Much of the action in The Poacher's Son takes place in the lost villages of Flagstaff and Dead River, near present-day Eustis, Maine. Today, these ghost towns lie at the bottom of Flagstaff Lake, but in the book I've spared them that fate and imagine what they might be like if they had survived into the present.
In 1949 Flagstaff and Dead River were evacuated. Buildings were either relocated or burned to the ground. The following year, the Central Maine Power Company constructed a hydroelectric dam at Grand Falls, creating a shallow, sprawling impoundment throughout the Dead River valley north of the Bigelow Mountains.
For a close-up look at what this area of northwestern Maine looked like before the flooding of Flagstaff click on the map at left.