Crossing the Androscoggin River between Auburn and Lewiston is a pretty routine matter these days. It’s a short drive across one of four principal bridges, and there’s not much time to take in the view, except for a glance at the Great Falls.

Years ago, the linking of east and west shores of the Androscoggin by bridge was a very important accomplishment. North Bridge, now known as the James B. Longley Memorial Bridge, has been a solid and reliable connector for many years, but it was preceded by wooden bridges that were much more vulnerable to nature’s extremes.

The bridge between Auburn’s Court Street and Lewiston’s Main Street served well for many decades in the 1800s. It was a toll bridge in its early history. I have a toll ticket from the days when my great-grandparents and their family used it regularly.

The early spring freshet of 1896 washed that wooden structure away, and as I learned in the diary of my great-grandmother, that loss led to considerable hardship and danger.

Dorcas Field wrote about her brother’s trials and tribulations as he tried to maintain his milk delivery route.

“Ern carried milk across the railroad bridge,” the diary reports the day after the calamity. “He got home at three o’clock. Oh, it is a wild, frightening sight.”

With no bridge, the only other way to cross was by ferry, which local people set up within a few days.

Dorcas writes then, “Ern carried his horse over the river and left him and hauled his milk over in the wagon.”

I often wondered how a ferry could ever be employed to cross a rushing river that had destroyed a bridge. The answer for me was in a description of a ferry’s operation on the Androscoggin at West Bethel.

Frank Worcester, writing in a June 1979 issue of the Bethel Courier, said a large steel cable attached to two double poles on each side of the river was the means employed at a site in his town. On the ferryman’s home side, the cable could be loosened or tightened on a windlass (a simple winch) to adjust for the rise and fall of the river.

It might be imagined that the ferry moved across by pulling a rope. Not so. It was much more ingenious.

A heavy rope on each end of the flat boat went to a two-wheel cable trolley. A rope crank on the rail made it possible for the ferryman to adjust the ferry’s angle to the cable.

The river’s current was the means of propulsion. Borrowing from the principles of wind on the angled sails of a schooner, the moving water pushed against the side of the boat and against two heavy sideboards that could be levered down when water depth allowed. The angle to the current squeezed the ferry through the water.

There are many other sights that no longer can be seen when crossing the river these days.

If the Veterans Memorial Bridge that leads to the Auburn Mall area had existed more than 100 years ago, winter commuters would have seen a spectacular toboggan run on the Lewiston shore just north of Boxer Island.

It began at the top of a fairly large hill and went right to the shore where toboggans could shoot onto the ice for an extra-long ride.

In recent years, housing development and roads have erased traces of that neighborhood recreation site.

Crossing the Androscoggin has taken many forms from bridges to ferries or on the ice. There were times you could walk across – not on the river bottom but on floating logs.

The Androscoggin is not often thought of as a river on which huge log drives took place, but they happened here, and on a grand scale. There were several weeks of the year after a winter of cutting in forestland to the north that thousands of logs were floated downstream to the sawmills. A stretch of river above the Great Falls was an important holding area for the logs. That was before the 1902 construction of the Libbey-Dingley Dam, now called Deer Rips Dam, and Gulf Island Dam in the early 1920s.

Two large piles of rocks enclosed by a square of log cribbing can be seen below Deer Rips. When the dams now hold water back and levels drop very low, nearly two dozen other rock piers can be seen in the channel.

There’s a large boulder on our family’s riverfront shore. A huge iron ring is attached to it. Chains were run from that ring to piers, and various log companies had their pens to hold logs until sawmills were ready to receive them. Each pen’s logs were branded with the owner’s mark.

Today, we whiz across this great river with barely a look at it. Those who are now working for its restoration and recreation potential are rediscovering its values of years ago and for the future.