Moosehead Lake

Moosehead Lake is forty miles of cold Maine water at the edge of the North Woods — the largest lake entirely inside a single state, named by the Penobscot 'K-ci-Sebem,' the great collection of waters. Thoreau paddled it in 1853 and 1857 with the Penobscot guide Joseph Polis, who told him the legend of Mount Kineo: the hornblende cliff rising off the lake's middle shore is a cow moose killed by a great hunter, still lying there with her head outlined against the water. Thoreau put it in The Maine Woods, which is how the mountain with a moose's outline became famous.

The steamboats came with the loggers — the first one was built on the lake in 1836 — and stayed for the tourists. By the turn of the century Moosehead was the Hamptons of the North Woods: dozens of steamers ferried Boston and New York elites from the Greenville Junction train depot to resorts like the Mount Kineo House, a five-hundred-room hotel with its own baseball team, bowling alley, and fleet of steam yachts. The boats hauled logs out and wealthy rusticators in.

When the automobile killed the resorts, the steamboats were scuttled where they floated — the bottom of Moosehead is a fleet of sunken vessels, towed out and sunk when the era ended. Only one survived: the Katahdin, a 1914 steamer that still runs cruises out of Greenville — the last of the Moosehead fleet, sailing over the wrecks of all the others.