‘Tunnel’ pure fiction

The essay by Brian Higgins (“Underground Railroad,” BDN, Feb. 15) reflects his long-term agenda to prove Brewer’s Holyoke House was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

I was the Maine DOT resident engineer during the construction of the Penobscot Bridge and was often subjected to the demands of Higgins who abused his political power in a manner that was chicken feed in the power abuse game but an annoyance to me and costly for taxpayers.

Extensive pre-construction in-vestigations by the DOT, including ground-penetrating radar, provided no evidence that the house was indeed a hideout for escaping slaves.

When the vertical shaft was uncovered it was investigated by the DOT’s Wells Division which found no outlet or genie nests. They concluded it was a hand-dug well, a stone-lined work of art in its own right.

A tanker of colored water was dumped into the shaft to see if it would flow to the river, The water was never seen again. A survey crew, rushed from Augusta, ran a line to the Penobscot River. I rented the largest excavator I could find and dug a 30-foot deep trench across that line, represented as a horizontal tunnel in Higgins’ diagram. Nothing was found except sand. A tunnel from the river to the shaft, through sand, would be quite a feat even today.

The “bronze statue of a slave escaping to freedom” is indeed “a tribute to all the African Americans who escaped slavery and those who helped them.”

To present the tunnel as historical fact is unnecessary and untrue.

Robert Zimmerman

Abbot