WILLOW CREEK — The Maine Fish and Game Commission has stocked Silas Homan’s kettle pond, still called the deep hole in common usage, with two thousand brook trout fingerlings.

Homan's Hole — a deep, spring-fed kettle pond — receiving its first stocking of brook trout, overseen by the Homan family.
Homan's Hole — a deep, spring-fed kettle pond — receiving its first stocking of brook trout, overseen by the Homan family.

The fingerlings, transported from the state hatchery in Augusta, arrived by rail on the Bangor & Aroostook line. A crowd of a dozen boys and several adults gathered to watch their release into the pond on Tuesday afternoon.

“The pond is deep enough and cold enough to hold trout year-round,” said Silas Homan, who has lived beside the pond since purchasing the surrounding land in 1869. “It is too small for commercial purposes, but well suited to the boy with a cane pole.”

The stocking is another sign of the railroad’s integration into daily life. The same line that delivered the fingerlings from Augusta now carries nearly everything the town consumes. Ezra Thorne II, whose family’s Thorne & Sons Shipworks built vessels on the river below the pond, could not resist an observation: “The railroad brings fish, it brings books, it brings machinery. It brings everything except the shipyard it destroyed.”