Here, we see snow-bordered Patten Stream chortling south from Lower Patten Pond toward its mouth, where it empties into Patten Bay in the town that used to be called Pattensborough. The town is now Surry, Maine.
Two things are illustrated here. First, there’s plenty of water in this wooded stream (and others) in our area. Curiously, we’ve been getting more precipitation than average; yet, in much of Maine, this January (so far) has been one of the 10 warmest we’ve had.
Second, somebody named Patten once lived around Surry and he wasn’t modest about people knowing it. That would have been Captain Mathew Patten, Surry’s (Pattensborough’s) first settler and an apparent believer in self-branding.
The Captain arrived in the unsettled area in his coastal schooner sometime in the 1760s. He bought his first 100 wild acres there in 1767 for very little money. Thus began his life as a successful land speculator and a supplier of goods for the settlers. He would use his schooner (later schooners) to deliver timber cut by the settlers to Boston and points in between and return with goods not available in the wilds of Down East Maine.
(Surry, Maine; images taken Friday [January 22])