The meandering Sawmill River flows west out of the rugged hills of eastern Franklin county: so named by European settlers for the multiple sawmills they built along the river in those hills. Its makes a sharp turn north before enclosing the quaint village of Montague Center, Massachusetts, home of the famous Montague Bookmill. The Connecticut River, bordered by pastoral farmland, makes its appearance to the west of the village. The heart-shaped prominence of Taylor Hill takes center stage. The delicate washes of the Sawmill’s floodplain, in many places barely a foot above the river’s channel, document its active history as it migrated its way north following the path of retreating ice sheets from the area after the draining of Glacial Lake Hitchcock ~14,000 years ago. Looking closely, one can see evidence of its past courses in the southeastern corner of the map since captured by smaller streams. In fact, the Sawmill itself utilizes old channels of the Connecticut River to the north and northwest of the village center: This village contains several lessons in stream geomorphology for anyone with a geological interest.

I was inspired to make these maps after seeing Daniel Coe's work (www.kartopics.com) portraying the Williamette River in Oregon. This cartographic style is used with his permission. This map was made using GIS software and the detailed elevation data derived from LiDAR imagery, collected by the U.S. Geological Survey and MassGIS.

The map is primarily an elevation map: The river is white, with higher elevations at progressively darker shades of blue, with everything ~105 feet above the surface of the river masked out in white.