Six years ago today – a bright, beautiful morning here and all up and down the East Coast – we were working on our second cup of coffee when the phone rang. It was Bob Colby: “Do you have your TV on? Better turn it on.”

We turned it on. Nothing would ever be the same.

The River Valley felt safe. In an interview, then-Town Manager Rob Welsh said he didn’t think we had anything to worry about here. Most people, I think, resumed their day-to-day routines and found comfort in them.

Some people sought out new enterprises, ones that reassured us that we still had some control over our lives. Wasn’t it about that time Lem Cissel landed in Rumford? And didn’t Phil Zinck’s air field appear about then? It certainly was the time the Rumford Library Growth Committee began its work, and a committee began to envision a restored Chisholm Park. This was the park that once stretched from Morse Bridge all the way down Rumford Avenue to the footbridge to the mill.

I knew that a lot of work had been done on the restoration of the trails over the summer, but for some reason – fear of disappointment? – I didn’t rush to view the work. Finally, on one of those perfect afternoons we enjoyed last week, finished with my errands, I took a walk in the park. Andy Russell’s crew had begun clearing brush along the old trail last year. It had been marked by a hardy band of high-school volunteers – one of the Rotary’s Interact teams – back in 2003.

This summer the work began in earnest. The first trail head opens just below the giant glacial rocks near the Rumford Library. The way is broad – and very dusty last week – and slopes down to the site of what will be an overlook with views up to the Falls and down to the rapids below Memorial Bridge. (Best kayaking in Maine, some say.)

The trail curves, rather steeply, up and back to Rumford Avenue, just where it intersects with Knox and Franklin streets. Russell’s crew has begun the higher, parallel trail, too. A picnic area is planned in there about where there used to be a basketball court. Someone has already brought an old picnic table into that space.

Dennis Breton wrote a history of Chisholm Park for the Rumford Historical Society, and he shared it (Sun Journal, December 2001): As early as 1890, a tract of land along the river was set aside for a park, Riverside Park. Great improvements – restrooms, bandstand, benches, and a pavilion – were made by Mr. W.C. Day, who leased the park for five years, beginning in 1895. The park probably became Chisholm Park at the time of Hugh Chisholm’s death in 1912. The park and the town of Rumford flourished through the 1920s. But the next decade brought a devastating flood (1936) and the next, world war.

Chisholm Park disappeared beneath a parking lot and snow dump and untamed tree and brush growth.

Though the aftermath of 9/11 may have crystallized the River Park Committee’s determination to bring Chisholm Park back, other factors figured in the mix. Chief among them, fond recollections: the band concerts the late Aubrey Thompson could hear from his family’s front porch on Rumford Avenue; the park’s beauty (Arthur Meader hoped the growth could be thinned to reveal the river once more). Mike Myles remembers his mother talking fondly of hisholm Park. In a letter to the Rumford Falls Times (July 2, 2002), Robert Louvat Sr., spoke of “wonderful years” in the old park but thought vandalism would plague a renewed one. Dru and Dennis Breton recalled walking to Stephens High through the park.

From the fall of 2001 through 2003, the River Park Committee made headway. Grants to the committee from The Betterment Fund, the Eagles, and Rotary brought first TJ deWan & Associates, and later Main Land Development, to town to assist in planning for the renewed park and the engineering it would require. A core committee (Jane deFrees, Jolene Lovejoy, Dennis Breton, and me) hung in there, helped along the way by Janice Reed, Marcel, and Louise Austin, among others.

For several years, the project languished: lack of funding; committee burn-out. But the dream didn’t die, and in March 2005, the River Park Restoration Committee turned its remaining funds (sheltered at the River Valley Healthy Communities Coalition) over to the town.

In short order, the town won a $50,000 grant that will provide for those amenities Bobby Nowak told me about last week: benches, railings, pavers at the trail heads …

Chisholm Park – a.k.a. River Park and River Walk – restored: It’s a dream coming true!

Linda Farr Macgregor lives in Rumford with her husband, Jim. She is a freelance writer and author of Rumford Stories. Contact her: [email protected]