By Mike Davis

BN Columnist

Howdy neighbor!

When I was growing up here in Bridgton, I would sometimes go out in the summers to climb Pleasant Mountain in the company of friends. Sometimes, this was on our own, sometimes via a district school trip or with some town recreational program, but always the enchanting scenes of these visits left deep imprints on my memory.

I remember the long hike up through the trees, the difficult scrabbling over rock falls and among granite ledges bare to the sky, and the breathtaking views of the countryside which become visible from exposed places near the summit. I recall drinking freely from pure mountain streams, running the ridge from bald peak all the way down to the green pinnacle, and daring to ascend yet further, unsupervised of course, into the very clouds themselves by way of the rusting fire lookout tower built on the site of the former Pleasant Mountain hotel. 

To everyone who grew up in its long shadow, Pleasant Mountain will certainly hold a dear place in the heart of every citizen of Bridgton, Denmark and Fryeburg; we who can hardly look to the horizon every day without seeing that signature green wall of its silhouette painted against the sky. It’s where I learned to whistle; it’s where I learned to ski; and one time I even ran the entire course of the old fire-warden’s trail downhill, an exhilarating but foolhardy youthful risk which I shudder to think back on today — not the least because I never once stopped to look for the lost treasure in amethyst crystals which tradition places somewhere thereabouts!

But there is another treasure on that mountain, of a similar shade and far more abundant, which I’m sure anyone who’s ever been to the top of Pleasant Mountain in summer has not failed to notice and enjoy; I refer of course to the many hundreds of blueberry bushes which grow thick and fast among the rocks at the mountain’s higher elevations.  Truthfully, I’ll l admit these berries are perhaps the part of Pleasant Mountain which impressed me the most in youth, for they seemed to me the best reward for a hard day’s climbing.

Now that I am older and better acquainted with our history, this feeling of appreciation has only deepened, and about two weeks ago this enabled me to find rare delight in walking the trails of Pleasant Mountain again and stooping to pick the little berries from their windblown barrens by the handful, for I know now that I was taking part in a tradition stretching back many hundreds of years; a tradition whose finer points I am now happy to share for the benefit of my fellow friends and neighbors here in Bridgton and Denmark. 

Of course, for any readers of this column who are also members of the Bridgton Historical Society, portions of today’s column will be familiar to you, as I made the blueberries of Pleasant Mountain the special feature article of this summer’s newsletter. (If you’re not a member of the Society yet, joining will confer a host of benefits upon you including free research and admittance, members parties, and also special long articles, with pictures, that don’t always run here in the News.)

Since time immemorial, blueberries have grown wild and been picked on Pleasant Mountain; long before the days of English settlement here; the Pequawket Native Americans of the Saco River Valley hunted and lived in the immediate vicinity and could not have failed to avail themselves of the fine berries which, generations later, our first settlers here found and picked in like manner. As early as the 1820s, I can find definite reference to children in the Hio Ridge and New Limington districts of Bridgton picking berries on Pleasant Mountain; and certainly they were following in the footsteps of their forefathers when they went, as one account tells, to “go blueberrying and gather bushels and bushels at a time.”

But the true development of the berrying tradition on Pleasant Mountain comes in 1845, after Caleb Warren of Denmark built the first hotel atop the Green Pinnacle, or what is now called “House Peak.” Once this hotel opened its doors, just so the beauties of our scenic region were opened to the outside world. Some of the earliest tourists to Pleasant Mountain, penning an account of their visit in the Portland Daily Argus of Aug. 18, 1846, describe the ongoing practice of summer blueberry harvests on the mountain, noting; “The mountain is famous for its blueberries. They are larger and sweeter, and plentier than we ever saw anywhere else. You may stand on the southerly declivity, and gather quarts with but a little change of position. Mr. Warren considered it an easy task to gather twelve quarts in thirty minutes. The neighbors, for miles around, resort to this mountain for the purpose. Parties of males and females, to ascend the mountain for berries, are as common as picnics or Island parties near the sea. The morning we left, they were swarming up the sides like bees — and some of the advanced guard told us there would be at least three hundred on the mountain that forenoon. Five hundred have been seen on its sides at one time, gathering the fruit.”

