably wider but it isn't wide enough to account for all that missing material. Something doesn't add up. There is probably no way to know what the Whale's Back originally looked like and how it has been changed over the years.

At times it seemed like the drive was through an unbroken forest but beginning around Aurora there were occasional open blueberry barrens. We had noticed these on the trip to Lubec but in September the blueberry foliage hadn't yet changed colors

The blueberry barrens are also the product of glaciers, which left behind sand that provides the low pH and good drainage that is ideal for wild blueberries. I later read about a large barren north of Aurora called the Silsby Plain, shown above. It is considered to be a glacial delta where the edge of the glacier met the ocean, which was further inland at the time. (This is similar to what happened along Baseline Road, which I write about elsewhere.) The glacier slowly dumped a mixture of sand, silt, pebbles, and boulders into the sea. Later, after the glaciers and the ocean both receded the glacial debris or till was left as dry ground. From the surface of Silsby Plain there is 20 vertical feet of sand and then another 25 feet of sand, silt, clay, pebbles, and boulders before hitting bedrock. I didn't know about Silsby Plain during this trip or I would have made a side trip to see it. It isn't visible from the highway but is not far from it. This photo, taken before the blueberries took on their fall colors, is from Maine--An Encyclopedia.

I found the fall colors of the blueberry barrens to be beautiful. These were what motivated me to make a later day trip towards Deblois where I had determined from Google Earth that there was a large expanse of blueberry barrens.

A view of the Narraguagus River west of Beddington. The Narraguagus still supports an Atlantic salmon run, but it is much reduced compared to what it had been in the past. Many of Maine's rivers were damaged by past practices of the lumber industry. In order to float logs downstream to the mills, lumberers would sometimes reconfigure streams and rivers to eliminate spots where logs were more likely to jam. The damage to aquatic habitat caused by the alterations persists to the present day.

A view of Airline Road looking west between Beddington and Wesley.

On the return trip, Angel and I found a wide place in the road and pulled over for a short walk. Just into the woods, this is the landscape we found. The soil was almost entirely sand and small pebbles---another reminder of how extensively glaciers shaped the face of Maine.

There was a sand road that led back to a sand pit. It was difficult to tell how much of the woods that looked like this was natural and how much was due to past human disturbance. Was this area sparsely vegetated because of the sandy soil or was it an area that was disturbed in the past that was slowly recovering? I think it may have been some of both.

Closed tourist cabins west of Wesley. In places Airline Road had the aura of lost prosperity. It reminded me of older highways where businesses failed once an interstate was built nearby.

This sign and a wide spot in the road is all that is left of the former Cloud 9 Motel. The original business at this spot was a gas station/lunch room starting in 1959, around the time the road was tarred from end to end and probably at least partially paved. The eight-unit motel was opened later.

An older photo of Cloud 9 before it was demolished. It's unclear when the business closed. The buildings were torn down in 2015. Before the motel was demolished, a horror movie called "Anniversary" was partly filmed there. The photo is from mainething.com.

Above is a still shot from the movie, "Anniversary," with the Cloud 9 Motel in the background.

Plot summary of "Anniversary": A young professor and his colleagues travel to a small community called Wheatley, hidden in the Maine wilderness. When they begin to conduct a survey there, they notice something isn't quite right with the townspeople. (from IMDb)

A postcard showing an older view of the bigger enterprise, which included a lunchroom, gas station, and a watering hole. The demise of roadside businesses was attributed to multiple factors. One was that as the logging industry became more mechanized there were fewer local men working in the woods as harvesters. This caused many locals to move from the area.

It is also believed that the transformation of Airline Road into a modern highway hurt roadside businesses. In the past when the road was rougher, windier, and narrower and it took longer to get from end to end it was more likely that travellers would need to stop somewhere for gas, lunch, or just for a driving break. Now that it's possible for drivers to go between Bangor and Calais in less than an hour and a half it's more likely that drivers will just zip by. The photo is from cardcow.com

Behind the site of the former Cloud 9 was this sand pit. The till at this site was a mixture of mostly sand and silt with pebbles and cobbles mixed in. I assume the material may be run through sieves to separate it by particle size. There was no evidence that the sand pit had been recently active.

Adjacent to the sand pit was this blueberry barren. It looked like part of the barren had been sacrificed for the sand pit. The sand pit provided a good indication of the depth of till that underlies the barrens.

This was the last stop before the Angel and I headed back to Bangor.

Footnotes

Sources
Dudley, John. The Airline Road
Maine: An Encyclopedia

 

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