Hard Telling Not Knowing each week tries to answer your burning questions about why things are the way they are in Maine — specifically about Maine culture and history, both long ago and recent, large and small, important and silly. Send your questions to [email protected].
Who hasn’t had a daydream at some point in their lives of stumbling across a buried cache of money or hidden hoard of gold or diamonds, somewhere out in the wilderness? Sure, it’s even less likely to happen than winning the Powerball. But then again: you never truly know.
Case in point: the fact that rumors have persisted throughout the decades of buried treasures out in the wilds of Maine, involving gold, diamonds and straight up cash — and plenty of intrigue and semi-legendary stories as well.
Among the earliest examples of hidden treasure in Maine is the story of Timothy Barrett. The story goes that in 1793 Barrett, a 30-year-old New Hampshire native, moved to what is now Waldo County to become a hermit, buying 62 acres of land and building a primitive shelter near where the Ruffingham Meadow wildlife management area in Montville is now located. In 1807, Barrett sold his Montville property and moved a few miles away to True’s Pond in Liberty. He lived there until his death in 1847, accompanied by a series of dogs and, at one point, a tamed wild otter.
Barrett was the subject of endless curiosity from local residents. He would come into town to buy essentials, but with no job or other means of income, people wondered where, exactly, he got his money. Supposedly, Barrett had gold coins squirreled away on one of his properties, with local legends claiming the cache was worth anywhere from a few thousand dollars to up to $70,000 — about $2 million in 2024 dollars, adjusted for inflation from 1847.
Though there are stories that someone found some coins along the shores of True’s Pond in the years after Barrett’s death, there’s no known documentation of anyone finding any trace of the alleged treasure in either Liberty or Montville.
Fast forward a few years and head about 200 miles north, and there’s another story of a hidden treasure — but instead of gold, it’s diamonds.
In the 1850s, smugglers secreted lots of valuable things from Canada into the U.S., including precious gems that could be turned into cash in cities. According to Portage Lake’s town manager and president of the local historical society, Corrine Routhier, there’s a longstanding local legend that sometime in the 1850s, a smuggler arrived in the area of Portage Lake known as Buffalo, having recently trekked across Maine from the border with Canada.
His female companion — either his wife or his daughter — had died on the journey, and the man buried her on Carpenter Ridge, an elevated area in the north part of town. He also, supposedly, buried a bag of diamonds and other gemstones, with plans to come back to retrieve them. According to legend, the smuggler also eventually died, and the gems remained buried somewhere in the area, on land that is now privately owned.
Routhier said that in the 1940s, a local high school teacher wrote a poem about the buried jewels, based on a story he heard from an elderly man in nearby Masardis, and the poem is still recited at town functions to this day. Whether or not the story of the Portage Lake buried jewels has any truth to it is another matter.
Gold has driven many people to the brink of insanity over the centuries, from the greedy Spanish conquistadors of the 16th century to the “gold fever” during the California gold rush in the mid 1800s. In Maine, the most famous example of this is likely the story of Jim Dolliver, who, according to legend, in the late 1800s went a bit off the rails when it came to protecting his wealth.
Dolliver owned a sawmill somewhere in Somerset County and had made quite a fortune over the years. According to treasure hunting website CNY Artifact Recovery, Dolliver preferred to convert all his money into British gold sovereigns, and regularly traveled to Montreal to do so. On his way back from one of those trips sometime in the 1890s, Dolliver reportedly held between $10,000 and $42,000 in gold coins — anywhere from $340,000 to $1.4 million, in today’s money.
The story goes that Dolliver became convinced that people that were also on the road from Montreal were going to rob him. Paranoid, he jumped off his carriage and ran into the woods somewhere near The Forks, and buried his gold in an old tree stump. Dolliver reportedly could never find his gold and went insane afterwards. His family attempted to find it for years afterwards, but never had any luck.
There are likely many more stories out there about legendary caches of untold wealth, hidden somewhere in the wilds of Maine. And like most unsubstantiated tales from the semi-mythic past, it’s wise to take it all with a very large chunk of salt.
But then again: you just never know.
