Evans Notch: A great trip, and never mind the direction
Most of the "how to, where to" guidebook entries about Evans Notch begin with "One of northern New England's best-kept secrets," or something like that. They're right.
This not-so-little jewel of geography offers a lovely, narrow mountain road mercifully bereft of utility poles and wires (just lots and lots of trees) and offering stunning scenery to boot. It's one of the few places you can go and meet--well, hardly anyone.
Evans Notch and winding, hill-and-dale Route 113 are situated along the Maine-New Hampshire border, from Route 2 on the Shelburne-Gilead end (the north end) to Route 302 in Fryeburg (just across the Maine line from Conway).
If you love to drive, and actually enjoy being vigilant with accelerator, gear shift, brakes and steering wheel, this road's for you. If sinuous roads without a whole lot of room for vehicles meeting each other give you the hives, stay on Interstate 93.
Since I'm a north-to-south-oriented guy, I like to start the drive down through the notch from its northern beginning on Route 2 just east of Shelburne. However, most of the guidebooks seem to assume that most people will start at the south end and drive northward. Go figure. Must have something to do with demographics.
So okay, we'll start at the junction of routes 302 and 113 in North Fryeburg, just east of the Maine state line. It's a 21.5-mile drive to the northern end at Route 2, and there's so much to see and do that there's only enough space here to hit the high points. Solution: Curious and adventurous souls should just pack a nice picnic and go see for themselves.
(Consumer alert: If peak foliage season is your be-all thing, go on a weekday. Even little-known Evans Notch can be not quite bumper to bumper on a peak foliage weekend, but close.)
Two or three miles into the drive, the Stow Town Hall, built in 1842, appears on your left. At about Mile 6, you cease being a Mainer (or Maniac) and become a Temporary Honorary Citizen of the Independent Principality of New Hampshire. Counseling is available here for anyone fainting at the idea of this. Not to worry, however--you'll soon be back in Maine.
Openings in the roadside trees and special pullouts and picnic spots offer stunning views of the Baldface Range to the west. About ten miles into the drive, signs point the way to the U.S. Forest Service's Cold River Campground and Basin Camp-ground (camping reservations can be made at the USFS District Office in Bethel, Maine).
In just another tenth of a mile, it's back into Maine (try to remain calm). In another few hundred yards, the Federal-period Brickett House appears. Built in around 1838 by John Brickett, it served as a farmhouse for several generations of Bricketts, and was acquired by the White Mountain National Forest in 1918. Over the years it served as a Civilian Conservation Corps operations center, an Appalachian Mountain Club hut (albeit a pretty fancy hut), and as an activities center for the Boy Scouts. The Chatham Trails Association and the Cold River Campground staff now use it as a seasonal information center.
About 13 miles into the drive, you reach the top of the notch. Teeter there a bit and enjoy the outstanding scenery.
Five more miles along the road a couple of signs for Hastings Campground mark the site of one of northern New England's great boom-and-bust logging towns. The town of Hastings, named for three brothers who first bought the timberland in the 1870s, was built near a sawmill and manufacturing complex and served as the center of operations for a railroad ultimately extending 14 miles up the valley, and for logging and support operations that ultimately involved more than 1,000 people. The railroad, with branches extending up several feeder-stream valleys, eventually had more than 20 miles of track.
By 1890, Hastings boasted more than 20 homes, a boarding house, two stores, a schoolhouse, barns and storehouses, a barbershop, numerous sawmills and finishing mills, an engine roundhouse and machine shop, a blacksmith shop, and electricity for many buildings courtesy of a dynamo in one of the sawmills.
But within a decade, the end was in sight. The Wild River Lumber Company was sold in 1898, and sold again. Even as logging crews reached the last of the accessible old-growth trees, the Moriah Brook fire, which burned 4,900 acres in 1895, served as a clear warning of the folly of denuding and thus drying out the landscape and leaving stupendous amounts of tinder-dry slash. Huge fires in 1902 and 1903 burned more than 84,000 acres, and disastrous floods the following spring wiped out roads, bridges, dams and trestles.
By 1904, the company's operators and investors had had enough, and most of the best wood had been hauled out anyway. On October 19 the last train pulled out, with workers picking up the tracks behind it. Most of the buildings were taken down and hauled away. And between 1912 and 1914, Hastings and its surrounding 34,000 acres were sold to the White Mountain National Forest--for $5 an acre.
Today, foundations are barely discernable, and the old railroad beds are overgrown and hardly visible. And save for Route 113 and a few small openings and campgrounds, the Wild River Valley and all the ridges and mountains around are covered with trees and high-country vegetation, except for those top-of-the-world places where the weather is just too fierce to let anything grow.
(Note: I cribbed much of the stuff about Hastings from Bill Gove's new book, Logging Railroads of New Hampshire's North Country. Bill did a great job, and once I started the book I couldn't--and didn't--put it down. For anyone who loves local history and railroad lore and scads of evocative old photographs, it's a must read.)
(This column runs in a dozen weekly papers covering the northern two-thirds of New Hampshire and parts of Maine and Vermont. John Harrigan's address: Box 39, Colebrook, NH 03576, or hooligan@ncia.net)
(Issue of September 1, 2010)
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