Ormsby Sanctuary at Merrymeeting Park

Merrymeeting Park trails in orange; Brunswick River Path in blue.

The town successfully purchased this remarkable property in 2022 from the Ormsby family, ensuring that a place with natural beauty and interesting history remains open to the public.

The land can only be accessed via the paved Androscoggin River Path, meaning you’ll have to park at either end of the one-way route and walk or bike in. The east side of the bike path, via the parking lot at the end of Grover Lane, is the shortest way to reach the park. If you walk or bike from this end, you’ll reach the first of three trailheads on your right, marked with a green town sign, in about 0.6 miles. You’ll reach the main trailhead — with a sign for the Ormsby Sanctuary and a roughly paved driveway — about 1.1 miles from the start of the path. (From the other direction, it’s about 1.5 miles.)

From the main trailhead: You’ll turn off the bike path at the sign for Ormsby Sanctuary and follow an old paved road to the kiosk, which explains some of the history of the land. To your right stretches a broad grassy field — the site of a four-story casino (which didn’t allow gambling)! But it did serve lavish meals and encourage dancing. The white posts you can see today at the field’s edges indicate the former building’s enormous footprint. On the top of the little hill at the east end of the field, a series of information panels tell the story of Merrymeeting Park.

In the late 1890s, entrepreneur Amos F. Gerald jumped on the craze for electric trolleys and amusements at the ends of trolley lines. People were eager to try the new electrified transportation—and they wanted alluring destinations to ride to. After buying farmland to develop, Gerald opened Merrymeeting Park in 1898. He built a fancy casino with a restaurant and dance floor, created a manmade pond by damming the stream, built an open-air amphitheater for thousands of people on the side of the ravine, and opened a zoo. Admission was free with the price of a trolley ticket — 5 cents, and just a 13-minute ride from downtown Brunswick.

But the park closed after just eight years, in 1906, perhaps due to competition from early movie theaters and automobiles and a local population that may have been too small to support such a big business.

But there’s more to the story. The panels explain that long before the amusement park, ancestors of today’s Wabanaki people lived here and along the Androscoggin for at least 13,000 years. They fished, hunted, planted crops, and traveled by canoe on the river some called Ammoscongon. In the mid-1800s, the property was home to J. C. Humphreys’ shipyard and steam-powered sawmills.

Today, easy trails wind through all this history to beautiful overlooks on the river. I’ve put two red icons on two points with wonderful views. They also seem like decent swimming spots. There is a large wetland in the middle of the property. A stream and a ravine cut across the land.

The easiest trail goes directly from the Androscoggin Bike Path, past the site of the old casino and out to the far point on the little peninsula. The other trails range from easy to moderate, since some seem to be less used than others, and you might encounter short overgrown sections. When I visited, the trails were tagged with flagging tape — look for these markers carefully as the trails can be faint in places. The town has constructed helpful rope handrails at some of the steeper sections on the paths.

Note: I was not successful at following the path along the river indicated on the official map. While there are a couple of bridges that cross the stream, the trail as far as I could tell requires bushwhacking. Also, the trail on the far east end of my map follows an old road to a steep bank with an eroded trail to the river’s edge.

Directions: Park at either of the large lots at either end of the paved Androscoggin River Path. For the west trailhead, park at the end of Water Street. For the eastern trailhead, turn off Old Bath Road onto the dead-end Grover Lane. Park at the end of the lane.

Old photos below from the Pejepscot History Center’s amazing image collection!