CHERRYFIELD – The lives of Alexander Dallas Bache and Nancy Willey are inextricably linked even though they never met.

In the 1800s Bache was the builder of Baseline Road, and about 150 years later Willey’s interest in Bache’s project earned her the nickname “Baseline Lady.”

It all started back in the mid-1800s, when Bache was superintendent of the U.S. Coast Survey. The U.S. Congress was interested in mapping the coast for national security and navigational reasons, and Bache’s job was to map the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Alabama. Part of the mapping included Washington County and what is now known as Baseline Road, or Epping Plain Baseline Road.

The road, built meticulously in a straight line, was used as a kind of giant measuring stick by surveyors. Using a geometric formula known as triangulation, they were able to accurately calculate distances that were then used to create charts and maps.

Willey, 75, is a retired history teacher who incorporated the history of Baseline Road into her curriculum. Born in Columbia Falls, she moved to Cherryfield with her family when she was in the seventh grade. She taught at Narraguagus High School for 12 years. In 1978, she transferred to Milbridge where she taught junior high school. She retired in 1998.

But her drive to teach others about Baseline Road hasn’t rested. She has taken everyone from children to adults to see it. Now she would like to see other teachers include the history of the road in their curriculum. “It is right in our own backyard,” she said.

When asked to explain what Baseline Road is, Willey’s response was: “So you’re not local?”

Listening to Willey talk about the road’s past is like sitting in a lively history class. Baseline Road, located just off Route 193, stretches 5.4 miles across the blueberry barrens from Deblois to Columbia.

“It is just an old dirt road. However, it is very important historically,” she said recently. “Back in the 1800s the United States was emerging as a world power. President Franklin Pierce put out a call for some sort of a measuring effort to measure more accurately our coast and the marine charts and harbors.”

Known as the eastern Oblique Arc, an earlier Bangor Daily News story reported, the road would serve as the framework for linking individual harbor surveys in a time when geodetic surveying was in its infancy. Unlike property surveys, used to establish the bounds of a parcel of land, geodetic surveys determine the absolute position of points on the Earth, the BDN story said. And of course the Baseline Road project began long before satellites or computers. So the federal government had to come up with a way to do it.

“They put out this call for someone to come up with a measuring system and they accepted Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler’s concept,” Willey said. “He was from Switzerland, and the [Swiss] had used this way of measuring by using the base of the right triangles. So hence it is called the baseline.”

Hassler was a farmer living in the U.S. He proposed using a chain of triangles based on six lines, measured with extreme accuracy, spaced at irregular intervals from southwest Alabama to eastern Maine. The lengths of the six base lines would be used to calculate the sides of triangles in the chain.

Maine was the northernmost of the six base lines. The other sites were in Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, Georgia and Alabama.

Hassler died before the project was completed, and Bache succeeded him in 1843.

In 1853, surveyors arrived in Maine. It was a challenge compared with Alabama, “when you think of the Gulf Coast, sandy beaches and no mountains and up the Atlantic Coast until they got to the rockbound coast of Maine,” Willey said. “Those other five were pretty close to the shore; ours isn’t. When they got to the rockbound coast of Maine they came in about six miles up to Deblois.”

That area was selected because it was reasonably flat with lots of sandy soil, Willey said.

In 1856, Bache approved the site and the land was cleared. “From there they built [four] wooden towers with something like a tin apparatus on top of it,” Willey said, pointing at pictures taken at the time. The towers were used to ensure the surveyors measured a line that was perfectly straight, the BDN story said.

The survey team created huge double-tubed measuring devices, something like giant yardsticks, supported on trestles.

In May 1857 locals were hired. “They would leapfrog [the tubes] over and lock it to the next end all the way across the barrens,” she said.

The measurement was completed on Aug. 4, 1857.

“They engaged in packing up camp apparatus for storage in the neighborhood and sending plates and trestles of apparatus to Milbridge for shipment to Rockland and hence by steamer to Boston,” she said, reading from a copy of Bache’s daily journal.

Enter Jefferson Davis, a Mississippi senator and later president of the Confederate States of America who came to observe the baseline process.

There are lots of stories about Davis’ visit, including a BDN story that said Davis left behind a trunk containing plans for the Civil War.

Willey said she also has heard stories that while Davis was in Cherryfield he stayed in Willey’s family home. The house is known as the old Dr. VanWart house, and also as the Stagecoach Inn. “Although that is not historically correct,” she said.

She said that through her research she discovered that Bache and Davis were friends and fellow classmates, but she has never been able to uncover any evidence that Davis was in Cherryfield.

“He did come to Maine, we do know that,” she said. “But Jefferson Davis didn’t sleep here.”

Once Baseline Road was completed, two 3-foot-tall marble markers were placed at each end of the road. Digging through two totes filled with documents on Baseline Road, Willey pulled out pictures of the monuments. “Isn’t that lovely?” she said of the marker. One marker was vandalized; the other was taken to Augusta about three years ago and preserved.

In 1991, Baseline Road was measured again using modern technology including Global Positioning System. It was discovered that original surveyors were off by less than a half inch, Willey said, reading from the BDN article. “Isn’t that something?”

The Washington County road is the only historical site left. “Most of the others have been destroyed because they were too near the coast. They either eroded away or probably the site was turned into condominiums or malls. Because ours is in so far [from the ocean], that’s why it has survived,” she said. And, as geography shows, the road is also located in a remote area of Washington County.