MEMaine History

Maine got its statehood because Missouri wanted slavery. For 168 years it had been the northern district of Massachusetts, governed from Boston and not even attached to it, with New Hampshire sitting in between. Separation petitions had gone nowhere for decades. Then Congress deadlocked in 1819 over Missouri's admission, and Maine's pending request became the free half of a trade. It entered the Union on March 15, 1820, and Missouri followed the next year.

The Dawnland

The Wabanaki, the People of the Dawnland, are five related nations: the Penobscot on their river, the Passamaquoddy around the bay that carries their name, the Maliseet on the St. John, the Mi'kmaq to the northeast, and the Abenaki to the west. They moved between the coast in warm months and the interior in winter, hunted sea mammals, ran birchbark canoes up rivers that reach nearly to Quebec, and left shell heaps along the shore thousands of years deep. Those routes mattered later: the Wabanaki allied with New France, and for eighty years that alliance made this the most dangerous frontier in New England.

Two colonies that failed, then Boston

France tried first. Pierre Dugua de Mons and Samuel de Champlain wintered 79 men on Saint Croix Island in 1604, on what is now the international border; 35 died of scurvy before spring and the survivors abandoned the site for Port Royal. England tried in 1607, the same year as Jamestown, planting the Popham Colony at the mouth of the Kennebec. It lasted a single winter, but before leaving the colonists built the pinnace Virginia, the first English ship built in North America.

Permanent settlements at Pemaquid, York and Kittery came slowly and burned repeatedly. King Philip's War reached the coast in 1675. Father Rale's War followed in the 1720s, and a raiding force destroyed the Kennebec mission village of Norridgewock in 1724. Between the colonial wars against New France, whole towns were abandoned and resettled more than once. Massachusetts Bay quietly bought out the proprietary claim of the Gorges heirs in 1677, and the province charter of 1691 made Maine formally part of Massachusetts, an arrangement that outlasted the British Empire in America by 44 years.

Burned, invaded, and finally separate

The Revolution began early here. In June 1775 the townspeople of Machias seized the armed schooner Margaretta in the first naval action of the war. On October 18, 1775 the Royal Navy shelled and burned Falmouth, now Portland, to the ground. That autumn Benedict Arnold pushed 1,100 men up the Kennebec toward Quebec and lost nearly half of them to hunger and desertion in the wilderness. The worst came in 1779, when a Massachusetts fleet sent to dislodge the British from Castine was trapped in Penobscot Bay and burned or scuttled entirely, the heaviest American naval loss until Pearl Harbor. Paul Revere, commanding the artillery, was court-martialed and eventually cleared.

In 1814 a British force occupied everything east of the Penobscot and administered it as New Ireland. Massachusetts made little effort to take it back, and that failure did more for the separation movement than any argument. Maine voted to separate in 1819, wrote a constitution in Portland that October, and became the 23rd state.

Portland served as capital until the seat of government moved to Augusta in 1832. The northern boundary was still unsettled, and in 1838 and 1839 Maine militia and New Brunswick lumbermen faced each other in the Aroostook War, a confrontation over timber that produced no battle. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 drew the line that stands today.

Masts, ice, granite and looms

The eastern white pine was the state's first export. Royal Navy surveyors marked the tallest trees with the broad arrow for ships' masts before the Revolution, and the tree became the state emblem afterward. Bangor grew into the busiest lumber shipping port in the world in the 1850s. Ice cut from the Kennebec in winter went by ship to the Caribbean and beyond. Rockland burned limestone for the cement that built cities to the south, and granite from Vinalhaven and the Penobscot Bay islands went into post offices and monuments. From the 1860s onward French-speaking families came down from Quebec to the textile mills of Lewiston and Biddeford and the shoe shops of Auburn, and Franco-American communities became a defining part of the state.

Maine also legislated ahead of everyone else on liquor, banning it statewide in 1851 under a law written by Portland mayor Neal Dow. In 1855 a crowd protesting Dow's own liquor storage was fired on in the Portland Rum Riot. In the Civil War Maine sent an unusually large share of its men, and the 20th Maine under Joshua Chamberlain held the far left of the Union line at Little Round Top on July 2, 1863. Hannibal Hamlin of Bangor was Lincoln's first vice president.

Mills close, and the Wabanaki win in court

Acadia National Park was assembled out of donated private land on Mount Desert Island, protected as a national monument in 1916, made a park in 1919 and renamed Acadia in 1929, the first national park east of the Mississippi. Bath Iron Works, founded in 1884, has built warships for the Navy for over a century and remains among the largest employers in the state. A fire in October 1947 burned much of Mount Desert Island, including many of the summer estates of the families who had given the park its land. Margaret Chase Smith of Skowhegan, the first woman elected to both houses of Congress, delivered her Declaration of Conscience against Joseph McCarthy on June 1, 1950.

The textile and shoe industries left in the decades after the war, and the paper mills that replaced them have been closing since the 1990s. The most consequential legal event of the century came in 1980. The Passamaquoddy and Penobscot had sued over treaties covering roughly two thirds of the state, arguing that Congress had never ratified them as the Nonintercourse Act of 1790 required, and the courts found the argument strong enough that the state could not sell bonds. The Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act, signed in October 1980, paid $81.5 million to extinguish the claims and buy land for the tribes. Offshore, the groundfish that supported the coast for four centuries collapsed, and lobster, once a cheap food fed to prisoners, became by far the most valuable catch in Maine.

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