Then & Now: The lake that Timothy Walker built

Two hundred and fifty-five years ago, Capt. Timothy Walker settled on a promising spot where a brook ran out of a long, narrow pond in what he thought was Fryeburg, Maine. He dammed up the ravine where the brook emerged and built a sawmill and gristmill there, powered by what has ever since been called Mill Stream. He cut timber from the banks of the pond — known for five generations as Walker’s Pond — and floated the logs down to the mill, sawing lumber for sale and for his own home alongside the headwaters of the stream.

Industry flourished on that site in the 19th century, during which chair and box factories towered above the ravine. Over the decades, the embankments rose gradually with accretions of stone, stumps and refuse, lifting the pond higher still. Peninsulas along the banks of the pond turned into islands, as did a knoll a few rods from Walker’s still-extant home. A community sprang up around the mills, and after New Hampshire passed prohibition in the 1850s, a bootlegger operated out of his house there. Center Conway women burst in one night in 1865 and smashed all his liquor kegs, but disorderly behavior persisted in that settlement, which locals called “Sodom.” Mill Street was still known as “Sodom Avenue” in the 1930s.