Oriental Powder Company

Oriental Powder Company was a gunpowder manufacturer with mills located on the Presumpscot River in Gorham and Windham, Maine. The company was one of the four largest suppliers to Union forces through the American Civil War.

The Presumpscot River dropped 16 feet at Gambo Falls where the river formed the border between the towns of Windham and Gorham. Sebago Lake formed a large natural reservoir upstream of Gambo giving the falls an unusually reliable water supply with comparatively minor flow peaking from storm runoff. Early European settlers built a sawmill powered by the falls. In 1817 the sawmill was converted to gunpowder manufacture by Edmund Fowler and Lester Laflin. Lester Laflin was a grandson of American Revolutionary War gunpowder manufacturer Matthew Laflin. The Laflin family manufactured gunpowder in Massachusetts for several generations. When Lester came east to Maine, his first cousins traveled west to build gunpowder mills in New York and Chicago. Lester, his partner, and their mill foreman drowned on Sebago Lake on 22 June 1827.

Following an explosion killing seven employees on 19 July 1828, the Gambo Falls mill was enlarged by Oliver Whipple concurrently with construction of locks for the Cumberland and Oxford Canal. The canal provided reliable transportation from Portland harbor for sulfur from Sicily and saltpeter from India and from Sebago Lake for charcoal and lumber from forests to the north. Whipple's mill used the lumber to manufacture kegs holding as much as 25 pounds of powder. Kegs of gunpowder were shipped to Portland in canal boats when possible, but moved in horse-drawn sleighs when the canal was frozen. Canal boats carried about 25 tons, and sometimes sailed all the way to Boston when weather was favorable.

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