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Publication Date

7-1-2002

Document Type

Article

First Page

90

Last Page

116

Abstract

For more than half a century; land agent and timber-land owner Eben Smith Coe oversaw the operations of Chamberlain Farm, a large logging depot built in 1846 on the shore of Chamberlain Lake in Maine's famed Allagash region. From its founding to the present, the land on which he built the farm has undergone a succession of changes that provides insight into the meaning of wildness in American culture. Now protected as part of the Allagash wilderness waterway, Chamberlain Farm has come a full circle, and is now a fair semblance of the wilderness early native and Euro American visitors might have encountered in this remote but historically rich land. The following account of the early history of the farm and the logging activity it supported is adapted from The Wilderness from Chamberlain Farm: A Story of Hope for the American Wild, published by Island Press in 2001. Dean B. Bennett is professor emeritus at the University of Maine at Farmington; he has also published Allagash: Maine's Wild and Scenic River; The Forgotten Nature of New England: A Search for the Original Wilderness; Maine's Natural Heritage: Rare Species and Unique Natural Features.

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