ABANDONED TRAILS OF ACADIA NATIONAL PARK: IN SEARCH OF RED ROCK SPRING

IN SEARCH OF RED ROCK SPRING

Was there really such a place as Red Rock Spring on Mount Desert Island? That question can be answered easily, since we have old newspaper articles and ads that proclaim the purity of its crystal clear waters, but the exact location of Red Rock Spring remains a mystery. We know from an old article the spring lay between the Cemetery on Harden Farm Road and the base of Kebo Mountain, there is not a whole lot of ground between those two locations so locating the exact site of the Red Rock Spring, one would think, would be a fairly easy task - but it has turned out to be anything but easy. Red Rock Spring, as was the case with Sieur de Monts Spring area, was owned by a Mr. Prescott, who also owned a farm along the Harden Farm Road. It was on his farm that the Red Rock Spring was located, and according to newspaper articles, only a handful of people knew of the spring, until Mr Prescott came to a conclusion, there was money to be made from the spring, and he began the Red Rock Spring Bottling Company, which bottled both Spring Water as well as Ginger Ale at the location.

CONCRETE TROUGH

The spring got its name because the ledge around where the spring bubbled up from was a red color, thus the name Red Rock Spring. I have been trying to track down the location of the bottling plant and its spring for years now and today may of come close to finding it, or did we find it? Well, lets put it this way, we found something, which is always better than finding nothing at all.
What we found was a good number of large and small granite blocks scatter about an area near a brook. On top of a number of these granite blocks was very thin pieces of rock, like one might find covering an inside wall, or perhaps a roof. But the biggest find lay just ahead when we came upon this huge concrete trough of sorts, with two holes on top of it, and two holes near the base, with a medium size pipe stopping just short of connecting to the large concrete trough. I use the word trough lousely because clear as you will see from the photos, it was not designed to hold much water. So, did we fine what remains of the Red Rock Spring Bottling Company, who knows. Did we find a glorified horse trough, an abandoned fountain, or some other long lost artifact, who knows, but clearly water at one time flowed into it, as can be seen from that medium sized pipe. I do not have the GPS as i totally forgot to take the numbers down, but I will get those and update this when I have them, but really, this site is not too hard to locate.

RED ROCK SPRING -

We followed the Harden Farm Road (some locals refer to it as the other end of Kebo Street) down to where it comes to the Park Loop Road, straight ahead is a field, we moved through the field, until we reached the trees and than moved to the right through the trees and to the edge of a brook. From there we simply followed the brook until we came to many granite blocks and the horse trough thingy, I told my son it sure looks like it was a fountain at one time, but who knows. As you will see in the photos, there also was the tire marks of an old road which led right to this site, though the tire marks can't be seen from the road. My son thought it might of been a tub but clearly its not deep enough to have been a tube...LOL.
So the latest details we have uncovered on this mysterous spring, it was surrounded by tall thin white birches, the bottom of the spring is of sand, and the water in the spring "bubbles upward" - which is caused by a natural gas found in the water.

So in this photo I just noticed there is an indent in the ground where clearly another pipe ran out this side as well, though that pipe is no longer there. Could this be an early prototype of the first jacuzzi?