Saint Croix River (Maine – New Brunswick)

Saint Croix River

Catchment area of ​​the St. Croix River.

The St. Croix River ( in Canada; Saint Croix River in the U.S.) is a river in northeastern North America, which forms part of the border between the United States and Canada - more specifically, between the U.S. state of Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick.

Its source is in the Chiputneticook Lake and the mouth of Passamaquoddy Bay in the Atlantic Ocean. The St. Croix River flows through a series of natural lakes that are north and south of North Lake, East Grand Lake, the Spednic Lake, the Palfrey Lake, Grand Falls Lake, and ends at St. Stephen and Calais in the Passamaquoddy Bay.

At the mouth of the river between Calais / St. Stephen and Robbinston / St. Andrews there is an estuary of 25 km length. Due to the huge tidal range of around seven meters arises here a tidal wave that is pushed up the stream.

The St. Croix River forms two different geographical zones, the upper reaches of a vast lake area and the lower reaches of the actual river, bounded by wooded hills rounded, granite rocks and glacial boulders. Rare and endangered plants and animals are found here, such as the Lobelia cardinalis, the Highbush blueberry, viburnum, the bald eagle and the osprey.

History

Were already in front of around 12,000 years, as evidenced by archaeological finds, the banks of the St. Croix River inhabited. For many centuries, the river was a waterway for the Passamaquoddy, the caught fish on the coast and mussels collected. In 1604, the first French colonists in North America, Pierre Dugua de Monts and Samuel de Champlain reached the river, and built on the small Saint Croix Iceland about 6 above the mouth of the first French settlement in North America. After just one winter, most of them moved on to the Bay of Fundy. In the violent clashes between the British and French settlers for supremacy in North America, the settlements were devastated by the river, the area was a no man's land between the fronts and was sparsely inhabited only by Indians. After the American War of Independence in 1783 now declared independent United States and the British colonial territory of Canada in the Peace of Paris in the Saint Croix River on the border between, however, was not known exactly what the original river Saint Croix was. Only in 1793 was the Canadian Robert Pagan with a copy of Champlain's Map Saint Croix Iceland, where the ruins of the settlement, which he can identify by French porcelain. Thus, the boundary dispute was settled.

As a result, Americans and Loyalists settled on the St. Croix River and made the region a center of shipbuilding and timber trade. Hundreds of ships were built in the shipyards located here from local wood. To heranzuschaffen the wood needed for the shipbuilding industry from the domestic market, thousands of workers were needed and horses, the trees felled, the logs to the river and then down force-fed to the nearly 140 sawmills. Today testify the names of places like Upper Mills and Milltown of the existence of these sawmills. The last strains were floated in 1965 on the St. Croix River. Today, the logs are transported by lorry to the pulp mill built in 1907 in Woodland.

In the late 1880s a railway line was initially built to St. Andrews and later to Vanceboro and McAdam and brought wealthy tourists from Montreal and Boston to the St. Croix River, which made the town of St. Andrews for their summer vacation. Built in 1900, the Canadian Pacific Railway station in the McAdams ( McAdam Railway Station), which is a National Historic Site ( National Historic Landmark ) today. Saint Croix Iceland is reported as a memorial of the type of International Historic Site and is administered by the U.S. National Park Service in cooperation with Parcs Canada.