WINDHAM, Maine — After a dam malfunction earlier this year caused much of Dundee Pond in Windham to drain, naturalists and archeologists are finding treasures in the new landscape.
With the waterline receding to levels not seen since the early twentieth century, artifacts from Maine’s industrial past are cropping up around the edges of the waterway.
Archeologist and University of Southern Maine Professor Emeritus Rob Sanford says the area around Dundee Pond was a key thoroughfare for goods travelling from Sebago Lake to Casco Bay, hosting a canal where boats were pulled by oxen on the journey to market in Portland and Boston.
“There were businesspeople, goods being shipped down here. There was a lot going on,” Sanford said.
In the bed of the pond — a swimming hole that's currently closed — stone walls dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries sit, newly exposed, in the sun. Cut-down trees point to what Sanford says could have been a pasture for sheep.
“This river was a lot of things to a lot of people for a long time,” he explained.
More than just a field of industrial fossils (Sanford found an ox shoe), the issue at the dam has uncovered the natural flow of the Presumpscot River—with its turbulent rapids and churning water.
“This is the sound of the river breathing,” Michael Shaughnessy, who heads the Friends of the Presumpscot River, said Tuesday. “This is what it is meant to be.”
While he acknowledges the misfortune of the town’s popular swimming hole closing for the summer—deeply frustrating to many—he finds a beauty in the unobstructed path the river takes.
He describes seeing the drained pond and rushing river for the first time like a “wonderful, beautiful being coming out of a coma and just dancing.”
Shaughnessy has visited the river a dozen times because he knows, as Sanford does too, that this curious landscape is fleeting.
A fix to the dam is underway, leaving a limited window before the artifacts and river are submerged once again.
“There is…a kind of sorrow to it, because its going back into its hibernation,” Shaughnessy adds.