[UP-tun] is a town in Oxford County, incorporated on February 9, 1860 from Letter B Plantation.

This small community borders New Hampshire and Umbagog Lake that straddles the two states and is the source of the Androscoggin River. However, the river runs south through New Hampshire before entering Maine in Gilead.

The Gazetteer of Maine observed in 1886:

Most of the settlements in the town are between Cambridge River and the junction near [First B. Hill] of the three southern roads. On the falls near the lake [Umbagog] are a saw-mill and grist-mill. Near by is a starch factory, carriage and shoeshops, store, etc. There are two hotels at this place.

Mollidgewock Pond is located south of Umbagog Lake near the Maine-New Hampshire border. The main inlet is boggy with numerous beaver ponds and its shoreline was undeveloped as of 1998. Water quality in the pond is suitable for coldwater gamefish. It is accessible by a series of gravel logging roads south of Route 26 near the state border.

Upton is far from other sizable Maine towns on Maine Route 26 as it ends at the New Hampshire border.

Form of Government: Town Meeting-Select Board.

Additional resources

Heywood, Charles Errol. History of Upton, Maine. Norway, Me. Oxford Hills Press. 1973.

*Maine. Historic Preservation Commission. Augusta, Me.   Text and photos from National Register of Historic Places.

Maine. Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. ” Augusta, Me. 1998.  Mollidgewock Pond. http://www.maine.gov/ifw/fishing/lakesurvey_maps/oxford/mollidgewock_pond.pdf
(accessed April 7, 2014)

Varney, George J. A Gazetteer of the State of Maine. 1886. p. 549.

National Register of Historic Places – Listings

Forest Lodge

[Carry Road, about 1.9 miles west of Middle Dam] Forest Lodge is a compact historic district which is almost as isolated in time as it is geographically. Technically part of the town of Upton, and located deep in the woods of northwestern Maine, the oldest buildings at Forest Lodge were built as a sporting camp in the late 19th century. The almost two acre property contains three houses and two woodsheds, all built by the 1940s, as well as several more recent outbuildings. The site is perched on the edge of the Rapid River, an unnavigable river that drops 155 feet in 5.25 miles from the outlet of Lower Richardson Lake to Lake Umbagog on the Maine/New Hampshire border. The property is surrounded by logging company land, and is only accessible by company permission, or seasonally across the lakes.

This was the year round home of the best selling author Louise Dickinson Rich and her family from 1933 through 1944, and her summer residence until 1955. It was while she lived at Forest Lodge that Rich developed her literary skills and published her first stories and books.

Ralph Rich had just moved into Forest Lodge. Formerly an engineer working in the automotive industry, Ralph had first visited the Lodge thirty years earlier, when the Winter House was the property of the Oxford Club Camp, a sportsman’s group from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rich returned to the Richardson Lakes area repeatedly during his youth, and in 1924 bought the Lodge from Robert Davis, who had obtained it in 1903 from Edwin Abbott of the Oxford Club. In 1933, after Ralph’s own marriage dissolved and he tired of the corporate world, he relocated permanently to Forest Lodge. Rich courted Dickinson for half a year before the teacher moved to Forest Lodge in the winter of 1933/34. Although it is unclear whether the two ever legally married, Louise Dickinson took the surname Rich by the time her first story was published in 1937.* [Photos from We Took to the Woods, unknown photographer]

Upton Grange No. 404 (Former)

[junction of Route 26 and Mill Road] The 1899 Former Upton Grange No. 404 (a former spruce gum refinery) is a common two-story building that has served as a community hall and a place for town meetings.

Frank W. Bragg, of Upton built the structure to be used as a gum refinery. He bought gum in lumps, melting and refining. The commercial manufacturing of stick spruce gum was begun by John B. Curtis in 1848. Spruce gum was manufactured by collecting and grading the hardened resin from scars or breaks in the bark of Black Spruce trees, heating and straining the raw gum to remove impurities, mixing “suitable material,” and packaging. The spruce gum industry disappeared by the early 20th century as new types of chewing gum were developed.

In 1911, after the demise of the spruce gum business, Frank Bragg sold his former refinery to the Upton Grange No. 404. The Grange added the shed roofed additions to the building and converted the lower floor into a social hall that was used for a variety of community functions including dances and town meetings. The Grange was dissolved in the mid-1970s, so community activities and town meetings were held in the nearby former school house. The building was later sold and used as a private summer residence.* [Kirk F. Mohney photos, 2000]