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The Kennebec Wilderness Awakens
Mary R. Calvert
A work of dedicated local history, Mary R. Calvert's *The Kennebec Wilderness Awakens* chronicles the early European settlement of Maine's Kennebec River valley. Published in 1986, it draws on regional records to follow the river country from its wild beginnings through the arrival of settlers, the fur trade, missions, and conflict on a contested frontier. Calvert wrote from deep familiarity with the Kennebec's past, and the book has the granular, place-rooted texture that regional historians provide and national surveys miss. It is history for people who want to know exactly what happened along a particular river, town by town. For readers interested in Maine, colonial New England, or the way a specific landscape shaped the lives lived on it, it's a thorough and affectionate local record of a formative chapter in the state's making.
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The author
Mary R. Calvert was a Maine local historian who wrote several closely researched books on the Kennebec region, working from area archives and records. Her books reflect the labor of a community historian committed to preserving a particular corner of the state's past.
The book
The Kennebec Wilderness Awakens, published in 1986, traces the history of the Kennebec River valley from the early contact and settlement period onward, gathering the people, places, and events that shaped this stretch of the Maine frontier.
How it reads
This is regional history in the best local-historian tradition: detailed, document-based, and rooted in place rather than sweeping in argument. Readers seeking specific Kennebec history will find far more here than in general accounts of Maine or New England.
For more context
The Kennebec was a major artery of early Maine, site of the 1607 Popham Colony and long a contested frontier among English settlers, French missions, and the Wabanaki peoples.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Mary R. Calvert
- Publisher
- Maine Sunday Telegram
- Place of publication
- Maine
- Year
- 1986
- ISBN
- 0-9609914-4-1
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine
Places