North Maine Woods
The North Maine Woods is the northern geographic area of the state of Maine in the United States. The thinly populated region is overseen by a combination of private individual and private industrial owners and state government agencies, and is divided into 155 unincorporated townships within the NMW management area.
The region covers more than 3.5 million acres (14,000 km2) of forest land bordered by Canada to the west and north and by the early 20th century transportation corridors of the Canadian Pacific International Railway of Maine to the south and the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad Ashland branch to the east. It includes western Aroostook and northern Somerset, Penobscot, and Piscataquis counties. Much of the woods is currently owned by the timber corporations, including Seven Islands Land Company, Plum Creek, Maibec, Orion Timberlands and J. D. Irving timber corporations. Ownership changes hands quite frequently and is often difficult to determine.
Its main products are timber for pulp and lumber, as well as hunting and outdoor recreation .
Included within its boundaries are two wild rivers of the Northeastern United States: the Saint John and the Allagash. The North Maine Woods completely surrounds the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.
Early European settlement of New England and Atlantic Canada was along the Atlantic coast. Some settlers focused on fishing and shipbuilding while others cleared forests for conversion to farmland. Trees from the cleared forests provided lumber for homes, barns, and ships to support the fishing industry and European trade. As the coastal forests were cleared, settlers moved inland along the major rivers from the Hudson River north to the Saint Lawrence River. Early interior settlers spent the short summers growing food and the long winters cutting trees. Logs in excess of those needed to build farming structures could be floated downstream and sold to sawmills. Cities like Bangor, Maine on the Penobscot River and Saint John, New Brunswick on the Saint John River developed at the head of navigation where sawmills converted logs to lumber and shipyards converted lumber to ships.
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