How pictures constructed the Katahdin area

WRITTEN BY RICHARD SHAW

Before vacationers ventured into Baxter State Park, and onto its mile-high peak named Katahdin, there have been the images. Black and white — and ultimately coloration — postcards and different views captured the park’s now greater than 200,000 acres in all 4 seasons. Popular locales had been Katahdin Stream Campground, Chimney Pond, and Nesowadnehunk Stream.

Lugging large-format discipline cameras up Abol Trail and different paths to the summit was exhausting work, however stereographer A.L. Hinds managed to seize the Knife Edge, circa 1870 — arguably the primary such picture taken.

Coffee desk books promoting the wilderness’ “forever wild” grandeur adopted. Before former Gov. Percival Baxter donated the primary practically 6,000 park acres in 1931, “Thru Maine By Camera,” by Walter G. Hay, printed in 1925, featured wide-angle views of the Katahdin area. At the identical time, the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad’s journal, In the Maine Woods, chronicled the realm with illustrated looking and fishing articles.

Other publications picturing Daicey Pond campground and hikers clinging to Index Rock adopted. Marion J. Bradshaw, a Bangor Theological Seminary philosophy professor, printed three of the very best within the Nineteen Forties: “The Maine Land,” “The Nature of Maine,” and “The Maine Scene.” Long out of print, readers can discover these books in libraries and on public sale websites.

Moving into the twenty first century, Arcadia Publishing got here out with two photo-rich pictorials of the area. “Baxter State Park and the Allagash River,” by Frank H. Sleeper, and “Baxter State Park and Katahdin,” by John W. Neff and Howard R. Whitcomb, present the realm in superb black and white. Many of the views are postcard photos courting to the Thirties.

Today’s jumbo-size coloration postcards of the Katahdin area could also be glossier, however earlier playing cards, now collector’s objects, had been simply as alluring. Such Maine photographers as Dexter’s Bert Call, who scaled the mountain 16 instances, and his successor, Paul Knaut Jr., of Dover-Foxcroft, had been two of the trade’s hardest-working lens males. Now deceased, their work lives on.