WILLOW CREEK — The Aroostook Valley Lumber Company has completed a fourteen-mile logging rail spur connecting the upper West Branch timberlands to the Bangor & Aroostook main line at the Willow Creek depot. The spur, which will eventually become the corridor of the Mattawamkeag River Trail, required three wooden trestle bridges and a shelf road cut along a steep hillside known as Devil’s Elbow.
The spur will allow logs to be shipped directly to the flooring mill by rail, bypassing the river drives that have been the region’s primary means of log transport since before Thorne & Sons Shipworks was founded. The river drives, increasingly unreliable as the harvest moves farther from water, are expected to be phased out within a decade.
“In the days of Thorne & Sons, the river was the only road,” said superintendent Hiram Fletcher. “The logs came down on the spring freshet, and the Thorne yard caught them at the bend. That was good enough for 1803. It is not good enough for 1908. The railroad can run twelve months a year.”
The spur’s route passes within sight of Thorne’s Bend, where the old launching slip lies submerged under the mill race’s raised water level. The iron horse now runs where the river sloops once sailed.
Ezra Thorne II, watching from his porch, summed it up in a single sentence: “They are building a railroad on top of my family’s graveyard.”