Flagstaff

Named for an Arnold flagstaff, dismantled and drowned in 1950

Flagstaff was a village on the Dead River in Somerset County, Maine, near Eustis and about 20 miles north of Rangeley, and it got its name from a war. During the Revolutionary War, Benedict Arnold's expedition to Quebec camped here beside the Dead River, and the men raised a flagstaff to mark their position. The name stuck to the place that grew up after them.

The first permanent settlers came in the early 1800s, and Flagstaff, with its neighbours Dead River Plantation and Bigelow, became a timber and farming country of sawmills, a schoolhouse, a store, churches, picnics and dances, under the Bigelow Range. The river carried the logs down to the Kennebec and the pulp mills.

The river was also what the power company wanted. Central Maine Power, built up from 1899 by Walter Wyman and Harvey Eaton, set out in the 1920s to dam Maine's big rivers, and Wyman's plans ran straight into Percival Baxter, the legislator and future governor who fought to keep the state's wild country out of corporate hands. The fight dated back to 1923. Baxter bought the towns some years, but in 1927 the legislature passed a final law giving CMP the right to build its dams and to take private land by eminent domain. From 1930 the company bought out Flagstaff, Dead River and Bigelow at offers many thought modest. Most people took them and left; some houses were moved whole or in pieces, others were razed and burned, and the few who held out until the last minute left buildings standing for the water to take.

The Long Falls Dam closed on the Dead River in 1950, and the villages slowly drowned. The town was dismantled and legally disincorporated that year. The old natural Flagstaff Lake spread into a reservoir of more than 20,000 acres, Maine's fourth-largest lake, over the townships of Flagstaff, Bigelow, Dead River and Carrying Place. It is remarkably shallow, 48 feet at its deepest. The dam today generates no power itself; it regulates the flow for eight hydro plants down the Kennebec.

The lake has become wild country again. Its shores are still mostly undeveloped, the Bigelow Range rises along the south side, the Appalachian Trail passes nearby, and paddlers and anglers come for landlocked salmon and brook trout, floating over a town that lies beneath them.