Where in Maine?
This beautiful hill was contested ground during the Aroostook War ? and again in the past few years. Can you identify it?
By Photograph by Kevin Shields
Aroostook County is about as flat as Maine gets. The state's northernmost county is larger than the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island -- combined. But the whole is about as hilly as the pancakelike ployes for which the Saint John Valley is famous. This eminence, all 1,700 feet of it, is as lofty as lofty gets in the County, rising straight up from a level plain. The name of the local community comes from Greece via a British army chaplain, who held a service at the summit in 1790 and commented that the hill looked like Athens. This geomorphic buckle factored heavily into geopolitics in the early days of the United States. It was integral to a boundary dispute between the young country and the Brits that dated back to the Treaty of Paris, 1783. Great Britain contended that the hill represented the "highlands dividing those rivers that empty into the Saint Lawrence from those that fall into the Atlantic" specified in the treaty, but the U.S. claimed that those highlands, plural, were farther north and nearer to the Saint Lawrence. By the 1830s tensions mounted to the point where they became called the Aroostook War. More recent controversies, we're talking in the early 2000s, occurred when a Maine-based developer announced intentions to locate thirty-three turbines on the side of the hill to make Maine's first wind farm. These 389-foot windmills would create enough power to electrify 25,000 homes, according to the developer, but some advocacy groups worried they'd also chew up migrating birds. Send us a note if you can identify the beautiful hill on the horizon.
