After the surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, Henry Irving Wilson came home from the Massachusetts Cavalry and headed north. He had served in Virginia during the war, and when it was over he wanted something different — an untroubled frontier, far from the city. He found it at the East Outlet of Moosehead Lake, where he took on the job of dam operator, built a sawmill, and began constructing a hotel and cottages on the west shore.
The position was said to be cursed — the last three dam operators had drowned or been killed — but Henry had survived four years of Civil War and wasn’t troubled by the reputation. He kept building. Eventually there were 40 structures on the property, and what had started as a frontier outpost became Wilson’s Camps, known throughout the northeastern United States as one of the finest sporting destinations in Maine.
General Ulysses S. Grant himself visited, signing the register in 1885 when the place was still called The Wilson House. The same register — and Grant’s signature — remained at the camp for generations.
Four generations of Wilsons ran the business over the next century. Henry’s son Alfred and grandson Fred kept it going through the early decades of the twentieth century. When Fred’s son Alfred Jr. — known as Junior — drowned at Moosehead Lake in 1936, his brother Donald H. Wilson gave up a promising engineering career and came home to help. Don became one of the most recognized figures in the region’s sporting world, known for his skill at flycasting and his deep connections to guides, writers, and sportsmen from across the country. Three members of the Wilson family even originated their own streamer fly patterns, tied and sold to fishermen throughout New England. Don’s son, Donald A. Wilson, grew up at the camps and worked alongside his father, becoming the fourth generation of Wilsons to call East Outlet home. He has written extensively about the family’s history and their deep roots in the Moosehead region.
In 1974, after Don’s death, the camps passed out of the Wilson family for the first time. They changed hands again in 1983, when Wayne and Shan Snell took over and ran them for nearly two decades. In 2002, Wayne and Shan’s son Scott and his wife Alison stepped up, took a risk, and bought the family business — keeping Wilson’s going into its second century and a half. Today Wilson’s on Moosehead Lake remains the longest continuously operated sporting camp in the state of Maine.
Join Scott Snell as he traces this remarkable story from Henry Wilson’s arrival in 1865 through the generations of family, guides, and guests who made Wilson’s one of the most enduring names on Moosehead Lake.
Thursday, August 20, 2026 | 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM Center for Moosehead History
