‘Fly Rod’ Crosby: First registered guide in Maine

Cornelia Thurza “Fly Rod” Crosby (1854-1946) was a writer, hunter, outdoor enthusiast, publicity agent and precedent-setter. Fly Rod, as she was known in sporting journals and newspapers across the country, was the first registered guide in Maine, the first Maine woman to shoot a caribou, Maine’s first paid publicity agent, and the first person to call Maine “the nation’s playground” – a name that stuck.

Born and raised in Phillips, Maine, Crosby attended St. Catherine’s Hall, as did the daughters of many prominent Maine families, according to the University of Maine’s Women’s History Trail. St. Catherine’s Hall, an Episcopal finishing school for girls, was founded in 1868 in the 1837 mansion of Augusta’s first mayor, Gen. Alfred Redington. After the school closed, buildings were purchased and converted for hospital use. Over time, the mansion was renovated, reshaped and finally demolished. The remaining vestiges of the school are the name of a street behind the hospital and the chapel that was moved to 60 Bangor St. in 1892, where it stands today as Saint Barnabas Episcopal Church.

Crosby began working as a housekeeper at the Rangeley House, a hotel in the North Woods, when her doctor told her she would die if she did not get “abundant doses of fresh air.” She explored the nearby rivers, lakes, streams and forests of the Dead River region and learned to hunt and fish.

In 1886, a friend presented Crosby with a 5-ounce bamboo rod. She became so adept at fly-fishing that she once landed 200 trout in one day, according to Maine Guides Online. She began to write accounts of her fishing adventures and submitted them under the name “Fly Rod” to O.M. Moore, editor of the Phillips Phonograph.

“That’s mighty good stuff!” responded Moore, according to Maine Guides Online. “Send some more right away.”

“Fly Rod’s Notebook” became a widely syndicated column appearing in newspapers in New York, Boston and Chicago, and the new name stuck.

In 1895, Crosby traveled to New York to promote the Maine outdoors at the Sportsmen’s Show at Madison Square Garden as a publicist for Maine Central Railroad. She impressed the crowds with her daring display, which included a Maine log cabin she had built herself, several stuffed deer, moose and birds, and a tank full of trout and salmon, which were shipped by train from Bangor.

Modeling a new lady’s hunting outfit with a shortened skirt that shocked some observers, Crosby demonstrated her skill at fly-fishing by casting into the fish tank. She succeeded in attracting thousands of visitors to Maine.

On March 19, 1897, the Maine Legislature passed a bill requiring hunting guides to register with the state. Maine registered 1,316 guides in that first year. The honor of receiving the first Maine guiding license went to Crosby.

Crosby had many adventures including shooting the last legal caribou buck in the state of Maine and participating in a shooting exhibition with Annie Oakley.

A story in the Bangor Daily Commercial on Jan. 10, 1907, offered readers a glimpse of how Fly Rod was spending part of her time in those days. She had converted to Catholicism three years before while convalescing in the hospital. Now she was raising money to build a Catholic chapel at Oquossoc on Rangeley Lake. In about two weeks, she was planning to go up through the lumber camps soliciting money for her project. She already had raised $1,000. The lot had been bought and cleared, the work contributed by a French lumberman. Eventually $5,000 was raised.

“On the spot where the chapel is to be erected, there was not so long ago only a blazed trail. … Miss Crosby first passed over this route when a girl out on a hunting expedition,” explained the Commercial’s story. “Today the Portland and Rumford Falls railroad has its terminal station within a stone’s throw of the place and schoolhouses, stores and dwellings dot the large clearing there, while a good carriage road passes through from the Moosehead lake to the Rangeley itself, not far away. These things bring the chapel very close to civilization and to the scores of sportsmen who spread all over the region … within easy reach of the new church.” According to a 2006 Bangor Daily News article, the chapel still stands.

Crosby’s life is chronicled in “Fly Rod Crosby – The Woman Who Marketed Maine,” by Julia Hunter and Earle Shettleworth Jr.

Sources: University of Maine’s Women’s History Trail; Rangeley Outdoor Sporting Heritage Museum; “First Lady of the Maine Woods” by Thomas A. Verde; Down East Magazine, August 1998; Maine Guides Online; Bangor Daily News Dec. 18, 2006, history column by Wayne Reilly.

Maine’s history is full of female pioneers who blazed a path for the women of today. The Bangor Daily News, in cooperation with the Maine

Historical Society’s online museum Maine Memory Network, the Maine FolkLife Center and others, will highlight a different woman each day throughout March.