Lincoln Mills on the Dennys River
Photograph
Photograph of the Lincoln Mills on the Dennys River, taken by John P. Sheahan of Edmunds, Maine, c. 1890. Located on the 1787 dam, the building to the left is sawing short lumber into laths, shingles and staves, while the building to the right of the sluice sawed long lumber from the logs that can be seen floating in the pond behind them. One of the famed "State Seal Pines" is on the Edmunds shore, in the left bank of this image.
Among the first orders of business in the new settlement, Theodore Lincoln oversaw the construction of the sawmill on the mill seat of the Dennys River by Bela and Christopher Dyer in 1787. Town historian Rebecca Hobart writes: "Theodore Lincoln and a group of hardy men came to Township No. 2 in 1786 to harvest the timber and to use the waterpower to saw logs into boards. Bela and Christopher Dyer came at General Benjamin Lincoln's bidding to build a sawmill at the mill seat on the Dennys River in 1787. The massive stones in the dam that they completed, though hidden now by summer foliage, are still solidly in place on either bank, reaching out to the hole that was made when the dam was blown early on a Sunday morning in 1930."
