Desert of Maine

In the 1790s the Tuttle family cleared this land and began farming it. Over the following century, intensive farming, overgrazing by sheep, and a failure to rotate crops or protect the soil steadily wore away the thin layer of topsoil.

Beneath that topsoil lay a deep bed of glacial silt, sediment left behind when the great ice sheets melted thousands of years ago. Once the protective soil was gone, the silt was exposed and began to blow and spread, burying fields, fences, and eventually farm buildings.

What had been productive farmland turned into a growing patch of bare sand. It is a textbook example of soil exhaustion and erosion, the same kind of process that produced the Dust Bowl on a far larger scale.

In 1925 a man named Henry Goldrup bought the property and, recognizing its strangeness as an asset, opened it to the public as the Desert of Maine. It became one of the country's early roadside tourist attractions in the age of the automobile.

For generations visitors came to marvel at the dunes, ride a tram around the site, and hear the story of the buried farm. A signpost tradition, spring water, and the sight of old farm equipment half-swallowed by sand added to the appeal.

In recent years new owners have revived and expanded the site, adding walking trails, a cafe, a butterfly house, mini golf, and camping, while keeping the historic barn and the core oddity that made it famous.

The sand here is properly called glacial silt or rock flour, extremely fine particles produced when glaciers grind bedrock to powder. When the ice retreated, this material settled in thick beds across parts of Maine.

Because the grains are so fine and uniform, the exposed silt behaves like desert sand, forming dunes and ripples, even though the climate here is cool and wet, not arid.

The site is a living demonstration of how quickly land can change when its topsoil is lost, a small, strange classroom on erosion, soil, and the deep marks the ice ages left on Maine.

Summer is the main season, when the attraction is fully open and the pale dunes shimmer against the surrounding green forest.

Early fall keeps the site open with cooler air and thinner crowds, a pleasant time to walk the trails and take in the contrast of sand and turning leaves.

The Desert closes for the cold months, so it is best planned as a warm-weather stop, easily combined with a shopping trip to nearby Freeport.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.