On Tuesday, I received an email from Gretchen Cherry, who told me that her husband, Bill Cherry, had passed away on April 1. The name rang a vague bell, but I couldn’t really remember how I’d crossed paths with Bill.
“Some years back you interviewed my husband,” Gretchen explained. “Would you send me the article that you wrote on Bill? I would like to have it to display at this memorial service.”
Curious, I logged into the BDN’s archive service and did a simple search. When I found the column that had featured Bill Cherry, I began to smile. I’d written it in 2003, and as I read it once again, I remembered why his story was worth telling.
Bill Cherry played a special role in Maine’s outdoor history, you see. And once upon a time — just a few months after I’d begun covering the outdoors beat for this paper — I got to share his story with our readers.
Today, in Bill’s memory, I’m sharing it again. If you’re like me, and have spent countless hours exploring the wild places adjacent to eastern Maine’s Stud Mill Road, I think you’ll enjoy it. You might even consider passing along a silent “Thanks” to one of the men who helped make that road a reality.
Here’s that column. Enjoy.
People who like to spend time in places where there are more trees than humans can tell you there are a few ways to tell if you’ve officially moved off the beaten path.
There are no stores … nor rest stops. The “towns” you drive through exist only on maps, and consist of an odd combination of letters and numbers.
You’re more likely to see a bear than you are a house.
And at some point during your travels in places like this, you often pause to wonder: How tough must it have been to have put a road through this kind of terrain?
William “Bill” Cherry of Machias has the answer: Very, very tough.
Cherry, you see, was a recent college graduate back in 1972. He got a job with St. Regis Paper. And he spent much of the next four winters helping to plan the route of what would become the Stud Mill Road.
Dave Warren led the two-man crew, which grew to three when Les Bragdon joined the pair in ’74.
Their task: Work your way through the wilderness, laying out the center line for the working woods road that would follow.
It was, as you may guess, rough work.
“Well, we had a three-quarter pound Snow & Nealley spotting ax, and that’s all we had,” Cherry recalled last week. “When you think that you had to chop a clear, straight line for those distances, for those long periods that we were surveying across there, it was darned hard.”
If you’re from these parts, you’ve likely traveled that road at one time or another. Locals sometimes drop the “Road” suffix, and refer to the gravel East-West highway as simply, “Stud Mill.” As in: “Well, all you’ve got to do is go out Stud Mill until you get to Alligator, then turn right.”
“Alligator,” of course, is Alligator Lake — just one of the prime fishing spots that rest off Stud Mill’s many “exits.”
And “Stud Mill?” Well, over its 43-mile course from (you guessed it) a former stud mill in Costigan to First Machias Lake, the road now serves as a combination landmark, highway, and get-away-from-it-all tonic for sportsmen and women from all over Eastern Maine.
To some, it remains a road to nowhere. To others, of course, it’s much more than that.
Cherry’s crew worked its way along … slowly … in 100-foot sections. The man with the staff compass would have to have an unobstructed 100-foot view to the next “picket,” which would be chopped by his partner.
And Cherry points out that what he, Warren and Bragdon eventually accomplished wasn’t an amateurish attempt at building a passable road. St. Regis wouldn’t settle for that.
“That road had the possibilities of being tarred at one time,” Cherry said. “The specs were, you couldn’t have a hill more than 5 percent grade, nor a curve more than 5 percent. It was truly engineered. It wasn’t just willy-nilly with a Silva compass.”
All of the surveying work took place during the winter, as transportation via snowmobile made the task easier than ground travel.
For four straight winters, Cherry rolled out of bed on Monday morning, headed for the woods parallel to Route 9, and didn’t return home until Friday night.
For two years — 1974 and ’75 — Cherry spent weeknights at Carl and Clara Bamford’s sporting camps on Alligator Lake.
Those memories remain vivid, he said.
“It was an experience,” he said. “Staying in those old log cabins that were built in the 1920s and [at] Carl and Clara’s, they had walls that were like three logs high. Three logs. Think of that. The holes were actually chinked up with moss. You’d have to scootch down and step into the [cabin] and there’d be an actual goose-feather bed, and great big comforters.”
Cherry worked for St. Regis, Champion and International Paper for 29 years, and as of 2003 served as the watershed coordinator for the East Machias River Watershed Council. He says the future ramifications for Maine’s sporting public never really dawned on him when he and the others were designing the Stud Mill Road.
“At that time, being between 22 and 25 years old, having that kind of vision of what actually was going to be going on? It was very difficult to comprehend,” Cherry said.
“We would have crossed over 10 or more townships. The state of Maine had never seen anything like that, other than the Golden Road.”
Rest easy, Bill Cherry. Thank you, from a generation of outdoors enthusiasts who have made lasting memories in the wild places along the road you helped create.
John Holyoke can be reached at jholyoke@bangordailynews.com or 207-990-8214. Follow him on Twitter: @JohnHolyoke. His first book, “Evergreens,” a collection of his favorite BDN columns and features, is published by Islandport Press and is available wherever books are sold.
