B A C K   T H E N

Fort Kent Saw Mill

The Fort Kent Mill Company millpond and sawmill lies on the Fish River, above its confluence with the St. John. Unlike the big steam sawmills built along the upper St. John in the early 1900s after the arrival of the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad, the Fort Kent mill was powered by a fourteen-foot head of water forced through turbine “wheels.”

Established on a preexisting mill site circa 1890 by four Bradbury brothers from New Limerick, the complex included the sawmill, a gristmill, a carding mill, and extensive tracts of timber in the Fish River watershed. About five million feet of lumber were cut for the mill each year, producing 20 to 25 million cedar shingles and one million feet of lumber.

The company also owned a large farm, producing potatoes, hay, and buckwheat, and a store carrying a full line of general merchandise, supplies for lumbermen, fertilizer, farm implements, carriages, harnesses, and so forth. Its lumbering operations employed as many as 140 men with teams of horses. The mill was bought by the Great Northern Paper Company in 1919 and never again operated.

Text by illiam H. Bunting from Maine On Glass. Published by Tilbury House Publishers, 12 Starr St., Thomaston, Maine. 800-582-1899.

Maine On Glass and prints of the photographs are available through the Penobscot Marine Museum: PenobscotMarineMuseum.org.