Draft:Skinner, Maine

• Comment: Please see WP:REFBEGIN and convert the links into properly formatted citations. Sophisticatedevening ^(talk) 23:18, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

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Skinner, Maine is a township in North Franklin Unorganized Territory in Franklin County, Maine. It is 5 miles away from the border with Canada, and the nearest organized towns are Jackman in Somerset County, and Eustis in Franklin County.

Geography

Skinner Township is in western Maine near Moose River near it's source of the hills just to the west on the Canadian Border. The South Branch of the Moose River runs northward from it's head waters of Kibby Mountain in the valley of the township between the mountains of Caribou Mountain, Peaked Mountain, Moose Mountain, King Mountain and Smart Mountain. The actual settlement is in the north of the township at the end of Goldbrook Road, while the rest of the area is highly forested. It is bordered to the North by Lowelltown Township, the West by Merrill Strip Township, to the South by Kibby Township, to the Southeast by T5 R6 BKP WKR, and to the Northeast by Appleton Township. Most of the township is within the Passamaquoddy Trust Land 1 which was granted to the Passamaquoddy Tribe in 1980 by the State Government of Maine. Although the actual land isn't lived on by any of them.

Etymology

The origin of the name of the town is not very well known, but is believed to come from one of the families that came to live there in the beginning, possibly related to the family who settled first in the town of Corinth in what is known as the Skinner Settlement, where Daniel Skinner moved with his family in 1793. 2

History

Skinner was platted out as a square parcel of land in 1860 however, it became a populated place in 1900 where it was set up as a logging community. It along with many of it's neighboring communities thrived on the trade of timber. The area saw it's success due to Moose River flowing directly to Moosehead Lake, where they would bring the logs by boat from Moose River to Moosehead Lake then down Kennebec River all the way to the shores of Maine. The area saw more success after Canadian Pacific Railway connected it's lines in Lac Megantic to the border in Lowelltown where it became the International Railway of Maine which went to Mattawamkeag and eventually to Saint John in New Brunswick. The trains allowed for Lowelltown, Skinner and Jackman to thrive in the lumber industry allowing for growth to occur. Both of the nearby incorporated towns of Jackman and Eustis began to set up lumber mills, despite all the growth from having no population to having a few thousand lumberjacks in the area along with their families, while Skinner itself was home to possibly up to 10 or 12 families in it's own township. However the growth stagnated in the mid 1950s when the industry became less dependent on trains, and trucks became much more dependable, allowing for much easier and faster access to trade. In turn, that was the fall for people to want to move to Skinner or Lowelltown, causing the people who lived there to mainly move to larger towns around there where logging companies would situate themselves and companies would simply fell the trees, then bring them to stock yards to be shipped to lumber mills. Nowadays there are four homesteads in the central area by Moose River and the abandoned line of railway.

References

1https://legislature.maine.gov/doc/3575

2 https://maineanencyclopedia.com/corinth/#google_vignette

https://passamaquoddypeople.com/

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/spec_photos/60/