Desert of Maine hits the market
Courtesy / Wikimedia Commons
A tourist attraction in Freeport that has long called itself "the Desert of Maine" has gone on the market for $725,000.
A tourist attraction in Freeport that has long called itself "the Desert of Maine" has gone on the market for $725,000.
Mia Johnson of Northeast Campground Brokers, who is representing sellers Ginger and Gary Currens, told The Forecaster the property is being marketed as a turnkey business. The 40-acre property includes the “desert,” trails, a home, 48-site campground, gift shop and barn that is more than 225 years old.
“The sellers would love to see this continue as a tourist attraction and their employees continue to have jobs,” Johnson told the newspaper.
According to the facility’s website, in 1797, the Tuttle family moved to the 300-acre farm that once covered the Desert of Maine, where they raised crops of potatoes and hay for several years. Failure to rotate crops thereafter, combined with massive land-clearing and overgrazing, resulted in severe soil erosion that exposed the hidden desert.
According to Smithsonian.com, the desert is made up of glacial silt that was created when, thousands of years ago, glaciers scraped rocks and soil as they expanded, grinding rocks into pebbles, and grinding pebbles into glacial silt — a granular material with a texture somewhere between sand and clay. Layers of glacial silt piled up as high as 80 feet in some parts of southern Maine.
What started as a small patch of silt on the Tuttle farm grew to 40 acres. In 1919, Henry Goldrup bought the property for $300 and opened it as a public tourist attraction six years later.
The unique Maine ‘desert’ has been featured in Walter Winchell’s New York Daily News column, in Ripley's “Believe It or Not and” in “Deserts of America,” a Universal documentary, according to the Freeport attraction’s website.
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