BBC News

Steamboats were once a glamorous means of transport for tourists summering at Moosehead Lake – but when the era faded, ship owners sank the once-beloved ...

"The steamboats are symbolic of a time when our region was prosperous and bustling with activity," said McKeil. They check into one of the historical inns and perhaps book a moose-spotting tour or seaplane ride – or board the Kate for a cruise, as I did. Hopefully, they also find the chance to talk to locals, who can share stories of the area's rich past, both above and below the water. A mutual friend introduced McKeil to Robbins, and the two dreamed up a project based on their shared interest: a documentary about the sunken steamboats and an oral history effort to preserve stories of their glory days. "Listening to my aunts and uncles talk about their trips with their father on the boats was always interesting," Carter said. Keyth Carter, who lives in Moosehead's most populated town of Greenville (where she was a schoolteacher for 35 years) is the granddaughter of Stillman Sawyer, a boat captain and builder of the steamboat era. From roughly the 1830s to the 1930s, when the steamboats were in operation, this lake and surrounding woods in northern Maine were as popular for American tourists as a visit to the Hamptons or Cape Cod today. As the era's logging industry made the area more accessible, summer tourism bloomed around Moosehead Lake (which Thoreau described "like a gleaming silver platter at the end of the table"). [nation's last log drive in 1975](https://www.nytimes.com/1976/09/08/archives/last-log-drive-in-us-floating-to-end-in-maine.html), helping to transport timber down the Kennebec River off Moosehead Lake. I grew up in the US state of Maine at a smaller lake not far from here, and I spent many summers taking day trips to Moosehead Lake with my family. "What happened to the rest of them?" [The Maine Woods](https://books.google.com/books?id=2DJc00C27NMC), he recounted standing at the top of Mount Katahdin: "I could see…