Kathy Pollard has walked through the woods along the Penobscot River between Orono and Old Town, off Route 2 and near the railroad tracks, countless times over the years. But it wasn’t until April of this year that she noticed the odd carvings on a rock along the trail.
“The sun hit it just right, in just the right way to finally see them,” said Pollard, an artist and naturalist who lives nearby. “I literally stopped in my tracks.”
After clearing away dirt and brush from the boulder — she believes it is a glacial erratic of some sort, deposited there during the last ice age — Pollard began to make out names, dates and places carved into the stone, which lies just over the Old Town line in Orono.
There are names like McMahon, McClair, Sawyer, Chelsea and Rayes, and dates scrawled into the rock, including 1892 and 1894. There’s even a reference to Fort Howe, a fort built in what is now Saint John, New Brunswick, during the Revolutionary War. There are at least 20 different words currently visible, and there are likely more to be made out once the rock is further cleaned and excavated.
Neither Pollard nor Eisso Atzema, president of the Old Town Museum, is entirely sure who carved the inscriptions, or exactly when they were carved — only that they’ve been there for at least 130 years.
“This has never been a part of town where there were houses or lots of people living or working,” Atzema said. “The last time anybody was really down here, at least that we know of, was to build the railroad, and that would have been around the 1850s, or perhaps a little later.”
The closest regularly traveled trails to the rock are those at Piney Knoll Conservation Area, part of Orono Land Trust, which lies a few hundred feet to the south. The trails there are regularly used by walkers and bikers in the summer and cross-country skiers in the winter. The railroad tracks run parallel to the preserve, and in order to access the rock carvings, you have to follow the tracks — still actively used by CSX Transportation trains several times a day — from either the Old Town side or Orono side.
So who could have spent the time to neatly carve so many words into the rock? Both Pollard and Atzema’s best guess is that they were carved by the people who laid the railroad tracks that pass through the area — but that could have been anytime between the 1850s and the 1890s.
The earliest visible reference on the rock is to Fort Howe, a British garrison in Saint John, which was heavily used throughout the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, but fell into disuse in the 1820s and has been a Canadian historic site for more than a century.
It’s highly unlikely the carvings were made as early as the 1700s.
Kathy Pollard noticed carvings on a rock along a trail she walks near the Penobscot River between Old Town and Orono. Who carved them into the rock, when and why remain a mystery. Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN
The New Brunswick Southern Railway does run less than 1,000 feet from Fort Howe, though, and it eventually connects with the rail line running from Vanceboro to Mattawamkeag and then down to Old Town, Orono and Bangor. Could bored railroad workers have carved into the rock, noting that they’d laid tracks from Saint John all the way to Orono?
The next earliest references are several actual dates, including 1892 and 1894. As far as anyone can tell, however, the tracks that run between Route 2 and the river between Orono and Old Town were laid sometime in the 1850s or 1860s — not quite that late.
The names on the rock do correspond with some families that lived in Old Town and Orono in the 19th century, including McMahon, McClair and Sawyer. But those aren’t uncommon names statewide, or in Atlantic Canada.
There are more inscriptions that can’t currently be read because of lichens growing on the rock. The rock also extends an unknown depth below the surface, and Pollard has already made out more words carved buried in the soil. How deep the rock goes and how much soil and organic materials has piled up around the rock over the past century or more are also not known.
Mike Thornton, owner of Thornton Construction in Milford, owns the land between the river and the railroad and said he would help the Old Town Museum dig up more of the rock to see how many more carvings are on it. Pollard would like to clean the lichens off and see the more blurred inscriptions. And then, if it’s possible, they could potentially move the rock to the museum to put it on display.
“This is just such a unique little piece of local history, and as far as we know, nobody has seen it or noticed it there for many, many years,” she said. “It’s been right under our noses all this time.”