"Five millions are manufactured into boards, and about one million into clap-boards and shingles, &c. About one half of the five millions manufactured into boards are shipped to Boston, Mass., Providence and Fall River, R.I., and to the West Indies. The remaining half are manufactured here into sugar-box shooks for the Havana market."
The mean or average price which lumber bears per _M._ here is $14.30. The "resources for lumber on this river are very limited. The principal dealers are about leaving the business, though lumber, in small quantities, will probably be run for twenty or thirty years."
Logs are driven about one hundred and fifty miles, this being the longest drive. Others are hauled on to the river within forty miles of Brunswick.
From the causes alluded to, the Androscoggin is not much affected with drought, nor so seriously by freshets as most rivers, the mills being protected by ledges. "The river is very crooked, and when we have an _ice_ freshet, it is piled up in large quantities in the bends of the river, in some instances for five or six miles. Such was the case nine years since--also last spring; but the damage to our mills in these two ice freshets was but trifling."
[Illustration: VIEW OF UMBAGOG LAKE--SOURCE OF THE ANDROSCOGGIN.]
Umbagog Lake, from which the Androscoggin takes its rise, from the construction of its shores, acts as a regulator upon the height of the water. When the Megalloway rises, it flows into the Androscoggin, and raises its waters, so that they run back into the lake for the distance of two miles, having the appearance of a river running back to its source. The Androscoggin rises from the western side of the lake, and here is a sluggish stream, with low, grassy banks five feet high, covered with scattering swamp Maple-trees. "The Megalloway River is extremely serpentine and wild in its course, winding its way amid high mountains, while its banks are composed of sandy loam, covered thickly with Maple-trees."
[Illustration: FRYE'S FALLS, ON A TRIBUTARY OF ELLIS RIVER.]
"The Umbagog Lake is an irregular, shallow sheet of water, with grassy and boggy shores, and is surrounded by lofty mountains of granite, which in September are clothed with the red and yellow foliage of Maple and Birch trees, the former greatly predominating, and covering the mountains to their very summits." Among other objects of romantic interest are "Frye's Falls, in Andover Surplus," upon Frye's Stream, so called. "This stream rushes over a precipitous mass of granite, gneiss, and mica slate rocks, precipitating itself by a fall of twenty-five feet into a rocky basin below. The chasm is fifteen feet wide, and the basin fifty-five feet broad. Here the waters form a beautiful pool, and then leap again, by a second fall of twenty feet, into another larger and shallower reservoir, from which they descend gradually to Sawyer's Brook, running into Ellis River."