Eastward from Casco Bay to the Androscoggin is a rough wooded country becoming, however, rather more level as the river is approached. The Androscoggin having come down from the north, sweeps around to the northeast to enter Merry Meeting Bay, and at the bend, about thirty miles from Portland, is Brunswick, at the head of tidewater, with over six thousand population, largely employed in its mills. The river falls forty-one feet here in three separate cataracts, giving an enormous water-power. This was the Indian Pejepscot, where the English built Fort George in 1715, known as "the key of Western Maine." The city is chiefly noted now as the seat of Bowdoin College, the chief educational institution of Maine, incorporated in 1794, and opened in 1802 with an endowment by the State. It has nearly four hundred students and attractive buildings, the most conspicuous one being surmounted by twin spires, which are seen from afar in approaching the town, rising above the trees with a thick growth of pines behind them. This college had President Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne, Longfellow and Chief Justice Fuller among its graduates, and Longfellow was its professor of modern languages until 1835, when he was called to Harvard. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ in Brunswick in 1851-2, when her husband was in the Bowdoin College faculty. Pierre Baudouin, a Huguenot refugee from La Rochelle, came to Portland in 1687; and his grandson, who was Governor of Massachusetts in 1785-6, had his name given the college, the great-grandson, James Bowdoin 2nd, the noted diplomatist, having been most liberal in his gifts to it. Beyond Brunswick the Androscoggin broadens into Merry Meeting Bay, which is finally absorbed by the Kennebec.
The Kennebec River, the Indian "large water place," is one of the greatest streams of Maine, having its source in its largest lake, Moosehead, surrounded by forests. This lake is at an elevation of over a thousand feet, is thirty-five miles long, and has a surface of two hundred and twenty square miles. The shores are generally monotonous, excepting where the long peninsula of Mount Kineo is projected from the eastern side so far into the lake as to narrow it to little more than a mile width. Mount Kineo is nine hundred feet high, rising abruptly on the south and east, but sloping gradually to the water on the other sides. To the northeast, Spencer Mountain is seen rising four thousand feet, with Katahdin, the Indian "greatest mountain," in the distance. This magnificent summit, the highest in Maine, rises nearly fifty-four hundred feet. All about Moosehead Lake and far to the northward over the Canadian border is a vast forest wilderness, full of lakes and streams, visited chiefly by the timber-cutters and sportsmen, and one of the favorite hunting and angling regions of the country. From the southwestern extremity of the lake the Kennebec River flows out towards the sea, and in a winding course of a hundred miles descends a thousand feet of rapids and cataracts, until it reaches the tidal level at Augusta. It narrows at Solon to only forty feet as it goes over the Carrituck Falls of twenty feet. Then it passes Old Point and comes to Norridgewock, where several ancient elms of enormous size border the street along the river bank. This is the scene of Whittier's poem of _Mogg Megone_, and along here lived the ancient Norridgewocks. At Old Point was their chief town, and as early as 1610 French missionary priests sent out from Quebec settled among them, the famous Jesuit, Sebastian Rale, coming about 1670 and living there over forty years, being not only the spiritual but finally the political head of the tribe. He was a man of high culture, and had been professor of Greek at the College of Nismes, in France. The tribe belonged to the Canabis branch of the Abenaquis nation, and he prepared a complete dictionary of their language (now preserved in Harvard University), which he described as "a powerful and flexible language--the Greek of America."