By Zack Anchors
Staff writer

    The Scarborough Marsh is usually thought of as one of the most valuable ecological resources in Scarborough, but it is also a rich source of Scarborough history. In more ways than one, the town’s past would be a lot drier without it. Bruce Thurlow can testify to that. He has lived along the marsh for most of his life and has accumulated a great store of knowledge and anecdotes about it during that time. The marsh’s history, Thurlow said, is just as fascinating as its ecology.
    “There are still sticks driven into the ground in there that were used to catch fish and were put there by the Indians and colonists,” Thurlow said. “I can remember as a little kid catching eels and carp in there.”
    These days, Thurlow shares what he has learned, occasionally speaking on the history of the marsh for events organized by the Friends of the Scarborough Marsh or the Scarborough Historical Society. When schoolchildren come over to the historical society for a tour, one of the things he enjoys showing them the various artifacts from the marsh’s history – bog shoes the horses would wear, sluiceways that were built as part of the dyking systems and scythes used to harvest hay.
    “When people first came to America they were very interested in marshes,” said Thurlow. “They came because the marsh offered them two things: easy transportation and hay.” 
    For early settlers to the region, Thurlow said, the waterways of the marsh, connected to the ocean, provided an easy thoroughfare for boats to travel from one place to another. The saltwater hay was a valuable resource because of its use as feed for horses and other animals. Instead of having to clear forests and create fields, settlers could harvest the hay right out of the open marsh.
    The wetness of the marsh did create some obstacles though and that was where dyking became useful.
    “They wanted to see if they could grow more crops. Every so often they would come along and build a wall and put in a valve – a sluiceway we call it – that would let water flow out as the tide drained, but would not let it out,” Thurlow said. “They’d try to build dykes around hilly areas. One acre of dyked marsh land is the second richest land in the US – the first is in the prairie.”
    After the dykes were built the marsh would begin to dry out, making it easier to harvest hay.
    “They’d go in with a scythe to cut it and get hay to feed their animals – another type of hay they’d use for packaging things.” Thurlow said. “They would cut it all by hand and then people would walk behind raking it up.”
    During the summer, when this harvesting was being done, the marsh was still too wet for horses to come in and haul the hay out. Instead, items called “staddles” would be created in order to store their harvests.
    “They would drive logs into the soil and then make a staddle, which is a circle of logs they could pile hay on,” said Thurlow. “They’d cut it in the summer and then come in during the winter and with the horses to get it.”
    “They’d put bog shoes on the horses,” Thurlow said. “They could walk on the marsh just like we walk on the snow with snowshoes.”
    Although there were several dykes throughout the various marshes of Scarborough, Thurlow said, the main dykes were owned by one company – the Southgate Dyking Company. Although named after Dr. Southgate, a prominent figure in Scarborough’s history who built an unsuccessful dyke around 1802, the company was not established until 1870 by another man.
    “Scammon was a legislator and he passed an act to incorporate the dyking company,” said Thurlow. “The dyking company was very successful. Farmers could either pay taxes or become a part of the company. But they could levy taxes on land that other people owned.”
    Although hay was harvested for many more years, Thurlow said the dykes faded out around 1900.
    “When I was growing up we didn’t hay but we would burn the grass,” he said. “There was some haying still going on though.”
    Thurlow grew up on Pine Point in a family filled with fishermen. He remembers catching the trolley for a 14-cent ride to Saco for movies.
“You could hitchhike home and not even worry,” he said. “This was just a small, rinky-dink town.”
  He said when he was a child he did not have the respect for the marsh that he has gained from learning so much about it.
    “When I was a kid I threw a lot of things in there,” he said. “As I got older I came to know a lot more about the marsh. I didn’t want to see trash in there.”
    Thurlow said over the years there have been many things done around the marsh out of a misunderstanding of how it would affect it. Thurlow said at one point it was thought that draining the marsh would decimate the mosquito population, when in fact the opposite occurred. Also, some of the bridges over sections of the marsh were built in a way that has not allowed enough water to flow beneath them.
    Thurlow said although residents of Scarborough do not rely on the marsh for their livelihood or to get around town, people have found new uses for it.
    “The Friends of Scarbrough Marsh – they want to see it used not for dyking anymore, but for fishing, birdwatching, hunting and other recreational uses,” Thurlow said.