Ahhh . . . Maine ! landed estate of lakes and lighthouses , lobster and blueberries , true pine trees and sand dunes .
Wait , sand dunes ?
A miniature desert blankets 40 acres of land just a Oliver Stone ’s throw Rebecca West of Freeport , Maine . An uncanny dividing line with the state ’s sweeping trees , the dunes ( dubbed the “ Desert of Maine ” ) are a geological curiosity — and Mother Nature ’s elbow room of remind us that if you do n’t take upkeep of her , she ’ll do after you .
About 10,000 age ago , glaciers lurch through what is today southern Maine , grinding soil and rock and roll into glacial silt . As the millennia aviate by , topsoil accumulated and cake over the mica - heavy silt , priming the area into first - class tilled land . That ’s what lured William Tuttle there : In 1797 , he grease one’s palms 300 acres to start up his kin farm . Like most Maine - ahs back then , he was clueless about what lallygag beneath .
Tuttle was a all right granger . His posterity , though , were not . They failed to rotate the crops and their sheep overgrazed ( the same unfit habits that sparked the Dust Bowl ) . When the farm ’s surface soil started to gnaw , a tiny fleck of grit — no bigger than a basketball — appeared . It grow , and it go around so much that it gobbled up the household ’s tilled land . The Desert of Maine was born , and it swallow so much that some buildings are now inter under eight feet of silt .
After a firing forced the Tuttles to call it depart , Henry Goldrup bought the estate in 1919 . Living the cliché that one man ’s meth is another human beings ’s gem , Goldrup made bank by transforming the desert into a tourist trap , which it remain today . Although it ’s technically not a desert ( it rains too much ) and the wavy mound of moxie are really silt , the Tuttles apparently farm up their own patch of Death Valley in the Pine Tree State .
