Plans to restore a 19th century Oxford County sawmill to full working order are reigniting a heated debate between history enthusiasts and environmentalists.

On the banks of the Crooked River, a couple of miles up a dirt track near the town of Harrison, lies Scribner's Mill. Walking inside the old sawmill is like stepping back in time. As the river flows underneath the floorboards, pieces of machinery lie about the place, different types of saws, mainly.

In one corner, Bonnie Trundy, of Hebron, is putting the finishing touches to a wooden barrel she'd spent the morning making. "I think it's fabulous that people are trying to bring back skills, things that were done by hand," she says.

Trundy is excited by plans to rebuild a dam on the Crooked River to restore what would be the state's only water-powered sawmill. "The machinery here is very old but it's still functional -- you'd replace some of the wooden parts but the metal parts are still working and that's fabulous," she says.

Trundy's (right) barrel-making lesson is one of the experiences being offered by the Scribner's Mill Preservation Project, a non-profit established to run this living history museum, which started operating as a sawmill in 1847.

Marilyn Hatch, the organization's secretary, is passionate about bringing history alive by creating an historically authentic experience. She and her husband John live in the old homestead next to the mill, which she describes as unique, partly because of the range of product lines it offered during its heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It was, she says like a mini-Home Depot. "You could come and you could get all sorts of wood products, shingles, clapboards, barrels -- in fact they even made here - and we have the planer to do it -- they made silos."

The recreation of a working water mill, she says, would help people learn about history in a way they cannot learn from reading books. "It becomes a part of living history to see something operated by waterpower, as it was -- just gives a fuller, fuller understanding of what our ancestsors did."

Hatch says that turning Scribner's mill into a working operation would also enable it to be self-supporting by selling the lumber it produces. There's a growing demand, she says, for historically authentic local wood.

This all requires the construction of a three-foot dam to harnass the power of the river -- considerably smaller than the original nine-foot dam that was breached in 1972.

A previous effort to put up a four-foot dam was rejected by Maine's Department Environmental Protection in 2008. The objections to the latest proposal will be the same as they were two years ago, says Nick Bennett, staff scientist at the Natural Resources Council of Maine.

"The Crooked River is the spawning habitat for almost all of the wild land-locked salmon in Sebago Lake," he says.
The proposed dam, he says, would threaten these fish as they make their way upriver from the nearby lake to spawn.

About 50,000 anglers visit the Sebago Lake area every year, says Bennett, specifically to catch land-locked salmon. "The land-locked salmon really are a very special fish for people to catch, they're beautiful fish, and you can catch wild ones there," he says. "They're stocked in other places and people can catch stocked ones, but to catch a land-locked salmon that's a wild fish is a totally different experience."

The other main objection to the project has to do with the issue of water quality. "When you dam up a river you can cause algae blooms upstream of the dam, and lower dissolved oxygen in the water and affect the water quality," Bennett says. "The Crooked River has extraordinarily high water quality, as does Sebago Lake as a whole. The Crooked River supplies the majority of the surface water going into Sebago Lake, which is the drinking water source for about 200,000 people in Maine."

Sebago Lake, says Bennett, is one of only 50 utility sources in the country allowed to deliver drinking water without filtration because of its high quality. The construction of a filtration plant, which may be required if the water quality suffers, would cost the Portland water district about $70 million, he adds.

"To build a dam on the major surface water source for Sebago Lake so you can do a sawmill re-enactments of the 19th century just makes no sense, given the incredibly high value of the fishery and incredibly high value of the good water quality to 200,000 people in Maine," Bennett says.

"Scribners Mill is a small project. This would be the only direct water-powered sawmill, however," says Dana Murch, a hydropower specialist at the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

State agencies and private individuals have until the end of September to respond to the latest proposal to dam the Crooked River, he says. The DEP will study these comments, says Murch, and then issue a draft decision, which it will also seek comment on. It will likely be early next year before a final decision is made.

Despite the removal of a number of smaller dams in Maine, the overall hydropower capacity of the state is still increasing, says Dana Murch, thanks to technological advances in turbine design. "The total installed hydropower capacity today in Maine is about 765 megawatts -- that's roughly equivalent to one small nuclear power plant."

Meanwhile back at Scribner's Mill, Marilyn Hatch remains convinced the restored mill would not have a significant impact on the salmon because of a fishway which would be installed to help the salmon make their way upriver.

She also feels the water quality would not be significantly affected because of the small size of the impoundment, which would stretch a third of a mile up the river. "We're just hoping that people understand that both the salmon and this historic site can live together and both use the Crooked River."

As for history boff Bonnie Trundy, as she heads back home to Hebron with her newly-constructed barrel, her next task, she says, is to persuade her husband, the salmon fisherman, to support the dam restoration.