HARRISON – About 45 people took a walking tour of Bolsters Mills village last week, according to Gerry Smith, president of the Harrison Historical Society.

The village is divided by the Crooked River with one side in Otisfield and the other in Harrison. The village was settled, he said, by a Bolster family in 1819 who went on to build a sawmill on the Otisfield side. Then they built a dam to power the sawmill. Eventually other mills were built – carding, fulling and grist – to take advantage of the power provided by the dam. The latter three are gone now.

The dam is still there, Smith said, because interestingly 20 or 25 years ago the state was trying to get rid of dams because they interfered spawning grounds and ended up rebuilding it.

It was too expensive, Smith said, to rebuild a conventional wood dam with fishways, so Norman Wight designed a dam built with stones which gave fish deeper pools and spaces between the stones to migrate through. Wight gives credit, Smith said, to Milton Mills for the design.

Wight and a crew worked with advisers from Fish and Wildlife and the Department of Environmental Protection to create a dam which would meet their requirements. The dam still stands and is beautiful, he said.

“It cost half as much as a standard wooden dam and requires no maintenance,” Smith said. As an engineer he said he is very impressed with the dam and proud of their accomplishment.

Wight is 89 now, Smith said, and has been coming to Bolsters Mills for many years for summer vacations. He retired from teaching in 1976 and made Bolsters Mills his full-time home. He has lived in several of the houses shown on the tour, all built between 1819 and 1840, Smith said.

Smith and his wife, Elaine, of the Harrison Historical Society worked with David and Jean Hankins of the Otisfield Historical Society and other members of both groups to organize this cooperative tour on both sides of Crooked River, he said. The tour started on the Harrison side, and just across the bridge on the Otisfield side is the general store.

Dave Hankins said the store is the only operating retail store of any kind in Otisfield and now it is up for sale. Both he and Smith expressed hope that someone will buy it and continue operating it as a store.

Jean Hankins, recuperating from a broken leg, rode the tour route with two other people in a golf cart. She talked about the architecture of some buildings on the Otisfield side, mentioning that two houses were designed by the architect Nathan Nutting, the house Lee Dassler lives in now and the one next to the store.

The tour ended at the Joe Kiley house, which she thinks is built over an old stable that was part of one of the old mill sites. One can see the stone walls from the old sluice way, she said. Though the house has been modernized, she said one can still see places where horses had chewed on the beams.

After the flood of 1936, Dave Hankins said, they made the switch to steam power because the flood had destroyed the water-powered mill.

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