Taking leave of the beautiful Kennebeck, the flourishing villages which skirt its borders, and its rich, productive farms, spreading east and west, our attention is next arrested by the serpentine Androscoggin, with its vast water power.
"From Merry-meeting Bay, into which it empties, to Lewiston Falls, it formerly went by the name of Peyepscook or Pyepscook, which means crooked, like a diving snake," strikingly expressive of the zigzag course of the stream, and the numerous pitches in its channel, giving it the appearance, or at least suggesting the idea, of the movements of a diving eel.
The length of this river is set down at two hundred and fifty miles, though the distance, in a direct line from the point where it takes its rise to its mouth, does not probably exceed one hundred miles. It is this circumstance which gives it an opportunity to drain a large territory, and, though less numerously attended with tributary streams than either the Kennebeck or Penobscot, it is said to discharge more water during the year than either of the latter rivers.
To glance at the map and institute a comparison between the Penobscot and Androscoggin, the former sixty miles longer, with its hundreds of lakes, numerous branches and tributaries, ramifying nearly one third the area of the entire state, in the regions of ice and snow, mountains and wildernesses, then survey the Androscoggin, with comparatively few tributaries or lakes, and the thing seems incredible that the latter annually pours into the Atlantic more water than the former; yet actual surveys, made by the late Colonel Baldwin, J. A. Beard, Esq., and others, have demonstrated this result with mathematical certainty. In time of freshets, in the spring and fall, doubtless the Penobscot disgorges more water; but during the summer and winter months the waters of the Androscoggin exceed in quantity.
The country through which this river flows, "from Brunswick," a few miles from its junction with the Kennebeck, "to Dixfield, sixty miles distant, is not remarkable in its features; but from the latter place to Umbagog Lake," the grand reservoir of the Androscoggin, "and from Phillips, in Franklin county, westward, up the Megalloway River," the extreme north tributary of the Androscoggin, "some thirty or forty miles, the country is said to be wonderful for its mountains."