Lake Umbagog
1907
August 9
(No 7)
pleasing. Its chief interest lay, I think, in the immediate
foreground. This included several picturesque objects, among which were
the old red farm house and the mill buildings erected by Enoch Abbott
and then occupied by his son William I Abbott. The latter continued, up to the time of his death, to entertain such
travelers as wished to shelter themselves under his roof with good
if plain fare, for a very moderate compensation. Walter Brackett
the artist always stayed there when he came to the lake to
fish, as he often did in the old days. In some leisure he had adorned one of the
panels of the front door with an admirable oil painting of a
large trout which resisted exposure to wind and weather for
many years but was finally destroyed by fire, with the house,
about 1883. The fire, strange to say, did not (?) or at
least permanently injure the large paper birch which, when I first
saw it and for some time later, was completely encircled at its
base by the outer shell of an immense pine stump from the
top of which the birch had originally sprung. The saw mill was
a long, low shed of primitive construction, and so nearly open
on the sides towards the Lake House that we could watch
the big logs slowly moving against the (?) teeth of
the alternately ascending and descending saw. The grist mill appeared to belong to
a somewhat later type of architecture than the saw mill but it may have built
at the same time and afterwards remodeled. Just below
these mills was a wide wooden bridge over which the
road to Upton Hill crossed the river and above there
a placid mill pond about which Swallows circled by
day and Night hawks in the early evening. Beyond the 
pond lay the boundless forest into the heart of which one could penetrate by following
the course of the river but of which we saw from our piazza
little save the outer ranks of trees. Above them all towered
an enormous dead pine on which Eagles & Fish Hawks loved to perch.
Lake House