These berries, harvested by guests throughout the fifteen years of the first hotel’s existence, became such a feature as to be mentioned in advertisements for it, and even after the destruction of the first hotel by fire in 1860 the droves of summer berry pickers remained, as we learn from a feature on “Mount Pleasant and the Blue Berry Season” appearing in the Bridgton Reporter of July 17, 1863; “We choose to regard Mount Pleasant as admiringly as if nature had just disclosed to us this monument of her handiwork, with its wooded sides and granite peaks, and the delicious little berries which attain their greatest perfection there. We remember when we thought blue berries brought from any other locality quite unworthy the name, and we are not quite sure now that they can be found elsewhere of equal size and flavor. When the Mount Pleasant House was so unfortunately destroyed by fire a few years since, we felt as if the chief attraction was gone, but not so. Many who had before visited it as a fashionable resort, or for the benefit of the scenery, which is rarely surpassed in New England, came back with the return of the blueberry season, and indeed this season may be considered an important harvest to many of the inhabitants of this vicinity, insomuch that all other branches of business are laid aside, and whole families devote several weeks to picking berries for the market.”

In later summers of the 1870s and 80s, the John Winslow Jones corn shop in Bridgton did a sideline in canning summer blueberries, the bulk of which they received from pickers on Pleasant Mountain. References from this period found in the News and other area papers indicate upwards of fifty bushels a day were once picked on Pleasant Mountain in late July, August and early September.

In 1872, the cannery put up over thirty thousand cans a year, and in 1885 this number had risen to an average 3,000 cans a week, over the course of a roughly month and a half season. Now naturally none of our readers will remember these dear far olden days, but even today stories are still told of the sizable Depression era blueberry harvests on the mountain, and still in living memory are the days when the ski-field ran its chairlifts in peak summer berry season to allow easier access to the summit for weekend pickers in the 1970s and 80s.

With the new chairlift Boyne resorts have recently invested in this summer, one can well imagine the possibility of such berry runs returning. (If anyone in the know regarding these new developments there wants to give me a call about this, I’d welcome it!)

But then of course there is something wonderful in the task of hiking the mountain yourself, as I did on Aug. 1 with my beloved partner Zoe Silvia for our third anniversary, and together we filled a quart in a little over an hour of work, and covering a lesser area than half a tennis court. Don’t worry fellow hikers, we left behind a princely sum of berries up there for you, and plenty of bushes yet to even ripen. For early August really is the best time to go, today even as in days of old; and just so a modern traveler atop Pleasant Mountain may still eat his fill and even pick them by the bushel without materially affecting the available quantity — so numerous are they to be found among the rocky glens. But in the modern interest of preserving the habitat up there, I would advise limiting oneself to a quart or two on any one outing — more than enough to make up a good pie, and to leave enough for others.

To our part, we had in mind to make an anniversary cake, for among the treasures preserved in the Bridgton Historical Society is a selection of recipes from the old mountaintop hotel, and incredibly their old blueberry cake recipe is among them. How fine it proved to be, to make a Pleasant Mountain blueberry cake with berries picked from the very site of the old hotel, of the same type which the olden guests once enjoyed there. The recipe for this cake, which we stuck to with fidelity, involved such 19th century baking mainstays as cream of tartar, a piece of butter the size of an egg, and “a middling oven,” but as you can see it came out like a dream and honestly it tasted better than any modern cake recipe I’ve tried. Of course, it’s not so sweet as modern cake and definitely more toothsome too, but it gives itself well to breakfast and the scent of those dark, tiny little berries wafting up from the baking oven was nothing short of heavenly. It tasted half again as good as that! This being said however, I must allow that no matter what you we did our results must necessarily differ slightly from that old-fashioned cake once made and served atop Pleasant Mountain itself… for as the wife of the hotel-keeper used to say “the altitude of the mountain made her cakes and bread lighter than ever before!”

To all the museum’s members who now have the recipe in hand, do write in and tell us how you did replicating our success.

And to all our readers I say this in closing; do yourself a favor, if you can, and go pick some local berries this summer. I urge you to do this. I urge you to do it on the mountain if at all possible. It is a hard hike and well worth it, but even if you’re not feeling up to the tasking of mountaineering, I can offer suitable alternative locales among the swamp berries of the Holt Pond Preserve or the field berries of Bridgton Historical Society’s own Narramissic (or venture down Route 107 to Crabtree’s pick-your-own blueberry operation). Make muffins, pies, or cakes; stew them with cinnamon or eat them raw in oatmeal, but however you have them do go out and taste them while they’re here.  They’re Maine’s largest food crop, they grow wild here better than anywhere else, and in fact 99% of all wild blueberries in America are grown here in Maine. They don’t make them like this anywhere else. So, don’t be content with the pale, watery, bloated specimens sold to summer folk at the chain supermarkets. Seek instead those small, purple-black jewels that grow only in rain-washed, sun-dappled shade over 2,000 feet above sea-level, and I promise you’ll never wish to taste again those pale imitations grown in hydroponic vats in Michigan and Jersey. It will connect you to the land and place you firmly in the history and culture of our region, in a way which truly must be tasted to be believed.

Till next time!