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Posts: 6
Location: Cousins Island
Registered:
November 2005
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 Cedar Ledges
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Sat, 05 January 2008 15:42
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I read an interesting note about Cedar Ledges in "Casco Bay Yarns", written in 1916 by Williams Haynes. The island is between Ram and Elm Islands east of Orr's. A guy named John Wilson was out duck hunting on Cedar Ledges. He tripped in a hole, "round and smooth", and found a corroded copper kettle full of strange gold coins.
"If you will be careful to go out to the Cedar Ledges at low tide - the famous "Pirate's Gold Pot" is under water at other times - you can, as many other Doubting Thomases have done before you, put your hand into the hole where this hidden treasure lay for so many years."
If anyone gets out there to check this out, I'd love to hear about it.
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Posts: 186
Registered:
November 2002
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Re: Cedar Ledges
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Fri, 01 February 2008 17:47
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I haven't found it. Here's what I wrote in my Maine Coast Guide: Casco Bay.
Cedar Ledges lie off Gun Point, halfway between Ram Island and the Elm Islands. Curiously, the chart omits naming the small island at the north end of the ledges. It is known as Cedar Island, but any Cedars that were on it long gone. The island is an abrupt, treeless rock, and a private one at that.
By sea. Cedar Island is an important landmark when approaching Quahog Bay from the open water between Middle Ground and Ragged Island. It and the small rock to its south are the only visible indication of the long spine of ledge that includes Cedar Ledges and Middle Ground Rock to the south and Sloop Ledges and a constellation of rocks to the north. The least obstructed water is due west of the island and, to a lesser extent, southeast.
Ashore. Few people gave Cedar Island a second thought until after the death of John Wilson of Bailey Island. Wilson was a man of modest means living on Bailey Island around 1840 when he took an uncharacteristic trip to Boston carrying a heavy suitcase. He returned in a brand new sloop and bought one of the finest farms on the island. For the rest of his life, he was tight-lipped about the strange trip to Boston. It wasn't until he died that his papers describing his trip to Cedar Island came to light. Wilson had been duck hunting here when his foot slipped into a crevice. When he extracted his foot, he discovered an old copper kettle full of pieces of Spanish gold. In Boston, he cashed the gold in for $15,000, a substantial fortune in those days.
This legend differs from many in Casco Bay in that the loot is said to have actually been found. But like many others, it may have grown up in the fertile loam of oral tradition. Bailey Islanders held summer clambakes on Cedar Island for generations, and low tide reveals a natural hole in the ledges that they named Pirates' Gold Pot. Inevitably, the two became bound together by storytelling. Or was it truth?
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