Fish hatchery draws thousands to Raymond at turn of century

A postcard from the early 20th century shows the Raymond 
Village Fish Hatchery (Maine State Fish Hatchery #1) at
the outlet of Panther Pond below Panther Run. The facility
was in use from 1900 to the late 1950s and has since been
demolished. COURTESY PHOTO

By Ernest H. Knight

The Raymond Village Fish Hatchery (Maine State Fish Hatchery #1) at the outlet of Panther Pond below Panther Run is a set of buildings sorely missed by many residents and summer visitors familiar with the town.

Once a popular place for observation of the sequence in fish culture from egg to stocking size fish, highlighted by feeding time activity, it is now a scene of desolation even to the point of being shunned by salmon that for eons have come up the Jordan River from Sebago Lake every fall to this most upstream point, the females to deposit their eggs for fertilization by the milt of the male.

While once a natural process with the eggs left in the gravel beds for protection during fertilization and hatching, the fish are now stripped of eggs and milt by man for hatching under controlled conditions.

While the fish have long been directed to this and other spawning streams by instinct, the first state hatchery was built at this spot in Raymond about 1900.

At that time the spawning fish came there in numbers of 2,000 or more and of weight up to 35 pounds. As descendants of the Atlantic salmon trapped in this inland body of water far back in geological time when the outlet to the ocean was by way of the Saco River Corridor, the present landlocked variety are smaller than their ancestors but are a far more prized game fish and given its own species name of “Salmo Sebago.”

These famous salmon have been used to stock lakes and ponds all over North America and in foreign countries. But the salmon in Sebago, in spite of the continuous stocking program have steadily declined in number due to not only the pursuit by fishermen, depletion of their best food, the smelt and use of DDT in parasite control on adjacent shorelands.

Efforts to limit the taking of smelts to provide more of their natural food and the banning of the use of DDT have resulted in improvements in quality but their numbers continue to decline.

Old records of State Hatchery show the extent of this decline, even though records of the number and size of fish stripped are not available. The spread from good to bad years in the period 1900-1930 was 500,000 to 1,250 million eggs per year and a good year had a count of 1,500 or more of fish.

In the 1950s, a good run was 750 to 1,000 fish stripped and in recent years this has dropped to 100 to 150 fish with 75,000 to 100,000 eggs.

In 1978, on the first day of transfer from the pool to the holding pens  where they are allowed to ripen for a week or two before stripping and when the bulk of the fish are usually taken, there were a total of 18 fish. Just a few weeks later there was only two or three dozen, with very few survivors left for stocking.

Hatchery #1 was not only a rearing site for salmon but was home to the man in charge for most of its operation, George Libby of Raymond and his family included Orrin Libby. His assistant for those many years was Albert Plummer, who lived on Mill Street in Raymond Village.

The buildings and grounds were always kept in immaculate condition and great pride was taken in all activities and appearances. In the 1950s, the Raymond site was subordinated to the growing hatchery and rearing station in Casco and the Raymond property became a neglected satellite that probably would have been abandoned completely had it not been instinct of the salmon to continue to find their way back to the Jordan River.

Since then, the salmon have been stripped at Raymond and for a while the hatching was done there but later all the stripping was done at Casco. Unused and unmaintained with no caretaker, the buildings and other facilities became the prey of vandals who in a short time made such a shambles of the area that they could only be demolished as a liability of the town and the state.   

The desertion of the Jordan River by spawning salmon has undoubtedly many reasons such as beaver dams and other obstructions between the Mill Street dam and Sebago, lack of water reserves in Panther for good flushing, a decline in fish population at the source in spite of sophisticated fish management expertise, and also perhaps a resignation on the part of “Salmo Sebago” to the fate of the species. <