Maine Wilderness Transformed: Timber, Sporting, and Exploitation of the Moosehead Lake Region

This exhibition explores of the creation of a landscape of exploitation in interior Maine. The Native American use of Mt. Kineo rhyolite prefigured, on a small scale, the extensive and paradoxical exploitation after 1820 both of the region’s forest resources and of its idealized essence as “wilderness.” When Henry David Thoreau made his tours through the “Maine Woods” in the 1850s, the area was already the site of heavy capital investment and speculation. After the Civil War, the tourism industry has–paradoxically–developed hand-in-glove with forestry.