By Terry Karkos,Staff Writer

Robert Stevens doesn’t recall the 17 snow and rainstorms that blew into Maine during the first three weeks of March 1936. But the 80-year-old Canton man vividly remembers the havoc wreaked from March 18 through 21 along the ice-jammed Androscoggin River by what came to be called “Maine’s greatest flood.”

“At 10 years old, it scared the hell out of me when the ice hit the Gilbertville Bridge,” Stevens said recently about the Canton bridge that spanned the river on what is now Route 140.

“The ice bang-banging on the bridge beams, it made a hell of a noise,” Stevens said while reminiscing on the flood that struck the region 70 years ago today. “Boom! Boom! Boom! It went on for 24 hours. Bang! Boom! Boom! Boom!”

Stevens was one of eight children, who, in 1936, lived with their parents in a house with a barn and silo just above the Union Hall on Canton Point Road. They could see the bridge and river from their yard.

On Friday the 13th, Maine got an inkling of the impending doom. According to news reports from the time, heavy rain fell on March 12, causing swollen streams to flood. Millions of tons of ice crashed into cities and towns along the river, establishing all-time flood high marks.

Ice jams re-formed and, on March 18, after three days of rain, the Androscoggin jumped its banks and flooded Bethel.

Up to 8 feet of water covered the road to Portland. Bridge approaches washed out. For the first time in known history, several feet of water submerged Canadian National Railroad tracks there.

The river continued to rise.

Awash in pulp and ice

Hanover became like Venice, with residents paddling canoes up Main Street, which was under several feet of water. The Hanover Dowell Co. buildings were almost completely deluged.

By the morning of March 19, ice jammed behind the Gilbertville Bridge. Upstream at Rumford Center, ice and water moved the old ferry house landmark off its foundation. It was deposited 100 yards down the bank.

Water flowed over Prospect Avenue in the Virginia section of Rumford, nearly reaching the second-story piazza of a house.

The Maine Central Railroad Co. bridge in Rumford washed away.

Rising water in the Oxford Paper Co. mill yard swept 5,000 cords of pulp wood into the angry river, creating a maelstrom of logs and ice that smashed against the steel Ridlonville Bridge.

Pounding ice and pulp logs stripped trees of branches along the river in Mexico.

On the afternoon of March 19, water flowed over the 43-year-old Ridlonville Bridge.

Just before 4:30 p.m., a house was swept through jammed logs and ice. It went under the bridge, which then collapsed and was swept downriver, bridge atop the house.

“My dear dad had a grocery store next to the railroad bridge” in the Island business district in Rumford, Henry Dupill of Rumford wrote recently to the Sun Journal. “He and I were walking up the hill to the hospital and could hear the bridge coming apart.

Dupill said he remembered barns floating down the river “with animals looking through windows.”

“It rained for three days,” he said.

Floating debris field

Four miles downriver, the Mexico-Peru Bridge withstood attacks by ice, logs, high water and the mangled Ridlonville Bridge, which wrapped around a bridge pier on the Peru side.

The Berst-Forster-Dixfield Co. match and toothpick factory at Peru was inundated by water and badly damaged. Millions of matches and toothpicks entered the river, Stevens said.

“Wherever there was a high-water mark in Canton, there was this band of matches. We had high concerns until we found out they wouldn’t light,” he said.

Floodwaters bypassed the Gilbertville Bridge and freed the ice jam. Water swallowed up land and houses on either side because the agricultural fields were lower than the span’s bottom.

“Everything under the sun came down (the river), even animals, most of them dead,” Stevens remembered. “Just below my grandfather’s house, three smaller places went completely. The blacksmith shop wedged into trees, and the flood just ruined it.”

At 12:55 p.m., ice, wood and water ripped down the Turner Center Bridge between north Greene and Turner, carrying it toward Gulf Island Pond Dam.

Cars, people stranded

Downstream in Lewiston and Auburn, floodwaters completely overran the Deering Rips Dam. Upstream, a massive ice jam backed up behind the Gulf Island dam.

The flood backed up Barkerville Brook, swept down across the 9-hole Riverdale Golf Course, which was where Marden’s is now on outer Main Street, went through what was then called Tall Pines, and rejoined the Androscoggin, Charles W. Bartlett, who was 20 at the time, said recently.

Maurice LePage of Lewiston remembers his father telling him the flood wiped out the Cedar Street bridge and the end of the canal.

Mary and John Bussell of Lewiston, who were 6 years old then, and recall the great flood.

Mary Bussell lived in Barkerville across from the now Main Street fire station; John Bussell lived near Bates College. Mary’s grandparents, who were returning to Maine from Florida, were the last to cross the train trestle in Lewiston before the flood halted steam and electric train traffic.

All traffic on the two highway bridges – north and south – was also stopped, stranding hundreds of people. It became too dangerous to use either. Roiling, ice- and debris-laden water whacked the bottoms of both bridges.

At Auburn that afternoon, a flow of 135,000 cubic feet per second was registered; normal flow was 6,032 cubic feet per second, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Low-lying sections of the two cities were devoured by the raging water. Residents were ordered to evacuate from New Auburn, Newbury and River streets as water surged two stories high. Little Canada and Gas House Patch neighborhoods flooded. Hundreds of families became homeless.

Martial law in Rumford

Water poured over North Bridge, driving huge cakes of ice and logs into its side.

A span and a half of South Bridge from Lewiston to New Auburn collapsed into the river.

The 750-foot-long Maine Central Railroad bridge above the falls was weighted down with gondola cars filled with rocks, gravel and coal and parked on the trestle as ballast, John Bussell said.

The same thing was tried on another Maine Central Railroad Bridge between Brunswick and Topsham, but the center span still collapsed into the Androscoggin.

Electricity went out along the river from Rumford to Brunswick as generating plants became submerged and power lines were cut.

The National Guard was called into service. Martial law was declared in Rumford.

Rescuers paddled canoes and boats down submerged streets in towns and cities all along the river, evacuating stranded residents to higher ground or emergency shelters.

Elsie Harris Whitney, who turned 90 in January, remembers being stranded in Minot, unable to get to either a hospital in Lewiston or the one in Norway should she go into labor during those dangerous few days.

“We could not cross the North Bridge, as we called it, into Lewiston,” Harris Whitney wrote recently to the Sun Journal. “The Minot Corner Bridge was out. At Hackett’s Mills, the water was coming right down the road and we could not get to Mechanic Falls (to reach the hospital in Norway) either.

“We were stranded at Minot Center,” she said.

Nearly a week later, the water finally receded around her family’s home. Three days later, she went into labor.

“I was 20 at the time and this was my first baby,” Harris Whitney wrote. “I did not really know enough to be nervous. But my husband and the four ladies that lived on the hill near us were holding their breaths. I’m sure they thought they were going to have to deliver the baby!

So, “I always tell my son (Dick) he washed down with the flood.”