
In 1886, William Whitman, the wealthy owner of
several textile mills in Massachusetts, and Harry Chapman, a businessman, decided to follow their love of the
outdoors to a remote logging area in Aroostook County, known at the time as
the Red River Lakes region. There, they built a two-story cabin on a small
island on what would eventually become known as Island Pond. The cabin
spared no expense, featuring as its centerpiece a fifteen-hundred dollar, two-story
fireplace. The well built, stately fireplace still stands today as strong as it
did a century ago.
After completing the island cabin, the Whitman and Chapman families built
several buildings on the north shore of the pond, including a school,
barbershop, wood shop, a lodge to gather in, horse barns, and sleeping cabins.
For over thirty years, their extended families used the camp as a private retreat,
typically staying for an entire season each year. If rumors can be trusted, they
converted the island cabin to a dance hall, complete with piano, for a number of
years.
In the early 1920's, around the time the first forest-fire lookout on Deboullie
Mountain was established, (a simple seat hoisted into a tall tree, and later an
enclosed cab atop a steel-framed tower), camp ownership transferred to the
McNally brothers, proprietors of several local sporting camps.
The McNallys named the camps Red River after the common name for the
region and ran them until 1932. The camps then experienced a succession of
owners, including
Dr. AC Christie, a dentist from Washington, DC (1932-1948);
Herschel Currie, a Portage resident and railroad section hand (1948-1962);
Wilfred "Sleepy" Atkins, a 25-year veteran of the Warden Service and son of Will
Atkins, legendary Aroostook County guide (1962-1967);
Gene Bovard (1967-1972); and
Pete and Christina Norris (1972-1979).
Toward the end of
the Norrises' tenure, the Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands purchased the
township surrounding Red River to create the Deboullie Unit of Maine Public
Reserve Land, conserving it for future generations. Deboullie is an
Americanization of the French term d'eboulis, meaning "of the talus slope." It's
the perfect name for a township characterized by rock slides and crumbled
mountain slopes.
When the Norrises decided to sell Red River in 1979, the Brophy family agreed to run the camps for a season until the Norrises
could locate a buyer. The rest, as they say, is history.