MEMaine Geography

Maine touches exactly one other state. No other state in the union has a single land neighbour, and New Hampshire is it. The rest of Maine's land boundary, about 611 miles of it, belongs to Canada, which is more than twice the length of the state's ocean frontage measured as a general coastline. Drive north far enough and the geography stops making sense in a familiar way: Estcourt Station, the northernmost settlement in Maine, can only be reached by road through Quebec.

The line a bloodless war produced

The Canadian boundary was undecided for sixty years after independence because the 1783 treaty described it using rivers and highlands that nobody could agree on. Both Maine and New Brunswick claimed the Aroostook valley, and by the winter of 1838 both had sent armed men north over competing timber crews. The Aroostook War produced posturing, arrests and a militia mobilisation but no battle casualties. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty of August 1842 split roughly 12,000 square miles of disputed ground, with the larger share going to the United States, and put the line along the St. Croix River, then a due north survey line, then the St. John and St. Francis rivers, then the height of land toward Quebec. That is why the top of Maine looks bitten off at an odd angle rather than following any parallel.

Katahdin, a drowned coast, and three thousand islands

Mount Katahdin rises to 5,269 feet at Baxter Peak, a granite pluton standing alone above the north woods with the Knife Edge arete running off its summit. It is the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, and hikers reach it only after the Hundred Mile Wilderness. Percival Baxter bought the mountain and the land around it in parcels starting in 1930 and gave it to the state; Baxter State Park now covers nearly 210,000 acres and is deliberately kept roadless in character.

The coast is the other half of the story, and it is a mountain landscape that drowned. Ice sheets scoured the bedrock ridges and valleys running down to the sea, then the ocean rose into them, so what would elsewhere be hills and hollows became peninsulas and bays. Somes Sound on Mount Desert Island is the clearest example, a steep-walled inlet frequently described as the only fjord on the eastern seaboard. The arithmetic that follows is the memorable part: Maine's general coastline measures 228 miles, but trace the actual shore around every peninsula and inlet and it runs to about 3,478 miles, longer than California's. More than three thousand coastal islands and ledges sit offshore.

Acadia National Park protects a piece of that coast and was the first national park established east of the Mississippi, created as a monument in 1916 and given its present name in 1929. Cadillac Mountain, at 1,530 feet, is the highest point on the American Atlantic seaboard. At the far eastern end, near the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, Cobscook and Passamaquoddy bays see tidal ranges above twenty feet, the largest in the contiguous United States, which is why the water there moves through narrows like a river.

Half the state has no town government

Maine has more than four hundred townships with no municipal government at all, covering over ten million acres, more than half the state's land area. They carry survey grid names rather than town names, and they are administered directly by a state land use commission. Nothing comparable exists on that scale anywhere else east of the Rockies. It is possible because the interior is forest: about 89 percent of Maine is under tree cover, the highest proportion of any state, and much of the north woods has been in industrial timber ownership since the nineteenth century.

Size makes it work. Maine covers roughly 35,400 square miles, very nearly as much as the other five New England states put together, while holding a population smaller than several individual American cities.

Six thousand lakes and a river that runs north

Glaciation left Maine with over six thousand lakes and ponds. Moosehead Lake, about forty miles long, is the largest lake contained entirely within New England. The Penobscot is the longest river lying wholly inside Maine and drains the second largest watershed in New England after the Connecticut; the removal of the Veazie and Great Works dams in 2012 and 2013 reopened it to sea-run fish for the first time in almost two centuries.

Drainage is where Maine breaks the regional pattern. The northwest corner does not drain to the Gulf of Maine at all. The Allagash flows north into the St. John, which runs northeast into New Brunswick and reaches the sea at the Bay of Fundy, so a canoe launched in northern Maine leaves the country before it finds salt water. The state protected 92 miles of the Allagash as a wilderness waterway in 1966. When the ice retreated about 14,000 years ago the sea flooded far inland along these valleys and left marine clay in ground that is now well over a hundred miles from the coast.

Cold records and the first sunrise

Maine has the lowest average annual temperature in the lower 48. The record low is 50 below zero, recorded at Big Black River on January 16, 2009, and the record high is a comparatively mild 105 degrees at North Bridgton on July 10, 1911. The whole state observes Eastern Time despite sitting far enough east that the sun rises noticeably early. Between early October and early March, Cadillac Mountain is the first ground in the United States to see sunrise; for the rest of the year that distinction shifts to Mars Hill or to West Quoddy Head in Lubec, the easternmost point of the contiguous states.

Nearby states and more Maine pages