Lake Umbagog.
1907.
  Within the memory of persons still living in
Upton the shores of Lake Umbagog were bordered nearly
everywhere by large and vigorous coniferous trees of which very
many were old growth white pines. Most of these and of
the larger spruces and arbor vitaes had been cut and rafted
away by the lumbermen before my first visit to the lake
in 1871. Its shores were then evergreen in places but for
the most part fringed with dead or dying trees, chiefly
red maples, black ashes, canoe birches and balsam firs, which
the water had killed or seriously injured not long after its
level had been raised a number of feet by the dam built
across the Androscoggin River at Errol in 1852.
The original dam was built that year. It was carried out by the
water in 1887 and replaced, a little lower down the river, by the
present dam which was completed in 1888.
At the outlet and inlets of the lake, in some of its larger coves and
elsewhere where the shore were sufficiently low and flat to
be subject to prolongued inundation, these stubs, as they were
called, stood by the hundreds or even thousands in grim
and bristling array. Most of them were without bark and
weathered to a soft stone gray or gray-ish white color. Many
had lost all their lateral branches and some were already far
advanced in decay. In their trunks Nuthatches and various kinds
of Woodpeckers had drilled innumerable holes only the more
recent of which were occupied by the birds which has excavated
them most of the others having passed into the possesion of the
White bellied or "Stub" Swallows. There were also Wood Ducks,
Whistlers, Gooseanders, Hooded Mergansers, Bronzed Grackles,
Bluebirds, Crested Flycatchers and even Kingbirds, nesting in
natural cavities and hollows or in abandoned and perhaps
accidentally enlarged holes made by Flickers or by Pileated Woodpeckers.