THE HISTORY OF BERLIN
Introduction
The City is operated by a Mayor/Council/Manager form of
government. It has a full-time fire department with about 26 men;
and 23 full-time members on the police force. Two ambulances
and a well-trained crew are on call 24 hours a day. Municipal
water and sewer systems are available in all primary residential
areas. There is weekly garbage collection and a new recycling
center.
The first settlers came here for no apparent good reason.
They were farmers and the land didn't promise to be any better
here than what they had in Gilead and Shelburne down the
river. But they were restless and independent and the tract of
wilderness now known as Berlin was the last place on the
Androscoggin River untouched by the plow. So they came
across the mountains to start a new community in this isolated
area.
They found a spectacularly beautiful, rugged land with a river
running over rapids, chutes, and cascades for a full mile across
the grain of the mountains and falling 400 feet, all in the space
of six miles.
The Plantation of Maynesborough, as it was called, was
named after the most illustrious of the English gentlemen to
whom it was granted by the Crown in 1771. It was a hard place
but no one had to go hungry for the woods were full of deer
and partridge, and the brooks and river teemed with trout. And
everywhere stretched the seemingly endless towering stands
of timber-pine, spruce, fir, birch, and poplar, to name only a
few.
Those first farmers who made the move from down river
found good farmland upstream from the falls. There the river
flowed calm and smooth through a valley that was wide enough
to cultivate. William Sessions was the pioneer who opened five
acres of land on the east side of the river in 1824 and came
back in the spring of 1825 with his nephew to plant crops and
build a log house.
Sessions did not stay long enough to see Maynesborough
become established as the Town of Berlin; his nephew Cyrus
Wheeler stayed, however. By 1829 there were seven families
with names that are still remembered: Wheeler, Green,
Thompson, Bean, Blodgett, Evans, Ordway, Cates. That year
they incorporated their village under the name of the Town of
Berlin, though it is not recorded why they chose that particular
name. Over the next twenty years they and others who
followed continued to farm the land, run sawmills, and raise
homes and families.
In 1851, J.B. Brown and three other businessmen from
Portland Maine formed a partnership under the name of H.
Winslow & Co., and purchased the privilege at the top of the
falls. They saw the making of a successful lumber business in
the vast forest and natural water power of the river. They were
also aware the railroad was coming to Berlin and that there
would be a direct line of transportation to Portland and market
centers for the first time. They would no longer have to make
grueling trips through the hills hauling lumber by ox team or
down the river by canal boats. The railroad would be sure and
swift and a large scale lumber business could be profitable for
the first time.
In 1852, H. Winslow & Co. began building their sawmill. They
started operations in 1853, weathered a few bad years and
then began to thrive. In 1868, William Wentworth Brown and
Lewis T. Brown bought the controlling interest, establishing the
Brown family in the lumber business. By then it was known as
the Berlin Mills Company, the name it retained until 1917 when
the business pressures caused the family to change the name
to Brown Company.
The Brown Company grew rapidly and Berlin grew with it.
Solely a lumbering outfit until 1888, by the end of the first
decade of this century the Browns had the largest chemical
pulp mill in the world (Burgess Sulphite) and what was known
as the finest paper mill in the world (Cascade). Through careful
management, intelligent expansion, and some governmental
assistance during the Depression, the Brown Company, now
known as the James River Corporation, is still a vital force in
Berlin today.
In the early 1900's Berlin was a buzzing industrial center with a
melting-pot population of nearly 12,000 people. The Browns
weren't the only ones who realized the economic possibilities of
the woods and river. H.H. Furbish, who perfected the soda
process of making wood pulp, came to Berlin in 1877 and
founded the Forest Fiber Company, which thrived until the
development of the sulphite process in the pulp industry. The
sulphite process utilized spruce wood which was less
expensive than the poplar required by Forest Fiber's soda
process. Furbish's enterprise could no longer compete by the
turn of the century.
The Glen Manufacturing Company employed 500 people and
was said to have the largest newsprint plant in the world; the
Boston Globe and the New York Tribune among those with
whom it held contracts. International Paper bought out the
company and operated here until 1930, when the Depression
seriously curtailed the paper industry and forced International to
close the Berlin Mill.
Berlin's population numbered only 45 at the time of the Civil
War, a total which increased gradually for the next 20 years,
topping 1,000 by 1880. Then it boomed. There were almost
7,000 people living here by the turn of the century and nearly
12,000 by 1910. The city didn't stop growing until the early
1930's when the population reached a peak of over 20,000.
The growth of Berlin reflects the diversity of people who came
to stay-French Canadians, Yankees from Northern New England
farms, Norwegians, Italians, Irishmen, Russians. They sought a
chance to make a better living and found it in the mills, blacksmith
shops, machine shops, farms, stores, railroad yards and in the
long winters' logging camps.
Some of them found it on the Androscoggin when the ice broke
in the spring and the trees cut during the winter were driven
down river to the mills. Each year they guided thousands of feet
of timber down the Androscoggin from Errol, through the
Thirteen-Mile Woods and Pontook and on to where piers built in
the middle of the river separated logs belonging to one company
from those of its competitor. The log drive has been replaced
now by trucks and because of environmental concerns. The
piers still stand, however as a silent reminder of those earlier
days.
Among the things which have also disappeared are the farms,
small sawmills, some of the big industries, a cranberry bog in
the Dead River Swamp, streetcars, the Brown store, even the
Browns themselves. Orton B. Brown, the last of William
Wentworth Brown's sons, passed away in 1964.
In recent years Berlin's population has stabilized to around
12,000. The city has changed in size and appearance-buildings
have been renovated and refurbished, new buildings have been
built, Main Street is being revitalized and new small
manufacturers and businesses have added to a new growing
and prosperous Berlin.
The Early Days